Washington – Tucked inside an emergency spending bill that the Senate will take up this week are provisions far afield from the legislation’s main purpose of paying for the war in Iraq and hurricane recovery.
There is $100 million in farm subsidies and promotional programs; $700 million to relocate an existing rail line in Mississippi; and $1.1 billion for fishery projects, including a $15 million “Seafood Promotion Strategy.”
While each program has supporters who can make a case for its urgency, together they have increased the bill’s price tag to $106 billion, $14 billion more than President Bush requested.
And they have focused new attention on what many fiscal conservatives and watchdog groups consider a growing problem: the use of emergency spending bills for initiatives that they say should be considered through the normal budget process.
“Emergencies are not true emergencies when you’re repairing highway backlogs that go back several years, when Congress is giving large handouts to farmers, despite record farm incomes, and when you’re relocating a rail line that was proposed decades ago,” said Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization.
The issue is important, because “emergency spending” has ballooned over the past five years, driven first by the Sept. 11 attacks, followed by the war in Iraq and then by a series of natural disasters including the tsunami in Asia and Hurricane Katrina.
Critics of the congressional spending process contend that lawmakers have used emergencies as a cover to push through other projects or simply to make more room for normal government spending programs.
The Senate bill includes $72 billion for military operations and $27 billion for hurricane relief. There is also $3.4 billion for a National Guard reorganization, $1.1 billion for the fisheries industry and $3.4 billion in agricultural programs. Most programs have some tie to either military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan or to hurricane recovery efforts.
In many cases, such as highway construction along the Gulf Coast, it is difficult to separate money for disaster recovery from money for new projects.
The bill is coming to the Senate floor at a time when Republicans, in particular, are grappling with how to rein in government spending and bring down the federal budget deficit.