NSBA Editorial: The promised veto of the funding bill should be rejected

On May 17, 147 House members -- or enough needed to sustain a veto -- signed a letter stating they would support the president’s veto. Since most appropriations bills had not yet been developed, their commitment was made sight unseen.

Since last May, the House and Senate have passed their versions of a Labor/Health and Human Services/Education appropriations bill (H.R.3043). Earlier this month, a conference committee reconciled the dollar differences between those bills and released a final spending bill.

During this process, the White House issued a statement objecting to the Senate bill, setting the stage for the president’s veto. Bush objected that the Senate exceeded his request in discretionary spending, which Congress then topped in the final bill.

For education, the White House specifically objected that the Senate bill exceeded the president’s request by 7 percent -- without pointing out that much of the difference was based on the lawmakers’ rejection of the president’s desire to eliminate or cut programs.

NSBA believes that the House and Senate acted correctly to maintain support for the key programs that Bush placed on the chopping block. The final bill includes the higher increases that the House proposed for Title I (which funds the No Child Left Behind Act) and special education.

These increases do not come close to offsetting rising costs, let alone funding the share that Congress promised to pay when it enacted these mandates. These increases also come after a virtual three-year freeze in funding for both programs, despite the rising operational costs for schools to fulfill their mandates under NCLB and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

We anticipate that some of the debate on this spending measure will focus on the federal deficit. Placed in perspective, the final bill exceeds the president’s budget request by a mere one-third of 1 percent of the federal government’s $2.8 trillion budget -- and even less than that as a percent increase over last year’s bottom line.

Meanwhile, despite the multiyear ramp-up of expenditures for the Department of Defense, the president is seeking to increase funding for that agency by more than $40 billion this year, plus even greater off-budget increases for the war in Iraq and other purposes.

Surely, a shift of resources of that magnitude can be accomplished without targeting the much smaller dollar increases to support the education of our children and other services that Bush calls an “irresponsible” budget buster. 

In the event the president actually vetoes the measure, we hope the 147 House members who signed the May 17 letter -- sight unseen -- will seriously ask themselves whether sustaining Bush’s veto is truly in the best interest of the schoolchildren and local taxpayers in the districts they represent.

Likewise, they should ask whether sustaining a veto is truly in the long-term interest of a nation whose competitiveness in the future is directly related to how well we educate our children today.