Copyright 2001 The Seattle Times Company The Seattle
Times
March 1, 2001, Thursday Fourth Edition
SECTION: ROP ZONE; News; Pg. A3; Close-Up
LENGTH: 3069 words
HEADLINE:
BUSH BUDGET BREAKDOWN A look at how the president proposes to
allocate federal money
BYLINE: The Associated
Press
BODY: A REVIEW OF THE
WINNERS AND LOSERS in the Bush budget proposal provides a sense of the new
administration's priorities. Some of the big winners would be the Pentagon, the
Department of Education and medical research. Discretionary spending in most
other areas would be flat or face cuts.
Children
and families
Hoping to boost fathers, President Bush
picks up on an idea that has been circulating in Congress for some time: grants
to help low-income dads find jobs and become better parents.
He proposes $64 million for new competitive grants, and he wants to
make churches and other religious groups eligible to participate.
For foster children who turn 18 and age out of the system,
Bush wants $60 million for education and training vouchers that would help pay
for college tuition or vocational training. Each voucher would be worth up to
$5,000.
Bush is seeking increased money for states to
investigate child abuse and neglect, to help keep some families together and to
find placements for children who must be removed from their biological parents.
Bush proposes $505 million for the program for fiscal 2002, a $200 million
increase.
To encourage adoption, Bush wants to make the
existing adoption tax credit permanent and increase it to $7,500 from $5,000.
He proposes $400 million in new money for vouchers that
would pay for after-school programs as part of the child-care-and-development
block grant.
He wants $33 million for maternity group
homes, which would house teen mothers and their children.
Communications
Bush proposed requiring
commercial television stations to pay fees on their existing analog channels--a
plan that would raise nearly $1 billion over five years. Broadcasters have been
given a second TV channel to convert to higher-quality digital television. They
are supposed to return their analog channels to the government in 2006 or when
digital television reaches 85 percent of the market, whichever comes later. But
the conversion to high-definition television has been going slow.
Lawmakers, heavily lobbied, have generally opposed
imposing new fees on broadcasters.
He also anticipates
that the government will take in $7.5 billion over the next five years from
auctions of slices of the airwaves. This likely will include auctions for the
analog channels that broadcasters return to the government. Wireless companies
are eager to bid on these frequencies to offer new services.
Defense
Only $400 million of the $1.4 billion
in proposed military pay increases would be for across-the-board raises. The
rest would be earmarked as incentives to recruit and keep military
specialists.
The defense budget would total $310
billion, an increase of $14.2 billion over the current budget and exactly the
amount President Clinton had proposed for the coming year. Bush set out few
specifics, saying these would be determined after Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld completes reviews of national-security strategy, nuclear weapons,
missile defenses and overall quality of life for troops.
Bush proposed spending $2.6 billion on research and development of
"leap ahead" technologies for weapons and intelligence and the testing of a
missile-defense program. He also proposed earmarking $3.9 billion for expanding
health benefits mandated by Congress last year, plus $400 million to improve
housing.
Education
Bush
proposes $44.5 billion for the Department of Education, an 11.5 percent
increase. That includes $2.6 billion for states to improve teacher quality
through training, retention efforts and "aggressive recruitment."
Under Bush's budget, the federal government would allow
states more flexibility to direct funds to priority programs. The federal
government would also provide seed money to assist charter schools with start-up
costs and other needs.
It would let families earn
tax-free interest on savings accounts of up to $5,000 per child each year to pay
the costs of private school.
The budget includes $5
billion over five years for programs to help every child learn to read by third
grade.
Bush also proposes an additional $1 billion for
federal Pell grants to low-income college students. Last year, the government
provided $8.8 billion for the program.
Energy
The budget would provide $19 billion for the Energy
Department, a decline of 3 percent, including a sharp cut for energy-efficiency
and renewable-energy research.
Money for efficiency
technology and renewable-energy sources such as solar and fuel-cell technology
would drop from $1.2 billion to about $900 million. The budget calls for tax
credits for private-sector development of renewable sources.
The proposal expands spending on clean-coal technology, anticipating a
$2 billion program over 10 years.
It would provide more
money for low-income families to pay energy costs and weatherize homes.
The department's spending for maintaining the nation's
nuclear-weapons stockpile would increase to $5.3 billion, a boost of 5
percent.
For the first time the budget would rely on
future revenue from oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
It assumes $1.2 billion a year beginning in 2004 from oil-lease sales in the
refuge, although Congress currently prohibits any such sales.
Environment
Bush proposed $900 million for the
Land and Water Conservation Fund, the full amount it is authorized to get each
year. That money comes mainly from oil and gas drilling.
He also would spend $4.9 billion over five years for the National Park
Service's deferred-maintenance backlog, with $2.7 billion of that for park
roads, bridges and transportation projects, and $2.2 billion for building
maintenance and construction.
