The House Rules Committee is supposed to consider the FY07 Continuing Resolution (CR) today at 3 PM.

CR 101: For the last several years, programs in CRs are funded at the lower of the House-passed, Senate-passed or previous year funding levels. In the appropriations process there is often gamesmanship between the House and the Senate – the House would defund a historical Senate priority or vice-versa, knowing the other chamber would negotiate it out in conference. That way the House (or the Senate) can stuff more funding for their priorities leading up to conference. This practice means that there can be some programs and agencies funded well below historical levels in a CR. The idea behind picking the lowest funding level is to concentrate Congress’ mind and get the bills done quickly.

Because the Senate only passed one of the remaining FY07 appropriations bills (Military Construction), the base FY07 CR is generally the lower of the House FY07 bill or the FY06 spending level. Which means that any agencies the House low-balled will have historically low funding levels in a long-term CR. That is the justification for the Appropriations Committees are using to reshuffle the funding. To put it in perspective, the typical CR is one page, this bill 137 pages, an omnibus would be pushing 1000.

The Administration recognized the exact same thing and has requested additional discretion in re-allocating funding.

Now to be clear. None of this means you have to end up with earmarks, general re-programming whether to plus up the Army Corps of Engineers administrative offices or to get more Section 8 housing funds means you have earmark any funding to particular Corps projects.

One last point. To put it in biblical terms, there has been a lot of wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments about the elimination of earmarks in the continuing resolution. But in reality this will enable funding to be awarded on actual project merit rather than just political muscle. In FY05 there were 15,899 earmarks, in FY06 that number fell to 13,012. That didn’t represent a sudden moment of clarity on the part of appropriators. In actuality, it was because the number of earmarks in the Labor-HHS spending bill fell from 3,014 to 8 because there wasn’t enough money. The world didn’t end and the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services didn’t close their doors.