March 2007

Cleaning up the Budget Mess

 

Dear friend:

The 110th Congress, under new leadership, cleaned up the budget mess left by the last Congress and passed a stopgap 2007 federal budget measure — called a Continuing Resolution — almost five months into the budget year.  It is not the best way to fund the operations and services of the federal government, but the leadership of the last Congress walked away from its Constitutional responsibilities to consider and pass all the different appropriation bills that make up the federal budget. They decided to let the next Congress worry about it. 

The Continuing Resolution keeps the government running, but at the previous year’s budget levels. Any new programs, services or local projects enacted by Congress for the budget year are excluded—no new appropriation, no project.

We did add some funding above the 2006 budget level where it was absolutely critical:

• Veterans' health care received an additional $3.6 billion to provide service for a projected increase of 325,000 patients and to meet rising health care costs, and military healthcare received a $1.2 billion increase.
  
  
• The FBI received funds to double the number of intelligence analysts and invest in state and local law enforcement programs, including the COPS program.
  
  
• The maximum Pell Grant was increased to $4,310, the first increase in four years. This helps more than 5.3 million college students.
  
  
• The national Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and global HIV/AIDS programs received additional funding for medical research.
  
  
• Six thousand seven hundred schools that failed to meet the standards set by No Child Left Behind got additional funding to help them improve classroom performance, and we increased funding for Head Start.
  
  
• Congress added funds to finance the construction of 300 new or expeanded health centers that will serve 1.2 million new patients.
  
  
• Funding was increased to provide housing assistance for 227,000 individuals and families through Section 8 housing programs.

If we had failed to take action, employees of the Food Safety and Inspection Service would have faced layoffs for a month and 6,000 meat processing plants would have been closed; the federal courts would have had to fire 2,500 workers; and the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan assistance program would have run dry by the end of February. And every dime of those budget increases came from spending cuts elsewhere in the federal budget.

Fortunately, our Hawaii Congressional Delegation was able to rescue nearly $70-million in funding for Native Hawaiian health, housing and education programs.  We also maintained funding for the East-West Center and its research, education and events that have been such a catalyst for improved understanding and relations among Asian and Pacific nations and the United States.

We’ve already started work on the 2008 federal budget and two supplemental budget requests from the Bush Administration for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will not even think about adjourning at the end of the year until our work is done.

 

Aloha,

Neil Abercrombie

Member of Congress