House Republicans Reveal Spending Limits for Fiscal Year 2011

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives just launched the latest salvo in what has become a year-long debate over fiscal year 2011 appropriations. Yesterday the Budget Committee and the Appropriations Committee in the House announced self-imposed spending caps for the yet-to-be-completed fiscal year 2011 appropriations.

Although fiscal year 2011 began in October, Congress hasn’t enacted any full-year spending bills for programs subject to annual appropriations, which includes nearly all education programs. These programs are on temporary funding until March 4^th at 2010 levels.

When the 112^th Congress began last month, the new House Republican majority pledged to finalize the 2011 spending bills by bringing “non-security spending back to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels.” The limits that the House Republicans released yesterday provide the first glimpse into how the new spending limit might affect education programs.

Total appropriations funding for fiscal year 2011 would be capped at $1.055 trillion under the proposal. That’s down from the 2010 level of $1.086 trillion. (Both numbers exclude the annual “emergency” supplemental that Congress passes every year.) Within that number, the House Appropriations Committee has allocated $157.0 billion to the Labor-Health and Human Services-Education bill, down $6.3 billion from the fiscal year 2010 level.

Other agencies will bear a larger share of the overall spending reductions. For example, the bill funding the Departments of Justice and Commerce is $10.0 billion lower than the year before, or 16 percent. The bill funding the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development is reduced by $11.6 billion, or 17 percent. The Department of Defense, on the other hand, is slated for a $9.6 billion funding increase, or 2 percent more than in 2010.

Those figures are only top-level allocations, however. Now the House needs to draft and pass a bill that assigns actual funding figures to individual programs. So it’s still unclear how the $6.6 billion reduction in funding compared to last year will be divvied up among the various agencies and hundreds of programs covered in the Labor-Health and Human Services-Education bill.

Keep in mind that the funding limits apply only in the House. The Democratically controlled Senate will get its say in the process because the two Houses have to agree on a final bill before it can be sent to the president. We’ll have more once that debate gets underway.