Clean Budget News & Resources for FY 2020

The deal that they’ve landed on includes a total of $1.37 trillion in funding for agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, as well as Congress itself. These bills would keep the government funded though the end of September 2020. They also allocate $1.375 billion for border barriers, the same amount that was designated to fencing in last year’s spending bills. In other notable additions, Democrats secured $25 million in funding for gun violence research (the first funds Congress has put behind the subject in roughly two decades), $425 million for election security grants and an additional $550 million for federal child-care grants. Legislative riders include a measure that raises the age for purchasing tobacco products from 18 to 21 and another that extends Medicaid funding to US territories, including Puerto Rico. Pending potential interference from Trump, who forced the government shutdown last year, lawmakers are on track to keep the government open as Congress adjourns for the holiday recess.

Trump might shut down our government in retaliation for or to distract from impeachment, which may hit the House floor at the same time as the spending bills. No one besides the president wants another Trump Shutdown, but Senate Republicans are giving Trump the chance to instigate one. The stakes are high and regular people cannot afford to see a lapse in funding. Mitch McConnell needs to recognize this and push back on the president before it’s too late.

Lawmakers from both parties are eager to get fresh, fiscal 2020 spending in place before stopgap legislation expires on Dec. 20. Appropriators are now writing their 12 bills after striking a deal on top-line numbers last month. Congressional leaders have yet to decide how the bills will move forward, and they're also not saying what the top-line numbers are. But the most likely scenario is a broad omnibus package or a series of minibuses. An earlier deal struck over the summer should allow new and increased spending for most agencies, including EPA and the Interior and Energy departments. Riders could still be a thorny issue for negotiators, although most new policy provisions will be dropped under an agreement that says only those with bipartisan support can be attached. The deal, however, does not apply to provisions in past spending bills, meaning the parties could still haggle over riders barring spending for the United Nation's climate programs, bans on making the sage grouse an endangered species and other environmental policies.

Tonight, leading appropriators in both chambers of Congress will meet in their latest attempt to resolve disagreements over topline funding levels. Lawmakers should not allow the debate over funding levels to undermine the consensus that has been reached on excluding poison pill riders that harm the public, nor should they backtrack on the progress that already has been made on removing inappropriate legacy riders held over from previous budget cycles.

Appropriators in the U.S. Senate have their work cut out for them and hardly a moment to spare, at least if they want to be able to tell voters back home that they did their jobs. And as in years past, the debate over poison pill riders is leading to the fall funding crunch. We hope senators will not insist on keeping harmful policies that the House already voted to remove. If they do, they’ll be throwing a wrench in the process and potentially forcing another continuing resolution that kicks this debate to December. This would create more uncertainty for federal agencies that not only need additional funding but need to know what funding levels they can expect. Removing the harmful legacy riders that never belonged in the first place – and certainly don’t belong now – would honor the promise lawmakers made in August and finally get the job done.

Congress’ FY 2020 appropriations bills and continuing resolutions should remain free from poison pill policy riders that harm the public, 79 groups in the Clean Budget Coalition said in a letter sent to Congress today. Congress must act by the Nov. 21 funding deadline or risk another unwanted and costly government shutdown.

No appropriations titles or package of bills, or continuing resolutions (should that be deemed the appropriate path to continue funding the government), should move forward if they contain poison pill policy riders that go against the public interest. Unfortunately, such poison pill riders have existed as favors to corporate and special interests in previous appropriations cycles, and therefore a set of “legacy poison pills” must be removed from the FY20 appropriations bills. We ask that you take that stance as Congress processes the FY20 appropriations bills—keeping out new poison pills that harm the public and removing those that have become embedded. Poison pill riders are unpopular and dangerous, and the public opposes the abuse of the budget process to roll back public protections. The budget should be funding the things that Americans care about, not undoing essential safeguards or being held hostage to non-starter demands for projects such as a border wall.

Investors want more information about how their corporations engage in politics. More than 1.2 million comments have come in to the SEC on Jackson’s original rulemaking petition- the most in the agency’s history. It’s time for the SEC to get to work on this critical rulemaking and for Congress to remove the harmful Appropriations rider so that the rule can be finalized.

