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Federal News Radio
Race to finish
fiscal 2015 agency budgets hits snag
By Jack Moore
Monday - 7/7/2014
The budget process on Capitol Hill appears to have hit a summer slump.
Congress needs to pass 12 annual spending bills, which set agency
funding levels, before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. So far,
the House has only passed five of those bills and the Senate hasn't
passed any.
While the deadline is still more than two months away, fewer than 30
working days are left for Congress to hammer out a deal on spending
levels before the deadline.
The appropriations process was supposed to be easier this year compared
to last, because lawmakers had signed off on a bipartisan deal that set
top- line spending levels for the next two years.
But action in both the House and the Senate appears to have largely
stalled. Last month, for example, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.),
chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, delayed votes on a
few key spending bills over disagreements about whether to move forward
on bill amendments, according to a Politico report.
A return to 'normal dysfunction?'
It's far from the budget quagmire appropriators found themselves in
last year, when House and Senate took wildly divergent approaches to
account for the across-the-board sequestration budget cuts — and wound
up some $91 billion apart in their respective spending plans.
But stubborn disagreements remain over the nitty-gritty of individual
agency spending levels.
"I think it is true that things are easier this year, but that's really
grading on a curve," said Philip Joyce, a professor of public policy at
the University of Maryland. "We're to a place where they've agreed on a
top- line number, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to
agree on the details. ... We have returned to normal dysfunction as
opposed to extreme dysfunction."
So, what's the hold-up now...
Read the rest of the article at Federal News Radio
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