WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The U.S. Congress on Thursday finally approved a huge $375 billion catchall federal spending bill for fiscal year 2004 that had been delayed for months by disputes over issues ranging from media ownership to gun records and food labels.
The Senate voted 65-28 to pass the 1,200-page bill after Democrats, under pressure to free up its funding for everything from foreign aid, farm, veterans, education, transportation and health programs to the State Department and FBI, abandoned procedural tactics they had been using to oppose it.
“Nobody here wants to be accused of shutting the government down,” said Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. “But it is with great concern and chagrin that we find ourselves in this position today.”
The House of Representatives approved the package in December before adjourning for the year. The bill will now go to President Bush to be signed into law.
Bush said that the bill “stays within the spending limits I proposed” and that he would sign it.
Congress is supposed to pass the 13 spending bills needed to fund federal agencies by the start of each new fiscal year on Oct. 1. Only six were finished last year, with the remaining seven rolled up into the huge “omnibus” package.
In the meantime, much of the federal government has been operating under stopgap funding arrangements.
Congress regularly deadlocks in annual budget debates and last year a similar impasse dragged into February.
Even so, the delay was a blow for Republicans. They had vowed to get the federal budget process back on track after adding control of the Senate to their command of the House.
It also was a practical setback for the federal agencies that the bill finances, which have had to operate at current, mostly lower, funding levels for almost a third of the new fiscal year.
This year’s spending debates were dogged by policy fights between Congress and the White House. While the White House’s veto threats finally won out, they also slowed the process and sapped support for the final bill.
Republican leaders in Congress eventually headed off a bipartisan effort to block the Bush administration from changing overtime pay regulations. Backers argue the changes will modernize outdated work rules, but critics say they may cost up to 8 million workers their right to overtime.
They also agreed to hotly disputed compromises on how many local stations U.S. television networks can own and on delaying rules mandating country-of-origin labels for food products.
Lawmakers from both parties have also protested the thousands of so-called earmarks — funds set aside for individual lawmakers’ pet projects — in the package at a time when federal budget deficits are at record levels.
But Republicans said the bill remained below Congress’ budget limit and would hold the growth of federal discretionary spending to under 3 percent in 2004.
That total will almost certainly be increased though by the rising costs of military operations in Iraq and elsewhere. Those costs helped drive up the spending that Congress controls by almost 16 percent in fiscal year 2003.