The House appropriators are now turning to some potentially more contentious bills as they mark up the fiscal 2015 spending bill this week. The fiscal 2014 version of Transportation-HUD illustrated the difficulties lawmakers had last year in balancing domestic spending needs and sequestration. Moderate Republicans joined Democrats in the House in bucking that bill because of its austere funding level.
Republicans in the Senate, meanwhile, voted to block their chamber’s version because they said overall proposed spending levels were too high. Lawmakers could revisit some of those battles this year, but their differences might be tempered with the overall cap on domestic spending already set. Moreover, many of the transportation grants funded by the bill are politically popular and members may not want to oppose them in an election year. Some partisan splits could, however, emerge over affordable housing programs funded in the HUD portion of the bill, but the Obama administration might have headed off that opposition by scaling back current HUD funding by $1 billion to a proposed $32.6 billion for fiscal 2015.