Legislative Lowdown -- Week of June 27th
June 27, 2005 |  | 

Kudos to Rep. Chris Chocola (R.-Ind.) for his amendment to end NASA.s
inane .artist in residence. program.

NASA officials had actually commissioned a performance artist to
perform a theatrical story-telling piece as part of a NASA outreach
effort and to produce a film on the moons of the solar system. Though
minuscule in comparison to the multi-trillion-dollar federal
budget.the program consumed but $50,000.Chocola correctly
characterized it as being inconsistent with NASA.s mission and .a
symptom of a bigger problem. relating to ballooning federal spending. 

Unbelievably, two senior Democrats rose to defend the NASA arts
program. Rep. Alan Mollohan (D.-W.Va.), one of the most senior House
appropriators, dismissed Chocola.s concerns because they involve an
.awfully little bit of money.. Mollohan claimed that NASA ought to
have an arts program, pointing to the .beautiful murals and other art
initiatives. that grace NASA.s facilities. Not to be outdone,
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D.-Tex.) compared the inspirational potential
of the film to JFK.s Camelot and argued that viewing it would convince
countless young Americans to pursue graduate degrees in the hard
sciences. 

So long as veteran lawmakers such as Mollohan and Jackson Lee see
nothing wrong in funneling taxpayer dollars to such bizarre ends.This
is how artist Laurie Anderson described her taxpayer-funded film: .It
begins with this idea of stuttering and how difficult it is to start
things. And it.s connected to the rocks in many ways..efforts to
shrink the federal behemoth will flounder. 

Smoke and Mirrors

Once again, the annual appropriations process is under way and, once
again, lawmakers are determined to use every accounting trick
imaginable to evade the latest spending caps.

The current budget resolution allows Congress to spend up to $843
billion on an enormous range of federal activities.national security,
education, housing, transportation, law enforcement, agriculture,
etc. House and Senate appropriators have the discretion to allocate a
predetermined amount of funds.$843 billion this year.across these
activities. 

Rather than allocate sufficient resources to meet our national
security needs, appropriators purposefully deny the Pentagon billions
in much-needed funding and shift these funds to questionable domestic
programs. This year the House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis
(R.-Calif.) shifted $3.3 billion out of Defense spending, while his
Senate counterpart, Sen. Thad Cochran (R.-Miss.), slashed the
President.s proposed Pentagon budget by more than twice that level, $7
billion, and moved it all to the domestic side of government. 

The deceit involved is evident even to Washington.s jaded
insiders. .No one,. Congressional Quarterly observed recently,
.expects the Defense Department to do without the funds for
long. Supplemental spending bills for military operations in
Afghanistan and Iraq can more than make up the difference..

Surplus of New Ideas

The latest twist in the continuing saga of Social Security reform
involves a creative proposal floated by Sen. Jim DeMint (R.-S.C.) to
create a constrained version of personal retirement accounts that
would use only the excess funds generated annually by the Social
Security payroll tax. His idea quickly caught fire among leading
Republicans, both for its substantive integrity and its political
attractiveness, and may represent a serious breakthrough. 

The DeMint plan, embraced with a few tweaks by a leading group of
conservative Republicans who serve on the House Ways and Means
Committee, would end the decades-long practice whereby Congress
.borrows. excess Social Security payroll taxes and uses them to pay
for other government activities. Rather than underwriting the
activities of the Department of Education, the National Endowment of
the Arts and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, DeMint and his allies would
allow workers to lay claim to their share of the Social Security
surplus and place it in personal retirement accounts. 

While media accounts describe this latest development as .the latest
blow to Bush,. the cash portion of the surplus.DeMint does not count
the interest imputed each year to the Social Security trust fund.is no
small change, and is expected to exceed $800 billion through
2014. Leading liberal Democrats reacted predictably, denouncing the
proposal as .a smaller version of a bad idea. and .the same risky
privatization scheme in different packaging.. Moderate Democrats,
however, appeared to hold their fire, which is why this latest
development bears close watching.


Mr. Franc, who has held a number of positions on Capitol Hill, is vice
president of Government Relations at The Heritage Foundation.

First appeared in Human Events