Appropriations bills in both chambers of Congress should exclude legacy poison pill riders that harm the public, groups in the Clean Budget Coalition are telling federal lawmakers. Legacy riders, added to appropriations bills in past budget cycles and held over to the current one, have nothing to do with funding our government and do not belong in spending legislation, the coalition said. Appropriators in the U.S. House of Representatives already removed legacy riders from their spending bills, and their counterparts in the U.S. Senate should leave them out, the coalition maintains. Members of the Clean Budget Coalition provided the following statements on specific legacy riders that lawmakers should remove.

For years, conservatives in Congress have snuck language deep into federal budget bills meant to make it harder to reign in the flood of secret corporate cash that has saturated the political landscape for the last decade. In 2016 Public Citizen caught language in the Financial Services and General Government (FSGG) appropriations bill that forbid the SEC from finalizing rules that would require corporations to be honest about the money they spend to influence our politics. This is a critical transparency reform that America needs to expose who is truly paying to influence voters when they go to the polls. However, an undisclosed member of Congress, clearly interested in protecting their secret corporate donors, blocked the SEC from finalizing this measure.

The U.S.-UNFPA relationship is handled ably by teams of civil and foreign servants and political appointees from the U.S. administration who have seen firsthand UNFPA’s important. But anti-women’s health activists in Congress have inserted unnecessary policy riders that undermine this work. The Kemp-Kasten amendment is one of many needless riders that apply to UNFPA. For instance, current language prohibits UNFPA from using U.S. funding for abortion. But UNFPA does not, and has never, funded abortion services anywhere in the world, even in countries where it is legal.

Measures that let corporations game the political system, interfere with the independence of the District of Columbia, shut down critical public health protections, and attack our environment do not belong in federal spending legislation year after year. Senate appropriators and their staffers should make sure they are removed from the spending bills. Once lawmakers return from the August recess, senators will have just three weeks to mark up and pass all of their appropriations bills out of committee and send them on to the floor by the deadline at the end of September. Senators should not insist on keeping any policies not in the public interest that the House already voted to remove. If they do, they will be throwing a wrench in the process and risking yet another costly and politically embarrassing government shutdown in early October.

As part of the deal, Democratic leaders agreed not to include controversial policy changes, known as “riders,” in future spending bills. Those measures, which can be tied to hot-button issues such as abortion and immigration, can imperil spending legislation. Opponents of these measures often call them “poison pills.” “There will be no poison pills, additional new riders . . . or other changes in policy or conventions,” congressional leaders wrote in an outline of the deal. But lawmakers often disagree on what constitutes a poison pill, and the debate could be revived once specific spending bills are introduced.

The debate surrounding abortion access is about to spill over from the campaign trail to Capitol Hill as lawmakers begin debating must-pass appropriations bills. Starting Wednesday, the House will take up a nearly $1 trillion spending package written by Democrats that would roll back Trump administration anti-abortion policies, including restrictions barring health clinics from recommending abortion services and preventing U.S. foreign assistance to aid groups that perform or promote abortions. But the massive spending bill keeps in place the four-decades-old Hyde amendment, which prevents federal health care funding, including Medicaid, the insurance program for low-income beneficiaries, from covering abortions except in cases of rape, incest or to save the woman’s life. The amendment is named for the late Illinois Republican Rep. Henry J. Hyde, who sponsored the original language. That’s an increasingly difficult position for Democrats to defend these days, given the outcry on the campaign trail even among presidential candidates who’ve voted for Hyde in the past. Former Vice President Joe Biden, a self-described “practicing Catholic,” became the latest high-profile Democrat to publicly disavow the Hyde amendment Thursday after taking fire from fellow candidates and interest groups.