Bush also hopes to
accelerate the cleanup of abandoned toxic-waste sites through tax incentives and
regulatory reform.
He would provide $9.8 billion to the
Interior Department, 0.4 percent less than the $10.2 billion this year. It also
would give $7.3 billion to the Environmental Protection Agency, down from $7.8
billion.
Health policy
Bush
promises a review of Medicaid, which serves the poorest Americans, and the
Children's Health Insurance Program, which serves children in low-income
families. The review will look for ways to give states more flexibility. The
administration is not proposing any new money.
Bush
vows to work on closing a Medicaid loophole that has allowed states to collect
billions of federal dollars for hospitals and nursing homes without any
assurances that the money was being used for its intended purpose.
Bush wants to eliminate the $125 million Community Access
Program, a Clinton-administration initiative to help integrate the health-care
delivery system.
Under the Medicare budget, the
president proposes to help subsidize drug costs for seniors and the disabled
with $153 billion over the next 10 years, plus an initial $3 billion for fiscal
2001.
This spending includes a four-year program to
help states subsidize medicines for people with the lowest incomes or the
highest expenses. The grants would last until Congress overhauled Medicare to
expand drug benefits to all recipients and make sure the program can handle the
77 million baby boomers expected to begin their retirements in a decade.
Total spending for the bulk of Health and Human Services
Department programs--aside from Medicare and Medicaid, whose funds mostly rise
automatically--would be $55.45 billion in fiscal 2002. That's an increase of
about $2.8 billion over this year. With a slated $2.8 billion increase for the
National Institutes of Health, other programs as a group in the department would
see slightly less money than they did this year.
Housing
Bush proposed expanding a program to
help AIDS patients find homes and building more technology centers in poor
neighborhoods.
At the same time, a program that Bush
said has failed to keep drugs out of housing projects would be eliminated, as
would a 2-year-old rural housing initiative.
Bush also
called for a $700 million cut in a public-housing program that he said would be
made up for with money that has been authorized but not spent.
Cities would compete for the new technology centers. The AIDS-housing
expansion would be in areas that haven't had enough AIDS cases to qualify in the
past.
Bush said money that has been spent on
eliminating drugs in public housing should be spent on other efforts, such as
evictions, which have been more successful.
The Rural
Housing and Economic Development Program, which would be abolished, duplicates
other options for people in small communities, he said.
The plan also proposed changes to help poor families in high-rent
cities. Fees for some Federal Housing Administration programs would be increased
in areas such as condominium and rehabilitation loans.
International affairs
The administration
requested $23.1 billion in budget authority, a $1.2 billion increase. That
includes $1.3 billion for embassy construction and enhancement of embassy
security.
It also contemplates an expansion of--without
a specific figure--a $1.3 billion counternarcotics and social-development
program for Colombia and an expansion of drug-eradication and interdiction for
other Andean countries.
The request seeks an increase
for information technology, for combating AIDS and for improving primary
education in developing countries.
Justice
The administration proposed $19.9 billion for the Justice
Department, about $1 billion less than this year. Modest increases are proposed
for prisons, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and for U.S.
attorneys.
The budget would cut $1.5 billion from
law-enforcement grant programs for state and local governments that have
accomplished their initial objective, been funded though legislative action or
"are otherwise of questionable merit." These programs were appropriated $4.7
billion in 2001.
That $1.5 billion would be redirected
to other law-enforcement programs and to grants to fight violence against women,
enhance school safety and beef up drug-treatment programs at state prisons.
The budget also includes $50 million for programs to
involve parents and religious groups in anti-drug efforts, $500 million to fight
Colombian drug cartels and $278 million to upgrade drug interdiction. An
additional 1,140 Border Patrol agents would be added.
Labor
The budget proposes a $600 million cut
in discretionary spending for the Labor Department, to $11.3 billion. But
programs and services to be cut were not identified. The budget says funding for
some job-training programs would be redirected.
Bush
wants a $20 million increase for the new Disability Employment Office to help
administer his new "freedom initiative" to expand work opportunities for the
disabled.
Medical research
Bush is seeking $23.1 billion for the National Institutes of Health, a
record $2.8 billion increase. Congress and the Clinton administration already
had been allocating billions to the research facility in order to double the
institutes' funding by 2003, and Bush's increase would keep that initiative on
track.
His proposal does not break down amounts for
research into specific diseases.
Nor does Bush mention
the Food and Drug Administration or the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, the agencies responsible for guarding public health. Both are
expected, however, to receive modest increases for certain activities, such as
inspecting imported foods and protection against bioterrorism.
Aside from the National Institutes of Health, eight other agencies in
the Department of Health and Human Services perform health-related research.
