May 27, 1999

The House failed again Wednesday to conclude debate on the agricultural appropriations bill, instead bogging down in a fight over where additional money should come from for increased spending in fiscal 2000. The ag appropriations bill calls for about $61 billion in spending. But Rep. Tom Coburn (R-OK) brought more than 100 amendments to the floor in a slowdown move, forcing final action on the ag bill when Congress returns from a week-long Memorial Day recess.

Conservative Republicans have presented Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) with a challenge: how to quell an often angry debate over funding so the House can get on with the business of approving appropriations bills.

Coburn says the agricultural appropriations bill would increase spending and "that money will come from the Social Security surplus. There (are) those who will say there is no way you can know that this money will be coming from Social Security, because we have not considered the other bills. To me, that is intellectually dishonest, because we realize that this is the first bill of 13 appropriations bills under which we will consider over the next several months."

Under the budget, he added, "we have said that we would preserve 100% of the Social Security surplus. I...will vote for no appropriations bill and no rule that is intended to spend the first penny of the Social Security surplus."

Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman has said that even the $61 billion may not be enough for fiscal 2000. He also has expressed concern over the Coburn efforts.

On both Tuesday and Wednesday, Coburn and a group of supporters managed to all but halt work on the ag bill with the amendments.

One of the amendments, defeated on a 119-308 vote, would have eliminated funding for the National Center for Peanut Competitiveness, a program of research to assure U.S. peanuts are competitive on world markets.

Earlier this year, Republicans passed a 2000 budget resolution that promised to hold discretionary (annually-funded) spending within strict "caps" established in 1997. Privately, many Republican Congressional sources at the time predicted the appropriation bills would be permitted to exceed these caps. The floor fight this week shows not all Republicans agreed.