In the wake of a uniquely tumultuous 2020, the American people deserve a 2021 budget that ensures ample resources throughout the COVID-19 crisis. We urge Members of Congress to fully fund important public services and to reject any flawed bills that fail to remove poison pill policy riders that would undo essential public safeguards.
Top House and Senate appropriators on Tuesday clinched a deal on a bipartisan set of funding levels, paving the way for a $1.4 trillion spending package to avert a government shutdown next month. The agreement on the funding allocations, confirmed by a House Democratic aide, establishes overall totals for 12 appropriations measures that will be rolled into one massive omnibus bill that would boost federal budgets for the rest of the fiscal year. Negotiators plan to keep the numbers — known as 302(b)s — under wraps until a bipartisan, bicameral omnibus is finalized, the aide said. The deal comes at a time with little margin for error. After the Thanksgiving break, both chambers will have just two weeks to flesh out the finer points of the 12-bill spending package and pass the legislation in order to avoid a government shutdown by the Dec. 11 deadline.
An agreement between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to pursue a “clean” stopgap spending measure significantly reduces the chances of a government shutdown at month's end but leaves most other funding questions unanswered. Tuesday's accord, days before Congress prepares to return from summer recess, shows that neither President Donald Trump nor Republican or Democratic lawmakers see a political advantage in risking a partial shutdown just ahead of the elections. The agreement on a “clean” stopgap may be shorthand for avoiding “poison pills” or other controversial provisions that could hamper such a measure's enactment. Nevertheless, the door is open to potentially dozens of tweaks to spending provisions and temporary extensions of expiring programs, which often ride on a stopgap, Republican and Democratic aides familiar with the process said.
As appropriators in the U.S. House of Representatives mark up the FY 2021 spending bills this month, the Clean Budget Coalition is calling on Congress to remove as many legacy riders as possible from the annual spending packages. Below is a list compiled by the coalition of just some of the riders that should be removed. These examples are meant to illustrate how legacy riders harm the public, but are not an exhaustive list. Some already have been removed from the House’s FY 2021 spending bills marked up this week.
We expect the Senate to start its budget markups this week and the House of Representatives to begin markups after the fourth of July holiday. That means this is the perfect time to contact your Members of Congress and help ensure that they understand the importance of the budget for our community and its relevance to the pandemic and our allies fighting for racial justice. Contact your Senators and Representatives in Congress and tell them you insist that they pass a “clean” budget without poison policy riders! The budget mark-up process often results in harmful “riders,” by which Members of Congress, who are subservient to industries that provide financial support to their campaigns, seek to advance their taskmasters’ dangerous policy agendas. These riders are often introduced and negotiated behind closed doors in a manner that is opaque to the public until it is too late.
Lawmakers have to walk and chew gum at the same time by writing relief packages and regular spending bills. House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey last month circulated preliminary spending allocations to the panel leaders who will draft the fiscal 2021 spending bills. Lawmakers are already debating and drafting those bills, albeit from home and over emails, video chats, and phone calls, so they can move forward as soon as they are able to. Overall funding levels were decided in a hard fought agreement reached in 2019. That agreement also included a bipartisan commitment to keep poison pill policy riders out of the process, and that should mean removing poison pill policy riders that were added into previous packages. As lawmakers fight to prevent further cuts and boost funding for human needs amid the pandemic, appropriators should make it a top priority to remove old poison pill policy riders from past budget cycles that never should have been added into spending bills in the first place. These measures are known as legacy riders. They stick around year after year, sometimes for decades, until Congress proactively removes them, all the while leaving a toxic legacy that damages our environment, harms public health, and fuels political corruption, depending on what each rider does. Dozens of these unpopular and controversial measures were added into past spending bills with no public debate by conservatives as special favors for ideological extremists and big corporations.
The Clean Budget Coalition, an alliance of labor, scientific, consumer, research, good government, faith, civil rights, community, health, environmental, and public interest groups, writes you to urge FY21 appropriations bills that are free from policy riders that harm the public. No appropriations titles, 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 FY21 appropriations bills. We ask that you take that stance as Congress processes the FY21 appropriations bills—keeping out new policy riders that would harm the public as well as removing those that have become embedded.
