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Balancing the Federal Budget on the Back of
Education
By Jeff Simering, Director, Legislative
Services
 Again this year, the Labor, Health, and
Education appropriations bill is the last money vehicle leaving the
station.
As other appropriations bills were passed earlier in the summer,
this so-called ``peoples bill" was left with a shortfall of
approximately $16 billion below last year's funding levels for the
critical operations of education, labor and health.
The appropriations dilemmas facing the Congress include how to
abide by the unrealistic spending ceilings accepted in the 1997
Balanced Budget Agreement, how to avoid blame for spending the
budget surplus, and how to properly fund these essential
programs.
The prospect of as much as 18 percent cuts in popular education
programs is untenable to virtually everyone. Yet, the
appropriations committee leadership could generate little support to
forthrightly revise the 1997 spending caps.
The solution: budget gimmicks. The primary creative
budget technique, termed ``advance funding", straddles two fiscal
years by pushing the availability of funds from one fiscal year over
into the next — in effect borrowing next year's money for this
year's programs.
While this is far from a new budget gimmick, the pending
education appropriation bill expands this technique to a much
broader scale than any past utilization by the Congress or the
Administration. The House bill delays $8.5 billion more of
available education funding into FY2001, while the Senate bill
delays $5.1 billion more education funds. Analogous to piling
up credit card debt, there is minimal capacity under current budget
restrictions for the appropriators to pay off this future education
borrowing in the upcoming years.
Perhaps the most troubling part of this ``advance funding" budget
technique is that education grant programs are not receiving
increased funding equivalent to the education amounts deferred into
future fiscal years.
The House basically freezes new FY2000 funding for the Education
Department, while delaying this $8.5 billion into FY2001. The
Senate bill increases education funding for FY2000 by $1.7 billion,
a half billion dollars more than the Administration's request, but
then delays $5.1 billion more in education funding into
FY2001. The bulk of these additional billions of education
dollars that budgetarily have been freed by the ``advance funding"
technique are being used to support non-education programs, and to
keep the appropriations bill technically within the 1997 Balanced
Budget Agreement parameters.
To date, the appropriations levels have Title I funds frozen by
the House and increasing by $320 million in the Senate. Both
the House and Senate either freeze or provide negligible increases
to Title IV Safe and Drug Free Schools formula grants, Title VI
Innovative Strategies, Title VII Bilingual and Immigrant Education,
and Title II Technology Challenge funds. Funding or IDEA
education for disabled children, however, is proposed for
approximately a $500 million increase in the House and $700 million
increase in the Senate. Also slated by the Senate for an
important seven percent increase is the Magnet Schools
Program.
On the other hand, the Class Size Reduction Program faces a more
uncertain outlook. The House consolidates the Class Size funds
with Goals 2000 and professional development funds, and cuts this
mini-block grant by $200 million or nearly ten percent. The
Senate appears to separately fund each of these programs at current
levels, except that the $1.2 billion funding level equivalent to
last year's Class Size Program can be expended only under new
unspecified teacher assistance legislation.
In context, the proposed Senate education funding levels
represent a modest increase over last year, but use advance funding
techniques that threaten future education spending. The
proposed House appropriations produce only static funding for
education, while also using extensive advance funding techniques
that threaten future education spending. Such budget
techniques will mortgage future education spending to underwrite
mainly noneducation expenditures. Even with the modest
increases proposed by the Senate appropriators, there is legitimate
concern that federal education funding is being strung-out and
shortchanged. | 
