04.14.16

Fiscal Year 2017 Subcommittee Allocation Background

The FY2017 allocations are consistent with the amounts approved in the 2015 Balanced Budget Act.  They total $1.07 trillion in base funding and $74 billion in funding for Overseas Contingency Operations.

Compared to fiscal year 2016, the FY2017 subcommittee allocations take into account dozens of technical adjustments across federal agencies, the largest of which include a $4.6 billion increase in advance appropriations for veterans’ medical care, changes to offsetting receipts and collections, and unrepeatable rescissions.  Other budgetary adjustments include increased expenses to safeguard the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, funding necessary to renew existing rental assistance, and variations in one-time construction and acquisition needs.

Compared to the President’s FY2017 budget request, the FY2017 subcommittee allocations do not assume any of the more than $50 billion in mandatory spending that the President proposed to skirt statutory budget caps.  Many of these new spending proposals are outside the jurisdiction of the Appropriations Committee and would supplement or supplant discretionary appropriations with new mandatory funding streams that are offset in the President’s budget with new taxes, fees, or other savings that have limited or no support in the Congress.

In numerous instances, the President’s budget request assumes new mandatory spending for broadly bipartisan programs, while at the same time proposing significant cuts in discretionary appropriations to those very programs.  For example, the President’s budget request reduces both the NIH and NASA by $1.0 billion each in discretionary funding, while at the same time proposing $1.8 billion and $800 million, respectively, in new mandatory spending unlikely to ever be enacted.

The FY2017 subcommittee allocations make none of these unrealistic assumptions and adhere to the statutory spending caps recently enacted by the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015.

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