Even though the 2012 fiscal year (FY) began more than two months ago, Congress only recently put the finishing touches on this year’s budget. Over the weekend, the House and the Senate approved a funding package wrapping all of the outstanding annual appropriations bills into one. In doing so they stripped out many, but not all, of the controversial legislative provisions, known as policy riders.

The overall spending level for this year’s budget had been set in the summer by the debt ceiling deal, but it took the end of the so-called Super Committee to clear the way for the year’s final spending bills. Last month, Congress passed three appropriations bills – Transportation-Housing, Commerce-Justice-Science, and Agriculture – which had few controversial riders. Last week, Congress reached an agreement on the remaining nine bills, which fund everything from the Defense Department to Congress itself, and are worth more than a trillion dollars.

Three of the remaining bills - Financial Services, Labor-Health and Human Services-Education, and Interior-Environment - had threatened to hold up the entire process. They contained some of the most controversial issues Congress is currently grappling with, such as financial regulatory reform, the health care overhaul, and environmental protections. Congressional Republicans are intent on rolling back some of the gains Democrats have made in these areas over the past few years, and the battle had been playing out, in part, in these funding bills. For months, Republicans tried to defund important safeguards and reforms or undo them completely with targeted policy riders.

In the past, OMB Watch prepared an analysis of the annual appropriations bills, examining the policy riders they contained. For instance, we found more than 75 riders on the first three bills passed this year. However, with this most recent appropriations package, Congress deliberately left the public in the dark by releasing the bill’s language only days before final votes where scheduled. The bill stretches almost 1,400 pages, and it would have been impossible to fully catalogue all of its riders, never mind perform any meaningful analysis of them, before the bill’s passage (the House released the bill only three days before the final vote).

Even though the bill has already been approved by both houses of Congress, reporters and public interest groups continue to sift through it, trying to find out what Congress actually passed. While it seems that negotiators stripped the nine funding bills of their most controversial policy riders, many were left in. One rider prevents the government from enforcing new light bulb efficiency standards, while others prevent funding for a range of programs in Washington, DC. Another rider prevents the administration from fully implementing a proposed executive order which would have required contractors to disclose their contributions to political candidates when bidding on government contracts. A fourth, highlighted by the Natural Resources Defense Council, potentially weakens clean air permitting. With previous bills as a guide, it’s likely that there are other riders hidden in this spending package.

Of course, the budget process isn’t supposed to work this way. Ideally, both houses pass budget resolutions, and all twelve appropriations bills work their way through committees and on to the House and Senate floors in order to become law. That way, committees can hold hearings on important issues and question government officials in public, and there’s plenty of time for constituents to weigh in before any bills reach a final vote. Legislators are also supposed to focus spending bills on just that - spending. Provisions on non-spending policy issues, such as environmental standards and energy efficiency rules, should be debated separately and openly, not buried inside an immense bill deliberately kept away from public view.

Hopefully, this process won’t be repeated next year. If Congress can get a faster start on the appropriations process and allow the normal, more transparent process to work, it will be harder to slip in the hidden policy riders that plagued this year's spending bills.

Image by Flickr user Kevin Burkett used under a Creative Commons license.

Earlier this year, when Congress was finishing the long-overdue budget for fiscal year 2011, the House tried to use the must-pass spending bill to force adoption of dozens of "policy riders." These provisions would have done everything from preventing the regulation of greenhouse gases to prohibiting certain loans to mohair farmers. Fortunately, almost all of them were stripped out of the final bill. However, now, as Congress moves toward finishing the FY 2012 budget, Republicans in the House and Senate are once again attempting to bend the budget process to enact non-budget policies that can't pass on their own merits. Riders have no place in congressional spending bills.

With the new fiscal year already four weeks old, Congress is starting to get serious about the 2012 budget. Senate leadership is hoping to kick-start the appropriations process by passing the first of several "minibuses," this one combining three bills, which together fund the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, with some science programs thrown in as well.

According to analysis by OMB Watch staff, these three Senate bills contain at least 60 separate riders. Even though funding levels for the federal agencies covered by the bills are relatively noncontroversial, the attached riders contain hot-button issues. For instance, there are at least 12 policy riders limiting the government's power to regulate firearms, ranging from preventing the creation of a gun tracking database to making it easier to export firearm parts to Canada. There are two riders on abortion rights, even though none of these agencies handle much health policy. There are even two separate riders in the minibus preventing ACORN from receiving funding, despite the fact the community organizing group no longer exists. This is a bipartisan and bicameral problem, with both House and Senate appropriations bills full of riders.

The problem with policy riders, some of which have been regularly added to the appropriations bills for years, is that they subvert the normal legislative process. Normally, policy is created and debated in the committee charged with overseeing a particular set of issues and with overseeing the federal agency responsible for implementing and enforcing said policies. Including significant policy changes in appropriations bills subverts the normal processes of law-making, where elected representatives use hearings to gather information, to question experts, and to engage in debates that air a range of public opinions on a specific policy topic. Riders attached to appropriations bills do not undergo this level of scrutiny.

And when policy riders are added as amendments to bills, there is even less time for open and thoughtful evaluation. Senators have filed dozens of amendments to the current minibus, in addition to the riders already attached. Many of these amendments are quite radical. One proposed amendment would add a complex reporting requirement for federal employees working on climate change. There is almost no disclosure on which amendments the Senate is voting or notice about when the votes occur, effectively leaving the public locked out of debates on important policy matters. In the last week of debate, eight additional riders were added to the minibus as amendments, with more pending this week.

