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The 108th Congress gets underway on Jan. 7. Every two years, a
newly elected Congress begins with a clean slate, the bills introduced but not
enacted into law during the previous biennium having expired. The issues, however,
have not expired, and the 107th Congress left a great deal of unfinished business.
The 11 fiscal year 2003 appropriations bills remain incomplete three months
into the fiscal year. Only the two bills that fund the military were signed
into law. The rest of the federal government has been operating under continuing
resolutions that provide funding at fiscal year 2002 levels. Although both the
House and Senate passed versions of comprehensive energy legislation, the two
houses were unable to reach agreement.
Republicans control both houses of Congress and the presidency as they did two
years ago until the switch of Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.) threw control of the
Senate to the Democrats. Regaining the majority in the Senate means that Republicans
will control the agenda, but a razor-thin margin assures deadlock in the absence
of a bipartisan compromise.
Here’s a look at what we might expect from the 108th Congress on several
issues of interest to the geoscience community. Bear in mind Yogi Berra’s
observation that prediction is difficult, “especially about the future.”
Appropriations. The new Congress will attempt
to make short work of the fiscal year 2003 appropriations bills, whether as
a single omnibus package (the House preference) or as individual bills (the
Senate preference). The stated goal is completion by the president’s State
of the Union address in late January. Both houses have agreed to keep the overall
funding level to the president’s goal of $750 billion. For the Senate,
that means $15 billion needs to be cut from the bills approved by the Appropriations
Committee last summer and fall.
As staff work through the holidays to identify reductions, geoscience programs
could experience cuts across the board. Although details of the president’s
fiscal year 2004 request will not be released until early February, it is already
apparent that there will be no spending surge. Any increases will be concentrated
on defense and homeland security.
Energy. Senate Republican leaders have stated
that energy will be a top issue in the new Congress with the Republican-controlled
Senate expected to craft a bill much closer to last year’s House-passed
energy bill (H.R. 4). At the end of the 107th Congress, House-Senate negotiations
on H.R. 4 had produced compromise on hundreds of pages of bill language, but
the two sides remained far apart on electricity deregulation, climate-related
provisions, ethanol liability, drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge (ANWR), and tax incentives to encourage domestic energy production and
energy efficiency.
ANWR. In the final House-Senate negotiations
on an energy bill before the election, it appeared that ANWR was off the table
— it had been included in the House bill but not the Senate bill after
it was clear that drilling supporters did not have the 60 votes needed to overcome
a promised filibuster.
One option is to take ANWR out of the energy bill and instead move it as part
of a budget process known as reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered. Just
as the annual appropriations bills address the discretionary spending levels
for the federal government, budget reconciliation bills make changes on non-discretionary
spending and revenue items such as Social Security benefits and taxes. After
Republicans took over Congress in the 1994 election, they included ANWR (which
is fair game because it would bring in tax revenue) in a budget reconciliation
bill the following year that was ultimately vetoed by then-President Clinton.
Clearly, President Bush would not veto an ANWR provision this time, but getting
ANWR through the Senate is less certain. In a test vote this past year, ANWR
supporters garnered only 46 votes in the Senate with 8 Republicans voting against
drilling. A preliminary head count by Environment and Energy Daily of newly
elected senators suggests that supporters are still one vote short of the 50
needed (Vice President Dick Cheney would break a tie).
Climate Change. In the last Congress, Senate
Democrats sought to include provisions addressing climate change as part of
the energy bill, but those provisions are not likely to reappear in the new
Congress. A similar fate is expected for Clean Air Act reform legislation (S.
556) pushed in the last Congress by Sen. Jeffords, who chaired the Senate Environment
and Public Works Committee. S. 556 sought to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant
along with nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and mercury. The president’s
Clear Skies Initiative focused only on the latter three, and Jeffords’
replacement as chairman, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), is a strong opponent of
carbon dioxide regulation. On the research front, the administration plans to
unveil a strategic plan for its new Climate Change Science Program in April
2003.
Natural Hazards. The National Earthquake
Hazards Reduction Act was last re-authorized in 2000, and new legislation is
needed to direct spending in fiscal year 2004 and beyond. Although the 2000
bill called for $170 million to develop the Advanced National Seismic System
(Geotimes, October 2002), only a fraction of that has been appropriated. The
House Science Committee is expected to take up this legislation early in the
new Congress with an eye toward increasing the impact of this four-agency program.
Homeland Security. One piece of business
that the 107th Congress did finish in a special post-election session was enacting
legislation that created the new Department of Homeland Security. The department
will officially take shape on Jan. 26. Many of the details remain to be worked
out regarding oversight responsibility for the new department. The first half
of the 108th will see considerable jockeying for position among the committees
and their chairmen.
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