LEXIS-NEXIS® Academic Universe-Document

LEXIS-NEXIS® Academic

March 14, 2000, Tuesday, Final Edition

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A16

LENGTH: 512 words

HEADLINE: Air Power

BODY:

HOUSE TRANSPORTATION and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bud Shuster has once again succeeded in twisting the federal budget out of shape in behalf of the major interest groups for which he has made a career of fronting. In the last Congress he won not just a huge increase in funding but an exemption from the budget rules for the highway lobby. Highways go automatically to the head of the line; they are funded first, before even national defense, to say nothing of law enforcement, education, biomedical research, the national parks. Now he has done essentially the same for aviation. It, too, has a bye from the constraints that affect other programs. The fact that it gets more means they get less. A bill reauthorizing the programs of the Federal Aviation Administration was months in conference. Senators who had resisted the favored treatment for aviation programs finally basically yielded, just as the House Republican leadership did last year. The Senate easily approved the conference agreement; the House is expected to do so this week.

One of the few still objecting is Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young. The Shuster bill pretty well guarantees that aviation will receive each year not just all the money going into the aviation trust fund, but a share of general funds. The result is achieved indirectly by establishing procedures that limit the likelihood if not the possibility of amendment once aviation bills go to the floor, and which require that the bulk of trust fund money go to construction rather than operation of the air traffic control system. To keep the system operating, Congress will thus have no choice but to dip into general funds. "This bill puts concrete first and air traffic controllers and safety inspectors last . . . a dangerous change in federal priorities," Mr. Young, a Florida Republican, wrote in a letter to the speaker last week. He rightly added that "no special interest or committee, no matter how powerful, should be able to dictate to the leadership which bills or amendments to allow on the floor at a given time, and that is exactly what this agreement does."

But Mr. Young expects to be rolled, by precisely some of the House conservatives, most of them members of his own party, who make such a show of decrying the spending increases in appropriations bills each year. They're happy enough to denounce spending in the abstract, but an election-year bill to increase spending on the airports back home is a different proposition altogether. The administration likewise seems to be giving ground. It threatened last year on fiscal and good government grounds to veto an earlier version of the Shuster bill. A statement said the bill would reduce a budget surplus that should first be used "to ensure the long-term solvency of Social Security and Medicare reform." That's still true, but the threat appears to have been withdrawn. There does need to be an increase in aviation spending, but not a separate, protected budget for it. That in effect is what Mr. Shuster has achieved.

LOAD-DATE: March 14, 2000