Lawmakers Rush to Cram Pet projects Into Spending Deal Ahead of New Deadline | The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Congressional negotiators are lurching toward a year-end deal that could combine a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill with a slate of more than $750 billion in tax breaks for businesses and low-income workers, setting off a frenzied push by lawmakers, lobbyists and interest groups to attach pet provisions to the catchall legislative package.
Republican leaders on Capitol Hill conceded that they will miss a Friday deadline, and the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday put forward a stopgap measure to prevent a government shutdown and give negotiators an additional five days to reach an agreement.
But while all sides are voicing guarded optimism, discussions are still hung up on some fierce areas of disagreement, particularly over politically charged policy changes, known as “riders,” on topics as diverse as new restrictions on Syrian and Iraqi refugees, environmental regulations and campaign finance rules. Perhaps the most significant of these proposals would lift a more than 40-year-old ban on exports of crude oil.
With a presidential election year approaching, and control of Congress also at stake, the current negotiations represent one of the few opportunities in the near future to pass sweeping legislation.
“Anyone who wants to get anything done, who has already been frustrated by a virtually nonfunctioning Washington, is trying to cram whatever they can into this bill,” said Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal watchdog group.
The proposed changes include numerous Republican priorities, such as blocking an environmental regulation that would expand federal authority over domestic waterways and rejecting a proposed Department of Labor conflict-of-interest rule that would impose new restrictions on financial advisers handling retirement funds.
And there are other provisions that would have a more narrow impact, like a tweak to a Depression-era law protecting creditors that critics say would pointedly benefit Apollo Global Management, which owns the Caesars Entertainment casino conglomerate.
The House has voted twice in recent months for bills that would lift the ban on crude oil exports, a move eagerly sought by lawmakers in oil-producing states.
Supporters of lifting the restriction, like Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, say that doing so would help the American oil industry, which has struggled amid lower global prices.
Ms. MacGuineas has called the end-of-year legislation a borrowing “bonanza” with both parties prepared to add about $1 trillion to the nation’s debt, partly because Democrats are eager for more spending and also because Republicans in Congress do not insist on offsetting tax cuts with reductions in spending.
“If we were paying for this bill, if we were paying for the tax extenders portion, you wouldn’t be able to put in all these other things,” she said.
The spending measure and the tax package were drawn up separately, and ultimately may reach the House and Senate floors that way as well. But as is often the case in Congress, many of the underlying issues have become intertwined as negotiations come down to the wire, and political and policy imperatives collide.
Among the policy prescriptions sought by Republicans is a provision that would prevent the National Labor Relations Board from enforcing a rule that would make it easier for employees of fast-food restaurants to unionize.
Democrats, in turn, are hoping to extract major concessions in exchange for lifting the oil export ban, including indexing of the child tax credit to inflation, long sought by the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California.
There are also bipartisan efforts to use the year-end deal to complete legislation that for various reasons lawmakers could never quite push across the finish line, including a bill that would aid emergency workers now suffering from health ailments related to the work at the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack in New York City.
In recent years, persistent deadlock between Democrats and Republicans over budget policy — as well as the general elimination of so-called earmarks, the individual lawmaker-designated provisions, from appropriations bills — has often left Congress and the White House negotiating over relatively tiny changes in discretionary spending, with far less room for maneuvering by special interests.
The budget accord reached in October between congressional Republicans and the White House, which set overall spending limits for 2016 and 2017 above previously agreed-upon limits, as well as the Republican policy that permits tax cuts without corresponding increases in revenue, has created a rare opportunity. It is all the more tantalizing because Mr. Obama and the new House speaker, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, seem to have a shared interest in completing a deal without a protracted fight.
Paul Winfree, the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, a conservative think tank, said that some Republican lawmakers were hoping to extract a victory through the policy changes because they were not satisfied with the accord in October that lifted the spending caps.
The White House, which had indicated the president would support a stopgap measure to give negotiators more time, nonetheless accused Republicans of politically motivated foot-dragging.
“They’ve already had weeks and months to negotiate an agreement,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary. “And the only reason that we haven’t come to an agreement is the continued insistence on the part of Republicans to insert ideological riders into the process.”
Ms. MacGuineas said Democrats and Republicans were complicit in a long legacy of failed federal fiscal policy making.
“It all goes toward a bigger picture in that we don’t budget in a sensible way,” she said. “You have these terrible deals and both sides patting themselves on the back and chortling about successful bipartisan efforts.”