WASHINGTON - The Senate approved legislation Wednesday to lock in $85 billion in spending cuts aimed at restraining soaring federal deficits - and to avoid a government shutdown just a week away.
Arkansas’ senators - Democrat Mark Pryor and Republican John Boozman- voted for the legislation.
Additionally, President Barack Obama’s fellow Democrats rejected a call to reopen White House tours scrapped because of the tightened spending.
Federal meat inspectors were spared furloughs, but more than 100 small and medium air traffic control facilities were left exposed to possible closure as the two parties alternately clashed and cooperated over proposals to take the edge off across-the-board spending cuts that took effect March 1.
Final House approval of the measure is likely as early as today. Obama’s signature is a certainty, meaning the cuts will remain in place at least through the end of the budget year on Sept. 30 - even though he and lawmakers in both parties have criticized them as random rather than targeted. Obama argued strongly against them in campaign-style appearances, predicting painful consequences before they began taking effect, and Republicans objected to the effect on Pentagon spending.
Without changes, the $85 billion in cuts for the current year will swell to nearly $1 trillion over a decade, enough to make at least a small dentin federal deficits but requiring program cuts that lawmakers in both parties say are unsustainable politically. As a result, negotiations are possible later in the year to replace the reductions with different savings.
The final vote was 73-26, with 51 Democrats, 20 Republicans and two independents in favor and 25 Republicans and Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana opposed.
Leaders in both parties “wanted to not do a shutdown of the government, we needed to avoid that,” House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers, a Kentucky Republican, told reporters.
Senate Appropriations Chairman Barbara Mikulski, the bill’s chief sponsor, said, “This is pretty good to show that we can work on a bipartisan basis, that we can actually govern and that we can conduct ourselves with decorum.”
In both houses, lawmakers labored over measures relating to spending priorities, both for this year and a decade into the future.
Rep. Mark Mulvaney, R-S.C., said he had wanted the House to vote on Obama’s own budget, but he noted the president hadn’t yet released one. “It’s with great regret … that I’m not able to offer” a presidential budget for a vote, he said. He added he had wanted to vote on a placeholder - “34 pages full of question marks” - but House rules prevented it.
Minority Democrats advanced a plan that calls for $1 trillion in higher taxes, $500 billion in spending cuts over a decade and a $200 billion economic-stimulus package. Republicans voted it down, 253-165, with the four Arkansans in the House - all Republicans - opposing it.
Republicans are expected to approve their own blueprint today.
It calls for $4.6 trillion in spending cuts over a decade and no tax increases, a combination that projects a balanced budget in 10 years’ time. That spending plan would be simply a blueprint, lacking any actual control over federal spending.
In the Senate, lawmakers grappled with the immediate effect of across-the-board cuts on individual programs.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said he wanted to reopen the White House tours, shut down since earlier in the month. He said his proposal would take about $8 million from the National Heritage Partnership Program and apply it toward “opening up the tours at the White House, opening up Yellowstone National Park and the rest of the national parks.”
White House press secretary Jay Carney said previously that the decision to cancel the White House tours was made by the Secret Service because “it would be, in their view, impossible to staff those tours; that they would haveto withdraw staff from those tours in order to avoid more furloughs and overtime pay cuts.”
But in remarks on the Senate floor, Coburn said, “This is a Park Service issue, not a Secret Service issue.”
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said the funds involved in Coburn’s amendment would not go to the Secret Service, and as a result the tours “would not be affected.” He also said the Heritage program, a public-private partnership, helps produce economic development and should not be cut.
The vote was 54-45 against the proposal. Sen. Max Baucus, whose state of Montana borders on Yellowstone National Park, was the only Democrat to vote with Republicans.
Boozman voted for the Coburn amendment, and Pryoropposed it.
The overall legislation locks in the $85 billion in spending cuts through the end of the budget year, yet provides several departments and agencies with flexibility in coping with them. It extends flexibility to the Pentagon, the departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Justice, State and Commerce and the Food and Drug Administration.
In private negotiations Republicans rejected Democratic attempts to provide flexibility for the rest of the government.
That set off a scramble among lawmakers to round up support for changes on a case-by-case basis.
The provision to prevent furloughs for federal meat inspectors had the support of the industry as well as from both sides of the political aisle and cleared without a vote. It was supported by Pryor, who is seeking re-election next year, and Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, who helped Democrats round up the votes they needed to clear the legislation over a procedural hurdle.
The effect was to transfer $55 million to the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service from other accounts within the department, including deferred maintenance.
“Without this funding, every meat, poultry and egg-processing facility in the country would be forced to shut down for up to two weeks,” said Blunt. “That means high food prices and less work for the hardworking Americans who work in these facilities nationwide.”
In contrast to Blunt, Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., opposed Democrats when they sought to overcome procedural hurdles earlier in the week.
In the days since, he repeatedly refused to let the bill advance unless he was given a chance to cancel about $50 million in cuts aimed at contract employees at more than 170 air traffic control facilities around the country. In the end, his amendment was jettisoned without a vote.
The overall legislation provides modest funding increases to some other programs. It would provide an additional $10 billion for the Defense Department’s “operations and maintenance” accounts, which pay to train troops, maintain weapons and other daily operations.
It also includes an additional $250 million for the Women, Infants and Children program, which provides nutritional assistance to low-income mothers. The program had been reduced by about $350 million.
In many cases, though, theadditional funding is a small fraction of what was cut. The National Institutes of Health, the government’s medical-research arm, would receive a $71 million increase, even as it takes a $1.5 billion sequestration hit.
In all, the measure would provide $1.043 trillion in nonemergency funding, though sequestration will reduce that to about $984 billion. The bill also includes about $100 billion in “emergency” war-related money.
The measure would extend a pay freeze for federal workers and fund efforts to restore the Capitol’s cast-iron dome, one of the oldest such structures in the world.
It also would provide a $193,400 “bereavement payment” to the wife of the late Sen. Daniel Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat who died in December. It’s a tradition in Congress to provide one year’s salary to the survivor of a lawmaker who dies in office.
Across-the-board cuts known as sequestration would shrink federal spending authority by $85 billion for the budget year through Sept. 30 and total $1.2 trillion over nine years. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that actual spending in fiscal 2013 could decrease by just $42 billion because of long-term contracts, which spread spending over several years.
Information for this article was contributed by David Espo of The Associated Press and by Brian Faler and James Rowley of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/21/2013