Bush's budget outline promises to "streamline" such research by identifying
projects better suited to private funding, but it doesn't list specific cuts.
Bush seeks a $111 million increase for substance-abuse
treatment, most of which would go to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health
Services Administration and state grants to help the estimated 3 million people
who need but are not receiving therapy.
NASA
Bush is seeking $300 million more for the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration, an increase of 2 percent over 2001, and
wants to reshuffle how that money would be spent.
The
agency has had cuts or no increases in recent years.
The budget would support the U.S. core hardware for the space station
but not three planned additional modules. In a move that would affect his home
state, program management of the space station would be moved from the Johnson
Space Center in Houston to Washington, D.C.
Bush calls
for six space-shuttle flights per year but would transfer more jobs in that
program to private contractors.
He supports a more
robust program of Mars exploration but wants to withdraw funds for robot
missions to Pluto and the sun.
There is a 5 percent
increase for Earth-observing satellites such as those that measure ozone, but
aeronautics research faces cuts.
National Science
Foundation
The budget would continue a steady increase
in National Science Foundation funding, boosting it to $4.5 billion, up $56
million.
In 1998, the foundation's budget was $3.4
billion.
The proposed budget would support $1.5 billion
for 10,000 new research and education grants.
Current
research facilities, such as the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation,
are funded, but there's nothing for new project facilities, and spending on
"lower-priority needs" would be reduced by $45 million.
Bush calls for a review, to be completed in September, of how astronomy
research money split between NASA and the National Science Foundation.
In education, Bush calls for spending $200 million on the
President's Math and Science Partnership, a program to help
states and universities strengthen math and science education for kindergarten
through high school.
Social Security
Bush wants to spend the Social Security surpluses expected from payroll
taxes--$2.6 trillion in the next decade--to pay interest on the national debt
and fund a future overhaul of the program.
He also is
promising not to increase payroll taxes, which the White House says have risen
20 times since the program's 1937 beginning.
Social
Security is expected to run into cash shortfalls with an influx of new retirees
in the next decade, and Bush wants to protect the program by allowing younger
workers to invest some of their payroll taxes in private accounts. He expects
those investments to yield higher returns, which should prevent people from
relying on the federal retirement benefit in the coming years, the plan said.
Benefits for current recipients and those near retirement
would be preserved.
Bush said in his nationally
televised address Tuesday night that he would create a Social Security
commission to study the problem and recommend solutions by fall.
Social Security is expected to grow by $21 billion in fiscal 2002, but
nearly all of that new money would be dedicated to the program's growing number
of recipients.
Transportation
Bush wants those who carry hazardous materials, run railroads and own
pipelines to pay more.
The budget would impose $75
million in new user fees to pay the costs of regulating the movement of
hazardous materials, to increase the federal inspection of pipelines and to pay
for safety-related activities of the Federal Railroad Administration, including
research projects and inspections of railcars and track beds.
Overall, the budget would spend $54.7 billion on transportation, a 3.6
percent increase. The discretionary portion of the budget would decrease,
however.
The budget would provide the amounts Congress
requested for highways, mass transit and aviation.
Bush
would allocate $145 million to develop new transportation for disabled people.
He would eliminate a program that provides low-interest loan guarantees for
shipbuilders and for modernizing shipyards. Amtrak would get $521 million in
capital funding.
Bush said the government would study
whether to privatize the air-traffic-control system and would make other changes
to reduce airline delays.
Veterans
The $51 billion budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs includes
a proposal to limit veterans' choice of health-care services to either that of
the VA or the Defense Department.
More than 700,000
military retirees are enrolled in both departments' health systems and may use
either whenever they choose. Bush would require veterans to enroll in only
one.
The VA budget includes $28.1 billion for mandatory
entitlements and $23.4 billion in discretionary spending to administer veterans'
benefits and provide medical care and burial services. The discretionary total
is $1 billion more than in 2001.
Veterans said they
will "look to the Congress to set things right" and get better funding.
"How can it be that we as a nation can claim we are
enjoying a budget surplus when we have yet to fully repay our debt to those who
made our peace and prosperity possible in the first place?" asked John Gwizdak,
commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Because of
insufficient funding, some veterans wait up to a year for a medical appointment,
and others are forced to drive for hours to reach the closest health facility,
Gwizdak told a joint Veterans Affairs committee yesterday.
Budget-watchdog Web sites
These sites provide analyses of President Bush's proposed budget:
** Cato Institute, nonpartisan, dedicated to libertarian
and free-market principles: www.cato.org/.
**
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, liberal, with focus on policies
affecting moderate- and lower-income people: www.cbpp.org/.
** Citizens for Tax Justice, liberal research center on
tax policies: www.ctj.org/.
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