More Budget Cuts.

[gkripke@Essential.ORG]

Posting from Gawain Kripke <gkripke@Essential.ORG>

To: Interested Colleagues
From: Gawain Kripke

Last Friday, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on National 
Security (formerly named Defense) "marked-up" a supplemental spending 
bill for Fiscal Year 1995. The main rationale for this extra money is to 
compensate the Department of Defense for extra costs related to peace 
keeping missions in Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia. The subcommittee markup 
was a surprised and was only announced on Thursday evening.

No draft bill or notes were handed out in the closed meeting and no 
information is officially available. However, the Wall Street Journal 
ran a story on Monday (I think) which reported that in addition to 
increased spending on operations and maintenance accounts, some 
rescissions were proposed including $150 million from environmental 
cleanup and $502 million from the Technology Reinvestment Project or TRP.

In all the subcommittee proposed about $3.2 billion in new spending, 
about $1.46 in rescissions with a net increase of $1.75 billion for the 
DOD.

According to informal sources, only three members of the subcommittee 
voted against the bill, including one Republican. As a matter of process 
and precedent, this markup was unusual. Historically, the Appropriations 
Committee has acted in relatively bipartisan manner with good relations 
between Dems and Repubs. In this case, the secrecy and timing indicate a 
lack of congeniality which bodes very badly for interparty relations.

Next step is for the full Appropriations Committee to meet and mark up 
the bill. This will happen in a few weeks, but has not been scheduled 
yet.