
Sunset Commission Update: Delay in House, Rush in Senate
by Guest Blogger, 6/27/2006
While House leadership announced that sunset commissions would come up for a vote later than initially predicted, the Senate unexpectedly set the stage for its own consideration of a sunset commission proposal.
OMB Watch reported conflicting accounts two weeks ago about the timing for unveiling, and bringing to a vote, a final House package on sunset commissions. At the time, House GOP leadership suggested that a vote could happen imminently, while Hill sources speculated that leadership was being overly optimistic.
The latter proved to be the case. According to BNA's subscription-only Daily Report for Executives, the negotiations over a final proposal continued on several important details -- including whether the Department of Defense would be exempted from the sunset commission's purview.
Now, House leaders report that a House bill will come up for a vote in the first couple of weeks after Congress's July 4 recess.
Meanwhile, the Senate unexpectedly moved forward with its own sunset commission proposal. Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), chairman of the Budget Committee, unveiled the "Stop Over Spending Act" (S. 3521), a potpourri of budget process reforms with features that include attacks on entitlements, a line-item veto, and a sunset commission.
The Gregg sunset commission language is similar in most respects to the proposals developed by Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS) and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), the chief differences being:
- no exemptions for the Department of Defense, entitlement programs, or any other programs;
- charging the commission to produce four separate reviews and recommendations, each covering 25% of the federal programs in question; and
- adjusting the language from the Tiahrt/Brownback bills that would codify White House performance appraisals by acknowledging performance indicators that cannot easily be measured.
