WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama sought $15 million to run his oil-spill commission, and a panel on the Wall Street meltdown got $8 million. The budget for his commission on reducing the federal deficit: $500,000.
That’s less money than the government spent last year on a study of expanding a congressional underground garage. The Senate’s second-ranking Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, said the small budget is making an already tough job even more difficult.
“We’re having substantive, thoughtful hearings, but you look around the room and there are two or three people on staff and you think to yourself: This is a big assignment,” Durbin said. “They’re doing the best they can but it is really a struggle.”
The commission is charged with presenting a plan by December on how to reduce deficits projected to average $1 trillion a year for the next decade, an amount economists view as dangerously large. Moody’s Investors Service has warned it will cut the government’s bond rating if the deficit outlook doesn’t improve. Three-fourths of the panel’s 18 members must agree on its recommendations, and Congress would vote on them.
“We have all the money we need,” Bruce Reed, commission executive director, said in an interview. “We’re a deficit commission, so we’re tightfisted by nature.”
Panel member Kent Conrad, the Senate Budget Committee chairman, said it doesn’t have enough resources.
“These are extremely complex issues,” said Conrad, DN.D. “What are you going to do with Social Security, Medicare, the revenue system of our country?”
“Without professional staffing that puts an enormous weight on the commission,” Conrad said. “It adds to what is already a daunting challenge.”
Commission co-chairman Alan Simpson, a Republican former senator from Wyoming, said in April that members considered holding hearings around the country to draw attention to their work before concluding “we don’thave the scratch.”
Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., who pushed for years to create a debt commission, said holding such hearings is “mandatory” to help the panel build public support for its proposals.
“If you don’t have buy-in from the American people, how can you be successful?” said Wolf, who isn’t a member of the commission.
The $500,000 has been used to hire Reed and an assistant, rent equipment and an office of about 1,500square feet, and fund travel to Washington for Simpson and co-chairman Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff for President Bill Clinton. Bowles lives in North Carolina.
Honeywell International Chairman David Cote and Ann Fudge, former chief executive officer of Young & Rubicam, pay their own way to the meetings, Reed said. All 18 members are unpaid.
The panel supplemented its staff by borrowing aides from the Treasury Department, White House budget office and Department of Health and Human Services.
“You have to persuade their boss or persuade their agency that they can part with them,” Reed said. “On the other hand, the talent you can get that way is hard to beat, so if you can borrow the best people, that’s the best of all worlds.”
Lawmakers on the commission are having aides informally work for it, and the panel is using volunteers from nonprofit groups such as the Washingtonbased Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Reed said the panel doesn’t need the resources of other presidential commissions because those “are doing an awful lot of fact-finding, which is labor-intensive.”
He said the debt panel’s “biggest challenge is getting both sides to agree - and that’s not a manpower question.”
Front Section, Pages 9 on 06/26/2010