Bureau of Reclamation Stakeholders Meeting July 16, 2014
Budget and Appropriations Bob Wolf, Director of Program and Budget
I am going to talk primarily about 2015 because that is, I think, the most timely topic for today's discussion.
At the beginning of the 2015 process there was a lot of optimism that
Congress would be able to complete action on all twelve appropriation bills before October 1,
primarily because there was a 2-year budget deal where there was agreement between the administration and Congress
as to the total resources available for the appropriation bill.
So there was $1.014 trillion, which was a pretty modest $2 billion increase over 2014 final appropriations.
If you remember last year, there was a huge difference between the House and Senate before they had the deal arranged.
So the House had been working off a $967 billion number. The Senate was $1.048 billion,
and they ended up essentially splitting the difference in the final bill.
It meant there were huge differences between the House and the Senate in individual bills leading up to the budget deal.
So for example, the energy and water bill that includes Reclamation,
The difference was about $4 billion.
There was only about $30 billion when the House started the process last year,
about $34 billion in the Senate, and that was a huge gap to make up.
The good news is that the House and Senate started much closer together.
There is about a $200 million difference between the House and Senate on the allocation for the energy and water bill this year.
The other good news is that the house has passed their appropriation bill. They passed it last Thursday, after two days of debate.
What has not worked out as well as planned is that the Senate process has fallen off track.
The Senate had done a preliminary markup in the Subcommittee of the energy and water bill back on June 17.
They announced there were significant increases for Reclamation, but the bill has never been filed or gone to Committee,
and it is not clear what the schedule will be for that.
The table that is on the screen may be a little hard to read from where your seats are. Maybe your eyes are better than mine.
I will cover a little bit on what has happened in the 2015 process so far.
In the left column we have the 2014 for comparison purposes,
2015 President's budget is the second column.
And then when you move into the third column, that shows what the House did on the floor.
The only difference in funding levels when they went from full Committee to the floor action last week
is they added $10 million to the category of rural water, and that funding actually was, all of these amendments have to be zero-sum,
and there can be no additions to the bill on the floor,
but in that case they moved money from the Department of Energy over to the Bureau of Reclamation,
and used the category of rural water for where they wanted to place the funding.
If you look at the water and related resources account, it is considerably up from the President's budget because they have
incorporated the separate appropriation accounts that have been proposed in the President's budget account for three years
for Indian water rights settlements and for the San Joaquin River Restoration Program, which is a litigation settlement in California.
And they have not chosen to fund those in separate appropriation accounts.
They folded them into water resources and for that reason we show a subtotal for comparison purposes.
You can compare '14 enacted, '15 President's budget, and then the House floor action.
And then there are other the appropriation accounts were the House cut our Policy and Administration account
which is our admin account to provide centralized operations for Reclamation.
They did similar things in the Assistant Secretary's Civil Works Program, in the Army Corps of Engineers.
Similar things for the Department of Energy.
We are quite hopeful that this will get reimbursed in the final outcome on a bill.
And then they fully funded the California Bay-Delta restoration account and the Central Valley Project restoration fund.
If you look at that in total, the subtotal for Reclamation is the most pertinent comparison.
And that's where you see the House outcome is about a $22 million reduction from the President's budget request
It's a more significant reduction compared to the 2014 enacted.
And then for the Senate because they don't have an official bill or report that has been published yet,
until they do full committee action, it doesn't have official standing in the process, per se.
We just have a footnote on this table.
As had Lowell mentioned, the Senate has been far more supportive of Reclamation
because of, I think, the composition of the membership of the Subcommittee and the overall appropriations committee.
There's just more westerners who have an interest in the Reclamation program.
So, in the Senate, you will see that they provide a total of $1.23 billion,
which is over $115 million above the inactive for 2014, and $187 million above the President's budget.
So those are very good marks, comparatively, with the House.
And what you see in the House and the Senate is that in this non-earmark environment that we're currently working in Congress,
they cannot designate money for individual projects.
