Blog - New Democrats Announce Plan to Deal WIth Unfinished Republican Business

Incoming Appropriations committee chairmen Robert Byrd and David Obey laid out their plan for dealing with the 9 (of 11) spending bills left behind by the GOP-led Congress.

The plan is basically to keep funding levels where they are at for the rest of the fiscal year, eliminate earmarks entirely, and use some of the money that was taken up by earmarks to increase funding where the Republican budget plan was skimping out: education, health research, and law enforcement. This could potentially affect a lot of federally funded agencies, which base their livelihood on the funding level they were approved for in the 2007 budget — a funding level that now may not be reached.

Many government agencies have been fearing a continuation of last year’s budget, but Byrd and Obey say that they will be trying to keep these agencies afloat with the money they earn back from the earmark moratorium.