Fortunately, some opposition is building against these riders. In the House, Democrats are rallying behind a call to remove all riders from the appropriations bills, with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) leading the charge. The White House has likewise stated its opposition to riders, stating in a recent letter, "The Administration strongly opposes ideological and political provisions in these [appropriations] bills," indicating a willingness to veto any bill that goes too far.

While the Senate is still debating the current minibus and its many amendments, we urge Congress to reject any and all policy riders in its FY 2012 appropriations bills. Policy debates should occur in the open and be accessible to the public, not buried in spending bills voted on hurriedly without appropriate consideration.

Download the list of policy riders in the first minibus here.

Image by Flickr user nixter used under a Creative Commons license.

There’s a grand tradition in DC: the Friday afternoon news dump. Press secretaries from across the District save up any bad news, and then release it on Friday after the major news deadlines have passed. That way, articles won’t show up until the weekend, when most people aren't paying attention. In yet another example of this, the Senate Appropriations Committee, responsible for the government’s yearly funding bills, released four bills this afternoon, all of which had passed out of committee yesterday. And, sure enough, there, buried in one of the bills, is the Senate effectively slashing funding for transparency projects.

The cut in question is to the Electronic Government fund, which pays for projects such as USAspending.gov and the IT Dashboard (more about the fund and the effect of cuts here). The fund is overseen by the General Services Administration (GSA), specifically the same team which manages USA.gov, the federal government’s main information portal. Earlier this year, Congress cut the E-Gov fund from $34 million to $8 million, drastically reducing the fund’s ability to maintain current transparency tools, never mind create new ones.

The resulting outcry was heartening. A broad coalition of transparency and good-government groups pressed Congress to restore the funding, and Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) called the cuts “penny wise and pound foolish.”

A few months ago, the House of Representatives responded to the criticism in their appropriations bill by partially restoring the funding. The House bill combined the E-Gov fund with the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies (OCSIT), the GSA unit responsible for the E-Gov fund, and increased the new joint fund by $8 million. While this move increased the total level of funding to $50 million, the two funds used to have a combined budget of $71 million and President Obama called for $74 million for the two funds this year, so the total funding for important transparency projects was cut by about 30 percent.

The Senate appropriators' proposal released today reduces this funding even more, to $39 million for next year. Like the House, the Senate's bill also combines the two GSA funds, but it leaves the joint fund $3 million lower than the total amount allocated to the two funds this year, $42 million. This means there could be less money next year for projects such as Data.gov or Performance.gov, sites which allow public access to federal data sets and program performance information, and which help make the government more open and accessible.

It's unfortunate the Senate Appropriations Committee is trying to cut spending for transparency projects, some of which save the government millions of dollars a year and could easily pay for themselves, and even worse that it did so when it thought no one was looking. Ironically, at a time when Congress is scrounging for every last penny, both houses are about to underfund the very tools that will tell them how federal money is being spent.

The E-Gov fund should have robust funding to give the American people the transparency they deserve. The full Senate still needs to approve the bill, and OMB Watch strongly encourages it to restore the full amount of funding from the president's request.

Add this to the list of the nation’s current budgetary woes: according to Bloomberg news, the Treasury is losing about $30 million a day, or close to $200 million a week, because Congress has allowed the Federal Aviation Administration’s congressional authorization to lapse and, as a result, Treasury isn’t collecting taxes on airplane tickets. The House of Representatives is trying to ram through a provision that will make it harder for aviation workers to unionize, and the debate is holding up the latest in a long, long line of short-term extensions of the FAA’s authorization. Although it has been extended twenty times since it expired in 2007, Congress failed to re-authorize the FAA by July 22, meaning Treasury no longer has the authority to collect airline taxes. To add insult to injury, airlines have used this as an opportunity to raise their prices and reap more profit from consumers.

In other words, while Congress is tearing itself apart over raising the debt ceiling and figuring out how to fix the nation’s deficit “problem,” its inactivity is costing the federal government hundreds of millions of dollars in forgone revenue. While that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the size of this year’s deficit, which is close to $1.6 trillion, a few hundred million dollars is still a significant amount of money. All in all, it’s yet another example of the ridiculous, hypocritical behavior that runs rampant in today’s Congress. If the House Republicans were serious about lowering the budget deficit, they shouldn’t be knowingly costing the government money while trying to force social policy through the FAA reauthorization.

Coincidentally, Congress isn’t the only jerk in this story. The major airlines are also proving their (lack of) mettle. With Treasury not collecting taxes, ticket prices should fall. Theoretically, airlines figure out what price they should charge, taking into account operating costs and a profit margin, and the government then taxes based on that price. Without taxes, the cost to consumers should fall to the base “what airlines charge” price. But that apparently isn’t the case. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, most airlines are actually raising their ticket prices to make up the difference, costing consumers approximately an extra 10 percent.

The Journal-Constitution cites Delta Airlines representatives (the same corporation pushing the anti-union provisions in the reauthorization) as blaming fuel costs, which are apparently quite high. NPR, on the other hand, quotes an airline industry rep as saying “This short-term additional revenue for airlines, which does not mean a fare increase for consumers, benefits all stakeholders—customers, employees and investors—by temporarily improving tiny industry margins to better cover costs and enable airlines to invest in their product and service.” But neither argument makes sense. If the airlines needed the money so much to cover rising fuel costs, why didn’t they raise their prices before? And the industry’s claim that it isn’t, in fact, raising fares on consumers is particularly galling.

In reality, the situation is a remarkably bald-faced grab for money. The airlines clearly have no qualms scooping up the money Congress apparently doesn’t want. Anyone want to take bets on whether ticket prices fall when the FAA is reauthorized and the Treasury starts collecting taxes again?

Image by Flickr user Crank Media Guy used under a Creative Commons license.