Amendment Garnered Significant Support Yet Rejected by Democratic Majority
WASHINGTON D.C. U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) Texas senior Senator today released the following statement about her amendment to the Omnibus Appropriations bill:
My amendment would have told the American people that Congress is ready to show fiscal responsibility. Im disappointed that once again some members of the Senate put process ahead of common-sense reforms to the Omnibus. We had an opportunity to show the American taxpayer that we could exercise restraint by doing away with wasteful duplicative funding for projects that have recently received significant support in the Stimulus bill.
Instead the majoritys wish to push something through for the appearance of progress overtook many senators belief that we can make modest cuts in this Appropriations bill to ensure that the 122 agencies and programs that appear in both the Omnibus Appropriations bill and the Stimulus bill dont waste the hard-earned money of American families and small businesses."
Sen. Hutchisons motion failed to pass by a vote of 40-55.
The amendment would have sent the Omnibus back to the Appropriations Committee to reduce the bill to the overall spending level approved by Congress in FY 2008 with adjustments made for inflation.
While the measure would not have dictated how the Omnibus funding was redistributed to meet the FY 2008 level the amendment would have required offsets from accounts that have already been funded in the recently-passed Stimulus bill. In total there are 122 programs in the Omnibus that duplicate spending authorized in the Stimulus bill.
According to the Congressional Budget Office the Omnibus which provides funding for nine of the 12 appropriations bills for FY 2009 will cost about $408 billion. When accounting for Defense Military Construction and Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security appropriations that were passed as part of a continuing resolution last year the top line FY 2009 spending level is $1.024 trillion.
