On April 22, the Senate Budget Committee approved its Fiscal Year 2011 budget resolution, moving the chamber one step closer to setting spending limits for the coming appropriations process. The resolution provoked controversy, as it would cut spending levels below those in President Obama's budget request, which itself mandated a significant spending freeze on discretionary spending outside of defense and homeland security. The measure also frequently attracts contentious, policy-related amendments, and the current resolution is no exception.

Possibly the most significant amendment passed by the committee would create a new point of order should the Senate consider a provision or amendment under the reconciliation process that would "create gross new direct spending that exceeds 20 percent of the total savings" in the provision. Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) introduced the amendment, which would require 60 votes to overcome a point of order, effectively counteracting the procedural advantages that reconciliation provides. His objective was to ensure that legislation passed under reconciliation is largely used for deficit and debt reduction. Had this point of order been in effect this spring, it would have prevented reconciliation fixes for the recent health care legislation, according to Gregg. Going forward, the provision will make it difficult to use reconciliation on the pending climate bill and could have a lasting effect on the budget process.

Another noteworthy amendment was offered by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), who actually ended up voting against the overall budget resolution. Feingold's amendment would force Congress to pay for future war spending by requiring any such funding be offset over a ten-year period. To date, despite calls for “responsible” budgeting, Congress has funded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through yearly supplemental appropriations, which allow the spending to avoid budget limits set out in the budget resolution while creating larger budget deficits. By requiring that this spending be paid for over a ten-year window, Feingold's amendment helps to put war funding on equal footing with other government spending. Feingold's amendment passed on a 15-8 vote, with two Republicans joining all thirteen Democrats in voting for the amendment.

The committee also approved an amendment from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), which reduced the overall amount obligated under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Passed in 2008, the Bush administration intended to use the $700 billion in TARP funding to purchase "toxic" assets, mostly the billions of dollars in subprime loans and other housing-related securities that helped bring about the financial crisis and to help improve the health of the nation's struggling financial institutions. However, the program never fulfilled its grand intentions and ended up using far less of the $700 billion authorized to it. As of March 31, only about $500 billion was allocated to be spent, of which about $185 billion was repaid by entities receiving bailouts. That leaves some $385 billion in unallocated funding under TARP. Graham's amendment would reduce the TARP authorization by $44 billion to get rid of some of this unallocated money.

As it does not appear that any more financial institutions will be in dire need of support, the Obama administration had been planning on using some of the remaining TARP funds to create a small business loan program, a move which would require congressional authorization. Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) introduced an amendment to authorize these loans, but the committee instead narrowly approved Graham's alternative in a 12-11 vote, rebuffing the administration.

The committee also passed an amendment offered by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) that took aim at the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that allowed unlimited corporate spending on political campaigns (see related story). The amendment creates a reserve fund that will allow legislators to change assumptions in the budget resolution that would remove certain hurdles for authorization of funding for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), FEC, and other agencies to regulate corporate involvement in elections.

The committee's budget resolution was also notable for amendments it rejected. Among others, it voted down an amendment from Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who once again tried to institute particularly strict discretionary budget caps for the next three fiscal years. Sessions introduced a similar amendment to three other legislative vehicles (which OMB Watch strongly opposed), and the Senate voted it down every in every instance. Sessions' amendment would have instituted substantial discretionary budget cuts, far below the levels asked for by either the president's budget request or the budget resolution put forward by the Budget Committee's chairman, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND). The amendment failed on a party line vote (10-13), possibly because the chairman's budget represented a safe middle ground between the president's request and Sessions' budget caps, giving centrist Democrats on the committee the political cover they needed to avoid implementing severe spending cuts.

While the amendments detailed above are some of the more significant ones passed by the Senate Budget Committee, there are many more amendments in the resolution's future. It must pass the entire Senate, the House Budget Committee, and the entire House, and it will pick up (and probably drop) more amendments at each stage of the process. This, of course, is assuming the leadership of either chamber decides to continue pushing forward with the budget resolution. According to the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, which dictates the steps of the budget process, the House may begin considering appropriations bills after May 15 if a budget resolution has not been passed. Since the House Budget Committee has not yet scheduled a markup, odds are Congress will not meet that deadline.