Congress in standoff over FEMA funding

By Karoun Demirjian

Monday, Sept. 26, 2011 | 9:40 a.m.

There’s still a few days to go until the end of the fiscal year -- plenty of time to resolve the most recent budget standoff Congress finds itself in.

But the agency at the center of the funding feud might only have hours until it reaches the end of the line.

Republicans and Democrats have dug in over Federal Emergency Management Agency funding, which after a late summer season of many natural disasters is in need of more money to keep disaster response humming.

In the Senate, Democrats and 10 Republicans passed a bill earlier this month to kick $6.9 billion toward FEMA -- enough to fund it for a couple of months. House Republicans countered with a $3.7 billion offer -- enough for about six weeks -- and wrote that amount into the budget resolution they passed last week, with five House Democrats on board.

It’s not just a simple funding dispute, though. Republicans in the House have demanded that any extra money for FEMA, even if it is to respond to emergencies, needs to be offset right away by cuts elsewhere, and they’ve picked a favorite program of Democrats to add to the chopping block: loan guarantees for renewable energy projects, the same program that has backed most of the major solar projects in Nevada the last two years.

It’s the offsetting that’s proven to be the sticking point: Senate Democrats, after voting down the House’s budget last week (along with seven Republicans), agreed to the House’s number for FEMA, provided the House drop its request for what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called “job-killing cuts.” The offsets, Reid said, could jeopardize “as many as 50,000 manufacturing jobs.”

Those who have been following the march of congressional budget disputes over the last year will note that the FEMA-centered dispute is narrower than in past rounds.

The budget resolution will only fund the government through Nov. 18, and the difference between the Democrats and Republicans’ preferred positions is at this point about a billion and a half dollars. Even the energy loan guarantee offset isn’t huge: the $100 million that Republicans want to cut from that program (they picked the figure because that’s about how much the administration lost on the Solyndra deal) is only a fraction of the remaining $8 billion or so in energy loan guarantees the government could award to projects in the pipeline before the program expires Friday.

But smaller budgets don’t mean smaller disputes. It’s boiling down to matters of principle and winning an argument: Republicans are angling hard for a deficit-driven policy of no budgeting, ever, without offsets; Democrats say they’re happy to talk about offsetting the FEMA money, but Congress should argue later how to do it; the wildfires, earthquakes and flooding of the last few weeks mean this is a national emergency.

“We’ve compromised,” Reid said. “When they didn’t get what they wanted, they moved toward the Tea Party instead of toward the middle.”

House Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor has countered that it is Reid who is holding up the funding “for no reason ... other than politics.”

So far, the only casualty of the dispute is Congress’ vacation: both the Senate and House were supposed to be back in their states and districts this whole week for a break built around the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, which begins Wednesday at sunset.

Reid scheduled a vote for Monday night on an amended budget resolution. If they can resolve the interparty dispute, then the crisis is over: House Democrats’ assistant leader said Friday there will be enough support for a compromise in his camp to help Republican leaders pass a compromise by unanimous consent.