At $20 billion more than the President’s proposal, Congress’s $124 billion emergency spending bill is giving taxpayers an acute case of sticker shock. Instead of proposing a clean bill, House leadership has greased up the legislation enough to get the fence sitters to slide over to their side.

Additonal Information

TCS Analysis of Administration’s Proposal (pdf)

TCS Analysis of the House Proposal (pdf)

The legislation is larded with everything from $150 million for aircraft and facilities to patrol the U.S. northern border to $10 million to remove sediment from Rio Grande; from $500 million in emergency funding to suppress anticipated wildfires to $1.3 billion in new funding for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Katrina efforts—even though the Corps still haven’t spent all the money they have already have.

Emergency supplemental appropriation bills should be rare and targeted to the meet true emergencies.  The recent so-called emergency supplemental spending bills for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars don’t come close to meeting the standard definition of emergency:  sudden, temporary, unforeseen and urgent.  Instead, they have become opportunities to pile on excess funding outside the normal, relatively constrained budget process.  It looks like lawmakers are confusing “expediency” with “emergency.”

Initially, the new Congressional leadership looked like it planned to exercise restraint. Funding was pared back for numerous weapons systems: For example, $75.9 million was cut for additional multi-year procurements of UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters and $72 million for new radars for F-15 Eagles that wouldn’t be available until 2010. These are clearly items that could be budgeted in the normal FY08 appropriations process beginning as soon as next month. Then it became clear Congress was back up to the same old tricks: adding $89.2 for eight additional Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and $515 million for state and local grant programs for port and rail security and “emergency management performance grants.” Next thing you know all the savings are spent, along with an additional $21 billion.

This is not to say that any or all of these programs are bad. But letting powerful politicians put their project first in line, where they can skip past all the other federal programs competing for taxpayer dollars, is an abuse of power by appropriators and is more likely to produce waste.

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