Budget FY12: House Committee Decides on $18 Billion Cut to Labor, ED, HHS

This is the time of year when the U.S. Congress should be starting to work on the federal budget for fiscal year 2012, which starts on October 1st. The Senate has been silent so far, but the House recently voted, 235-189, to design a budget that spent no more than $1.019 trillion, or about $31 billion less than fiscal year 2011.

Yesterday, a few more details came to light after the House’s appropriations committee decided how to divvy up those billions among several buckets of federal programs in different agencies. For those in the early education field, the agencies to watch are the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services, which has control over Head Start and federal child care subsidies. A draft chart released yesterday by the committee does not offer a breakdown for each department, but it does group those two agencies under a heading that also includes the Department of Labor. The committee set a draft budget for “Labor, HHS, Education” spending at $139 billion. Here’s how that — highlighted in blue below — compares to last year and President Obama’s budget request:

See our sister blog, Ed Money Watch, for more details on the budget process, including a chart showing Congress’s allocations to Labor-HHS-Education programs over the past five years. For more historical information on federal spending on early education over the past five years, see our recent post on how the federal government has allocated dollars for early learning programs for children, birth through age 5 as well as birth through age 8.

We are a long way from knowing how cuts to this group of agencies would affect specific programs, and Congress still has much to do before it comes close to approving a budget for next year. Negotiations between Democrats and Republicans in both the House and the Senate will be intense. But this budget “maximum” — if maintained in the House’s final vote — is expected to factor into the Senate’s deliberations and is likely to have major implications for all sorts of federal programs that are designed to provide health and education services to young children.