The Senate on Wednesday passed legislation to keep the government financed through the end of the fiscal year â€" and to take some of the sting out of across-the-board spending cuts coursing through the government.
The bill, which passed 73 to 26, sticks to the hard cap of $984 billion for programs within Congress’s annual discretion, meaning efforts to shore up some programs hit hard by the automatic cuts â€" known as sequestration â€" would come out of another program’s budget. But the final Senate bill did ease the hit on a lucky few programs.
For instance, an amendment adopted Wednesday transferred $55 million to federal meat and poultry inspectors from other agriculture programs to make sure food plants can stay in operation. Without inspectors, meat plants must shut down, and the food lobby had come down hard on the Obama administration to keep the inspection program fully financed, something Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack had said was beyond his control. In the end, Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas, one of the Democrats’ most endangered incumbents in 2014, won passage of the provision.
Another amendment shifted money to hard-hit tuition assistance programs for military service members, a push championed by Senator Kay Hagan of North Carolina, another swing-state Democrat up for re-election. Still another transferred money from National Science Foundation political science grants to cancer research at the National Institutes of Health.
But Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, failed to win passage of his proposal to take $6 million from the National Heritage Partnership Program, which runs a wine-tasting train in Ohio, a Celtic celebration in Wheeling, W.V., and a Salem Witch Hunt program in Massachusetts, and use it to force President Obama to keep White House tours operating. The White House opposed it, and Democrats fell in line. Senator Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas, could not even get a vote on his effort to keep rural air traffic control towers financed under the sequester.
White House officials stressed that for all the patching, the worst of the sequester is still coming. The Head Start program, an education program for young low-income children that is facing more than $400 million in budget cuts got only about $34 million back, barely enough to help the 70,000 children expected to lose slots.
The Education Department’s main programs for underprivileged students and special education will get nothing back from the new spending plan, which is expected to pass the House and reach the president’s desk by the end of the week.
But the bill does keep the government financed, and it passed a week before the existing stopgap spending measure is set to expire â€" a break from the brinkmanship that has marked budget legislation since 2011.
Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, declared the Senate had “done something pretty terrific.â€
