Federal budget fight: A question of priorities
Battle over support of higher ed and schools heats
up in House

The federal budget and tax cuts will top the agenda when Congress gets back to work in February. The first items of business will most likely include budget reconciliation bills that cut funding from student loans, Medicaid and other vital domestic programs while preserving tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

A committee is still working to iron out differences in the House and Senate versions of the tax cut bill. Legislation will be submitted to both bodies for a vote, probably in early February. On the spending side, much of the heat likely will focus on the House of Representatives and its bill to cut domestic spending. The bill passed narrowly in mid-December—but only after a fierce floor fight which saw every Democrat and some moderate Republicans vote against the plan. The bill must come up for a second House vote, since the Senate made some amendments to its version.

Clearing that final hurdle won’t come easily, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California warned GOP leaders late last year. “Every single House Democrat opposed this immoral bill because of the harmful cuts in student loans, healthcare, child support enforcement and other assistance for seniors and for low- and middle-income families,” Pelosi wrote to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) in rejecting the GOP leader’s call for unanimous consent on the budget plan.

The fight also spilled into the streets of Washington, D.C., when religious leaders from across the country gathered in the nation’s capital to protest the budget proposal. Dozens of arrests were made in a demonstration designed to show that the current budget plan ignores the needs of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens while squandering scarce resources on tax breaks for the wealthy. More than three-quarters of tax breaks under consideration by Congress would go to the wealthiest 14 percent of all U.S. households, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reports. In contrast, families with children in college can expect to pay an additional $5,800 in interest due to planned cuts in the student loan program.

A backdrop of pain
For working families, the program cuts pending in Congress only add to the pain of budget decisions made at the end of 2005. Two appropriations bills signed into law on Dec. 30 put education and other vital domestic programs in the crosshairs. For the first time in a decade, Congress funded the Department of Education at a level less than the prior year, leaving many key programs underfunded. And that low funding was reduced even more when the Department of Defense (DOD) appropriations bill was approved, since this legislation included an across-the-board 1 percent cut to all domestic discretionary spending programs.

As a result, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) will suffer cuts in current funding levels, making it more difficult for students and school districts to meet achievement standards. In addition, the DOD bill included long overdue hurricane relief assistance for students and schools. Unfortunately, the $1.4 billion hurricane relief package fails to address the full range of needs among the schools ravaged by the hurricanes along the Gulf Coast. Congress also allowed both public and nonpublic schools to receive aid for restarting school operations—but nonpublic schools will receive a disproportionate share of the help. And the AFT has serious concerns about the precedent-setting potential of the proposed mechanism to provide aid to private school students in receiving districts, since it could pave the way to additional private school voucher attacks in Congress.

Moving forward
With no Democrat willing to support the plan, the key to the battle may rest with moderate Republicans, many of whom have publicly expressed misgivings about a fiscal plan that hurts low- and middle-income Americans while lavishing scarce resources on the wealthy. “The AFT is again mobilizing our grassroots network and will be working aggressively to defeat the budget reconciliation bill in the House. Our previous grassroots efforts helped grind the budget reconciliation to a halt and could not have succeeded without the thousands of AFT members who contacted their representatives in support of AFT’s position,” says AFT legislation director Tor Cowan. “Bipartisan outreach, particularly to the many moderate Republicans who have expressed doubts about the plan, is a key.”