So what they've done over the last few years is develop a group of categories
where if they choose to alter the funding from the President's budget request they will allocate it to a category of funding,
and then ultimately if they do a final conference report, which we are hopeful they will get to this year,
they will identify individual amounts for all the projects compared to the President's budget,
but in this non-earmark environment they will have categories, about five of them that have been developed --
water conservation and delivery is one that was added, or at least discussed, on the House floor.
This year, there has been one for facility operation and maintenance and rehabilitation.
In the last few years, there's nothing in the current House bill in that category
Rural water is one that they added in committee.
They add money to the existing authorized Rural Water Projects, and they added $31 million in the current version of the bill --
on top of the President's budget, which was about $34 million
And then they have a category for environmental compliance and restoration and a category for fish screens and passage.
So we will see how that works out. Our assumption is that the Senate, adding as much money as they did, would have been primarily
adding to those categories or other ones they may have developed in their process this year.
Again, we don't have evidence in the form of the bill or report as to exactly how they accomplished that .
As we approach the August recess, that will leave very little time for further action on appropriations in the month of September.
We are expecting that we will be under a continuing resolution to begin the new fiscal year on October 1.
There has been no substantive discussion that I am aware of as to the length of a continuing resolution.
One could suggest that it may be just for several weeks until they get agreement on the final appropriations bill.
More likely they may not do a continuing resolution until after the election in November.
And then there is also the possibility that they could go all the way to the next calendar year, when there would be a new Congress.
There's a lot of options as to how the Congress may chooses to address that working with the administration.
We will have to wait and see how that works out.
The other -- I will call it a drag -- on the appropriation process
is the administration did release a statement of administration policy on the energy and water bill the day before the floor action,
and they are threatening a veto on the bill, primarily over the Department of Energy issues and concerns about funding levels there.
And then they also mentioned environmental riders.
There were two provisions, General Provision 105 and General Provision 106, in the bill that came out of Committee
that deal with Clean Water Act and the Army Corps of Engineers Program,
and the environmental riders in general, and those two specifically, were called out in the statement of administration policy.
On the floor action, there were three or four amendments that address funding I mentioned.
I mentioned the addition to the rural water funding category of $10 million.
That was an addition to Reclamation's funding.
There were other wins for smaller amounts of money.
There was a $3 million and a $1 million ammendment that passed, but those were within available funds.
They would be offset within the program to fund those categories.
They cited water conservation and delivery and environmental restoration projects as the two categories,
and the individual members expressed their views on how they would like to see that money allocated in a final bill.
There were other ammendments -- a $52 million ammendment to try to add funding to Title 16. That one failed.
There were some other general provision types of amendments that also failed and were not adopted -- one of them was withdrawn.
I think that captures where we are in the Senate and House with the appropriation process.
We are, again, hopeful that we will have a C.R. that will at least allow us funding to begin the fiscal year on October 1.
And we're hopeful that we will get some agreement between the House and the Senate and the administration on how to proceed,
so that we get funding in place in a reasonable time.
It has been extremely difficult for Reclamation as an agency in years when we have not gotten
final funding allocations until -- one year it was as late as April.
In other recent years it has generally been late December to March time frame.
It just makes it difficult to operate a program, and do it in a reasonable fashion.
The final thing I will mention is on 2016.
We are fairly far along in 2016 process.
We expect to have a budget that will go over to OMB on the normal timeframe in September
and then OMB will be reviewing the 2016 request and getting us decisions back sometime in late fall or early winter.
And the normal process would be we would get final decision sometime in early December
and then turn that into a President's budget that would be delivered to Congress the first Monday in February.
As many of you know, in recent years there have been delays in the congressional appropriations process.
In the prior year, the administration has chosen to wait until they had a better understanding of the outcome of that process
before they did final decisions on the President's budget.
And the President's budget has gone up typically in the March and even April time frame in recent years.
Again we are hopeful that there is the two year budget agreement,
which would allow us, if they can get past some of these other issues, to get to a final bill.
There would hopefully not be too big of a difference between the overall allocations between the House and the Senate,
and would facilitate that process once they get the go-ahead.
And to do a conference on the appropriations bill.
And it should be easier than it was last year, but there are still issues to deal with that.