Federal budget--low and slow for higher education

Academe, Sep/Oct 1999 by Smith, Mark F

THE BUDGET PROCESS has long baffled outsiders and embarrassed most participants, and this year is proving no exception. From the outset of deliberations on the fiscal 2000 budget, higher education advocates had low expectations for the process, due in part to some recent success. So the goal was simply to hold fast to recent gains.

Yet budgetary bargaining over the summer has not lived up to even those low expectations. The problems, as for the last four years, are more procedural than substantive. Differing priorities between the Republican Congress and the Democratic administration have made the budget process a shambles since 1995, when disagreements shut down the government twice before the parties reached agreement the next spring. Last fall the Congress gave up completely and folded most of the thirteen appropriations bills into one four-thousand-page omnibus bill. Public disgust with that performance led to disappointments at the polls for some incumbents last November.

There are several explanations for the problems. Wounds from the impeachment struggle continue to exacerbate the partisan divisions in Congress. The very narrowness of the GOP majority in the House lends clout to uncooperative factions. And the majority ranks are increasingly frustrated by quarrels between those who want to sharpen ideological differences and those who want to complete the business at hand. Both parties are using the Social Security issue to advance their partisan goals. And presidential politics is already complicating matters.

So what is going to happen? During the summer, Congress has been able to make progress only on a few noncontroversial bills. The two bills most relevant to AAUP priorities are also the two most controversial, and thus the most likely to face delays. They will probably be incorporated into yet another omnibus appropriations bill, if not a series of continuing resolutions.

The two key bills are the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education bill and the Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, and Independent Agencies bill, which provide funding for all student-aid programs and most of the federal research agenda. (A third bill, Interior, includes research funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, but for the first time in years, congressional hostility to these agencies seems to have abated.)

Debate over the funding of these programs is likely to come after most of the available money has already been obligated. Despite all the talk of the budget surplus, Congress and the administration hamstrung themselves by staking out a series of positions before the fiscal 2000 deliberations even began.

The 1997 balanced budget deal put off many of the more difficult cuts by establishing extremely tight caps on spending in future years; these caps fall $20 billion short of current funding levels. The problems the caps pose are illustrated by the attempt to fund the 2000 census under "emergency" funding authority. That would enable Congress and the administration not to count that expenditure against the caps, although a constitutionally mandated "emergency" that has occurred every ten years since 1790 strains credulity.

Both parties pledged to increase defense spending, even before the hostilities broke out in Kosovo. And each party is vying to be seen as the more valiant defender of Social Security. Always important, Social Security is even more visible this year because the current year's budget surplus is dependent on the surplus in Social Security funds. That dependency is more visible, but no more real, since for years it simply masked the true size of the deficit. On top of all that, Republicans continue to advocate a tax cut, which, if approved, would eat further into what is available for domestic programs like higher education.

Watch the Government Relations Web site to see updates as budget negotiations unfold for fiscal 2000. Meanwhile, faculty and other advocates for higher education should continue to urge senators and representatives to maintain support for higher education programs.

Mark Smith is AAUP associate director of government relations.