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Thursday, January 04, 2007
Approps Chairs Realign Subcommittees
In a move that will streamline the budget-making process, House and Senate Appropriations chairs will realign the jurisdictions of appropriations subcommittees. House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-WI) and Senate Appropriations Chairman Robert Byrd (D-WV) announced today that this new subcommittee configuration will facilitate the completion of all 2008 spending measures by the start of the new fiscal year on October 1 - a feat which hasn’t been accomplished since 1994.
CQ ($):
As expected, the House will expand from 10 to 12 subcommittees - the same number held by the Senate in the 109th Congress. The misalignment of the two chambers occurred because of a reorganization of the Appropriations panels engineered in 2005 by former Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. In the 108th Congress, there had been 13 subcommittees. But the Senate was unwilling to match all of the House subcommittee changes, and reduced the number of subcommittees only to 12.
That led to some significant mismatches that complicated conferences and created headaches for staff. For example, in 2005 the House moved defense health spending to its Military Quality of Life Subcommittee, while the Senate kept it in the Defense spending measure. And the House included funding for the State Department in its measure funding the Science, Justice and Commerce Departments, while the Senate considered it in the measure funding foreign operations.
As the CQ article notes, the previous configuration was very problematic when the spending measures were reconciled in conference committee. More than just a logistical nightmare for appropriations staffers however, it resulted in delayed conference reports and unnecessarily impacted departmental and individual program budgets.
Posted by Craig Jennings
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