Taxpayer Coalition Calls For Removal of Pork From Emergency Supplemental Legislation

 

Taxpayer Coalition Calls For Removal of Pork From Emergency Supplemental Legislation
$24 billion of unrelated spending should be reviewed through normal appropriations process

WASHINGTON – This week the House of Representatives will vote on an “emergency” spending package which was originally conceived as emergency funding for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, the House leadership has converted the spending into a grab-bag of unrelated spending for their special interests.

Given this situation a coalition of taxpayer groups have called on Congress to remove the non-defense related spending out of the legislation and subsequently to reform the broken supplemental process for future legislation. The groups signing the letter to Congress include: Americans for Tax Reform, American Conservative Union, National Taxpayers Union, Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, Americans for Prosperity, Free Enterprise Fund, FreedomWorks, and American Shareholders Association.

The letter can be accessed at: http://www.atr.org/content/pdf/2007/march/032007lt-coalition.pdf

Spending added to the budget consist of drought-aid which has not been able to pass the Senate under normal rules, NASA, home heating assistance, border patrol, and children’s health insurance. If these provisions are priorities for members of Congress, then they should hold a vote on the separate legislation rather than using war-time related spending as the vehicle.

Over the past six years Congress has approved $501 billion of supplemental spending. As such, more than half of the increase in federal spending during this time has occurred off-budget through the supplemental process. This new proposal will raise that total $622 billion and the proposals have never been offset.

The coalition also calls for reform of this broken process by strengthening the criteria for emergency spending and ensuring non-emergency spending is not included in any supplemental. Furthermore the coalition calls for any new supplemental spending must be offset dollar for dollar with real spending cuts.