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In a startling victory, the United States Senate passed an amendment sponsored by Senators Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Tom Harkin (D-IA) that added $7 billion to the proposed federal budget for fiscal year (FY) 2007. Without this amendment funding for education, health care, training and low-income programs potentially would have been cut by over $4.2 billion from this year’s federal funding levels. The Specter-Harkin amendment restores those cuts by providing an additional $7 billion over the President’s budget request – allowing Congress to fund the FY 2007 Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill at the level enacted two years ago, in FY 2005. Funding is provided by increasing the cap on FY 2008 advance appropriations by $7 billion.
The vote on the Harkin/Specter amendment, which was expected to be very close, passed by a wide margin, gaining the support of 73 senators (including 28 of 55 Republican senators), with only 51 needed to pass. ASHA and many other education and health organizations lobbied hard and reached out to their grassroots networks to generate support for the amendment. ASHA members who contacted their Senators should feel very proud of their achievement.
While this was a decisive early victory, there is still a long way to go before health and education programs receive an increase in funding for FY 2007. The Senate is expected to complete their consideration of the 2007 budget this week. The House is scheduled to consider their budget resolution the week of March 27th. It is unclear at this time if there will be a similar amendment offered to the House. Once the budget resolutions are approved, the next congressional action would be consideration of these programs in the appropriations committees. For further information, please contact Neil Snyder, ASHA’s Director of Federal Advocacy, via e-mail at nsnyder@asha.org or by phone at 800-498-2071, ext. 4257.
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