Cutting down trees and burning them to make electricity is not a climate solution, and, thankfully, Congress took an important step toward recognizing that this week. Lawmakers in the House of Representatives eliminated a long-running—and ambiguous—provision in a spending bill that the Environmental Protection Agency inappropriately interpreted to mean it must recognize all so-called biomass energy as carbon neutral. The fight is not over yet, as the industry will fight hard to re-insert this dangerous “rider” into the Interior-EPA appropriations bill as its advances in the House and Senate. Congress must reject this effort, and the action of the House committee is a key step in the right direction.

In past years, lawmakers managed to sneak dozens of controversial riders into spending bills that never belonged in the first place and should be removed.

If you have followed the budget battles over the past few years, you know how difficult it can be for lawmakers in both chambers to reach a deal. You also may be aware of the threat posed by poison pill policy riders. These measures, inserted by unscrupulous lawmakers into “must pass” spending bills to reward corporate donors and ideological extremists, have nothing to do with funding our government. In past years, the inclusion of these harmful measures has stood in the way of lawmakers from coming to an agreement, which is why many groups in the Clean Budget Coalition have fought hard to remove hundreds of them from the annual spending bills. Despite our best efforts, a few bad policy riders sneaked through. So this year, in addition to opposing new poison pill riders, many groups are fighting to remove old legacy riders from the funding bills. Some have been around for decades, while others are quite recent. It turns out that cleaning up the budget is also an opportunity for lawmakers to work together on cleaning up our politics because a few of the more recent legacy poison pills are contributing to corruption in the system.

It is often said that a president’s budget is a “statement of priorities.” Frequently, the administration’s proposed budget is little more than a wish-list that will bear little resemblance to the ultimate funding package upon which Trump and Congress will (hopefully) agree in order to avoid another shutdown. Congress still needs to pass the actual appropriations bills, and in addition to advocating to oppose these types of dangerous proposed cuts to agency funding, we also need to ensure that the budget process is not hijacked for partisan purposes. All too often in recent years, Congress’ role in the budget process has been abused to enact dangerous, unpopular policies that harm the public. By inserting “poison pill” policy riders into must-pass appropriations bills, some members of Congress routinely push forward policies that would damage Americans’ health, wealth, and environment.

Appropriators in the U.S. House of Representatives should remove three harmful anti-democracy riders that were added to last year’s budget, Public Citizen and 27 other groups said in a letter sent today. All three riders are expressly overturned by H.R. 1, which will be introduced in the U.S. Senate this week after being passed by the House earlier this month. Regardless of the fate of H.R. 1, House appropriators can act now and remove these measures from spending legislation this year.

Congress stopped funding gun violence research at the CDC in 1996 when it first passed the Dickey amendment, which prohibits the agency from using federal funds to advocate for gun control. The amendment, attached to every appropriations bill for decades at the insistence of Republicans, has had a chilling effect on federal research, and Democrats have tried for years to repeal it. Each time they have been rebuffed by Republicans. But this year, Democrats in the House majority are backing off the party’s previous calls to nix the amendment. House Democrats who want to resume funding for gun violence research at the CDC now say the amendment can stay in place as a “guardrail,” an attempt to allay concerns that the money could be used inappropriately.

Part of the success at the committee level in the Senate stems from a deal struck by Sens. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) to avoid including what are referred to as poison pills. Though Republicans could wrestle controversial bills through committee, where they have a majority, legislation needs 60 votes to clear the Senate floor, a threshold that requires support from Democrats. “What we’d like to do is what we did last year — remember we passed all the bills for the first time in I think 15, 20 years,” Leahy said, but added that it’s “up to leadership” to move bills across the Senate floor in time. Shelby added that they wanted to move bills through the Appropriations Committee faster and try to avoid piling everything up on the Senate floor toward the October deadline because “the more you put on the wagon, it overloads it and generally bogs down.” “I would hope that we can approach it in at least an accelerated way,” Shelby added. “We realize it’s getting toward March already.”

The Trump administration expects to deliver its fiscal 2020 budget on March 12, a six-week delay from the planned initial release date. Three sources, speaking on background because there has been no formal announcement from the Office of Management and Budget, confirmed the March 12 target for the budget rollout. Although no dollar amount has been announced, the budget is expected to be in the range of $750 billion.