Updates

The house approved the legislation mentioned in the blog entry below, next stop senate--http://science.house.gov/press/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=2495

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How much can we spend? That's the question all appropriation subcommittee members ask their chairman. In the house, the subcommittee chairs got their allocations. CQ reports the following:

Congressional Quarterly compared a copy of the draft fiscal 2010 allocation list with the initial subcommittee allocations for fiscal 2009 released last year. Based on that analysis, many of the subcommittees would have sizable increases to work with.

One exception is the Energy-Water bill, which would receive about a 1 percent increase, to $33.3 billion, in fiscal 2010. The stimulus law included a substantial amount of spending for energy projects in fiscal 2009 and 2010.

The committee is set to provide $68.8 billion, which is $14 billion more than in fiscal 2009, for the Transportation-HUD bill and $48.8 billion, roughly a $14 billion boost, for the State-Foreign Operations bill.

The Defense bill would receive $508 billion under the allocations, about $20 billion more than provided in fiscal 2009. These figures, however, do not include war funding, which is provided as emergency spending and does not count against the committee’s budget caps.
The other allocations, compared with their fiscal 2009 committee allotments, are as follows:
• Agriculture: $22.9 billion, a $2.3 billion increase.
• Commerce-Justice-Science: $64.3 billion, a $7.5 billion increase.
• Financial Services: $23.6 billion, a $1.2 billion increase.
• Homeland Security: $42.4 billion, a $2.5 billion increase.
• Interior-Environment: $32.3 billion, a $4.4 billion increase.
• Labor-HHS-Education: $160.7 billion, a $7.5 billion increase.
• Legislative Branch: $4.7 billion, a $296 million increase.
• Military Construction-VA: $76.5 billion, a $3.8 billion increase.