Congress's Inaction Threatens Funding

The Department of Energy is looking at a 20 percent cut in its administrative budget and could be forced to lay off many of the 960 people who help manage the department -- secretarial aides, lawyers and human resources staffers, said Craig Stevens, a department spokesman.

New presidential initiatives for 2007, such as the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, FutureGen, a clean coal initiative, and a health-care information technology program, are not likely to be funded, agency officials say.

Democrats will make some adjustments in the joint resolution to address the most pressing needs, especially in the Department of Veterans Affairs health-care system, which needs $3 billion more just to keep covering all the veterans it covers now, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which could lose 500 agents under current funding levels, said Tom Gavin, spokesman for incoming Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.).

What is certain is that thousands of earmarks will get nothing, at least until October, when fiscal 2008 begins. About $400,000 in hospital equipment for Perris, Calif., $1.5 million in biotechnology grants for the Illinois Institute of Technology, and another $1.5 million for bridge and street repairs in Columbus, Ohio, will be wiped out.

Budget hawks who have been crusading against such home-district projects hailed the Democrats' decision as an unexpected stroke of political bravery. Bush praised the move yesterday in his weekly radio address.

But the lawmakers who worked to get those projects into the now-dashed spending bills were left quietly fuming. Obey said Friday that he has fielded "a steady stream of calls from people in high dudgeon."

"I will work to reverse this decision," promised Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), who lost a transit center for Bridgeport, a waste-to-energy program for Stamford and a train station for South Norwalk.

It has been nearly 20 years since congressional failures left the government to be financed under spending guidelines and formulas rather than line-by-line policymaking. But to federal budget experts, this year's breakdown was hardly surprising. Not since 1994, the last year of Democratic control, has Congress actually passed all of its spending bills. Republican leaders almost ensured logjams by populating the House Budget Committee with conservative spending hawks whose views on the size of government were fundamentally different from many of the appropriators who would have to flesh out the committee's budget blueprints. Ultimately, compromises in those conservative principles have been laid at the feet of the Clinton White House, the demands of the post-Sept. 11 government, or a Democratic-controlled Senate, said Scott Lilly, a former Democratic staff director of the House Appropriations Committee.

But this year, conservatives dug in, backed by the White House and GOP leaders. Bush's domestic spending request for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 actually sliced $2.2 billion from the 2006 level.

Rather than face a public fight over the cuts necessary to meet that goal, House Republican leaders decided not to bring the largest domestic spending bill, funding labor, health and education programs, to a vote before the election. The Senate did even less. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) simply decided none of the domestic spending bills would get time on the Senate floor before the election.

"The breakdown of regular order this cycle -- indeed the failure to get our bills done -- should be squarely placed at the feet of the departing Senate majority leader," said outgoing House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.).

Staff writers Christopher Lee, Dan Eggen, Steve Mufson and Amy Goldstein contributed to this report.