Appropriations Committee, House

The House Appropriations Committee is traditionally the largest standing committee in Congress, and one of the most powerful as well. Its members play a crucial role in the annual process by which Congress determines funding levels for government agencies and programs. In early 2003, the committee numbered sixty-five members, thirty-six of whom were Republicans and twenty-nine Democrats.

By custom, all spending bills begin in the House of Representatives. The job of the Appropriations Committee is to write the first versions of the regular appropriations bills each year, as well as any emergency funding measures that may be required. In recent decades long budget battles have caused the Senate to take the lead on some spending bills.

The full Appropriations Committee looks to its subcommittees to make most of the important decisions. The recommendations of the subcommittees—one for each of the thirteen annual spending bills—are generally accepted by the full committee without substantial change.

The real work of the Appropriations Committee is done in the subcommittees. Subcommittee members each year listen to many hours of testimony from government officials, who come to explain the dollar amounts requested for their agencies in the federal government's budget as prepared by the president. Subcommittee members and staff then meet to go over programs line by line and decide the exact dollar amounts to be given to each.

Subcommittee members follow closely the activities of the agencies under their jurisdiction, year after year. As a result they often acquire a great deal of knowledge about and power over government programs. For example, Jamie L. Whitten, a Democratic representative from Mississippi, became chair of the full Appropriations Committee in 1979 but remained chair as well of the panel's agriculture subcommittee, which he had headed since 1949. He was often referred to as “the permanent secretary of agriculture,” because his influence went on and on while the real secretaries of agriculture came and went.

The Appropriations Committee has lost some of its influence since the 1970s. The congressional budget process now limits the freedom of the Appropriations Committee to set spending levels. Annual spending caps set by budget legislation in the 1990s placed further, if temporary, restrictions on the Appropriations Committee's flexibility. A more significant and lasting limitation on the Appropriations Committee is the existence of entitlement programs, such as Social Security. An increasing share of the federal budget is consumed by such programs, which the government is legally required to pay for completely. The Appropriations Committee has little or no ability to alter the amounts required for entitlements.

One development in the 1980s was used to shore up the committee's power to make decisions. This was the practice of bundling appropriations for most or all federal agencies into a single omnibus bill, known as a continuing resolution. These comprehensive spending bills usually were passed toward the end of a congressional session in an atmosphere of haste and pressure, hiding many of the committee's funding decisions. Inclusion of authorizing measures in these packages also increased the clout of appropriators at the expense of the authorizing committees. In the early 1990s, after criticism from presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Congress backed away from using [Page p20]the continuing resolution as a permanent appropriations measure and instead put it to its more typical use of continuing funding primarily for short periods of time. But when the Republican-controlled Congress and the Democratic White House of Bill Clinton began waging heated battles over spending in the mid-1990s, Congress increasingly turned to omnibus bills to package together at least some of the annual appropriations bills. And in early 2003 Congress once again relied on a continuing resolution as the vehicle for eleven appropriations bills the previous Congress had failed to clear.

...