Congress is nearly ready to send President Bush the first appropriations bill of the FY 2008 budget cycle — almost one full month overdue. The Senate is scheduled to vote today, Oct. 23, on the $150 billion Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill. Once that version is conferenced with the House version (which passed in July 276-140), it will be sent to the president, where it may face a veto. The Labor-HHS bill funds a wide array of human needs programs, from Head Start and the National Institutes of Health to the Occupational Safety and Health and Administration and college loan programs. In his budget, President Bush requested drastic cuts to many of these programs. For more details on those proposed cuts, see the Coalition on Human Needs' analysis. President Bush has threatened to veto this appropriations bill and eight others, mostly over concerns they appropriate more funding than he requested. The president requested a total of $933 billion for FY 08 discretionary spending, while Congress proposed $956 billion. The $23 billion difference represents less than one percent of the $2.9 trillion total congressional proposal, and pales in comparison to the recent $196 billion supplemental funding request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the multitude of amendments offered during debate on the bill, two unrelated budget process measures were offered. Sen. Wayne Allard (R-CO) offered an amendment to institute mandatory, automatic cuts to programs covered under the bill should they receive an "ineffective" rating by the Office of Management and Budget's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART). This amendment was a dangerous proposal that would have transfered appropriating power to the executive branch and would have wreaked havoc with implementation of program services as budgets could be cut randomly throughout the year outside of the regular appropriations process. Fortunately, the amendment was soundly defeated 68-21. In addition, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) attempted to offer his version of a perennially bad idea — sunset commissions — to the Labor-HHS spending bill. Sunset commissions were particularly in vogue in 2006 as many conservatives in Congress attempted to institute policies that would have given the executive branch power to establish unelected commissions that could have created proposals to restructure or eliminate government programs and agencies and then fast-tracked those proposals through Congress. Cornyn's proposal was withdrawn when a point of order was raised against it, but he vowed to continue to raise the issue. Democratic leaders in the House and Senate have announced they will send this bill to the president on the heels of a close veto override vote on a bill reauthorizing the State Children's Health Insurance Program. It is likely this bill will test whether the president will make good on his veto threat and how much support is present in Congress for diverging from Bush on appropriations bills generally. The Labor-HHS appropriations bill will probably be the most difficult spending bill to pass this year. It is the second-largest appropriations bill, and the congressional versions have the biggest funding difference compared to the president's requests, with the Senate version being about $9 billion more. If Congress can pass this bill over the president's intended veto, it can probably pass other bills over the president's objections. This would pressure the president to negotiate with Congress over the remaining appropriations bills he has also threatened to veto. Alternatively, a stalemate over Labor-HHS means no end in sight for the FY 08 budget fight. Congress could give in to the president's demands for budget cuts, or it may attempt to package popular appropriations bills with unpopular ones. Either way, smaller amounts of funding for social programs are more likely if the Labor-HHS appropriations bill is not enacted the first time around. Like the children's health insurance debate, many of the funding proposals threatened with a presidential veto enjoy significant public support. A poll by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and US Action found about two-thirds of Americans favor the congressional funding proposals for Head Start and cancer research included in the bill.