August 1, 1975
Page 26741
Mr MUSKIE Mr. President, last Saturday in connection with the debate on the Housing and Urban Development independent agencies appropriation act, I spoke in some detail on the implications for the congressional budget process of costs in the "veterans benefits services" function of the Federal budget. I will not repeat those details today as we debate S. 1711, the Veterans' Administration Physician Pay Comparability Act of1975, but I would like to summarize those remarks for the benefit of my colleagues as they consider this bill.
S. 1711 is what we on the Budget Committee call "spending legislation." It is an entitlement bill which essentially locks us into $70 million in budget authority and outlays in fiscal year 1976
even though subsequent appropriations action is technically required. I stress this point because legislation of this type is basically a one-shot affair – we cannot rely on the subsequent appropriations process to hold spending down.
I fully understand and support the desirability of pay comparability between VA medical personnel of the Department of Defense and the Public Health Service, which this bill would provide. The Veterans Committee alerted us to the need for this legislation in their report to the Budget Committee last March, and the Budget Committee made provision for additional funds in
this function over the President's request. But I feel obligated to point out, as I did last week, that the veterans benefits and services function of the the congressional budget has already been oversubscribed, because since adoption of the budget resolution the Administration has increased its budget requests to Congress by an addition $1.4 billion in budget authority and outlays for
reestimates of mandatory costs of which none was reflected in the President's January budget, and only about half was assumed in the first concurrent resolution targets. The remaining $700 million was unanticipated and must be accommodated. The latest scorekeeping totals indicate clearly what this does to the veterans targets, even before taking account of additional legislative proposals in this function that are now under consideration.
In effect, most of the funds available for legislative initiatives in this area have been eaten up by these reestimates of existing program requirements over which the Congress has no control.
As I mentioned in my remarks last week, the Congress may need to take another look at the budget resolution targets for the veterans area because of these executive reestimates over which we have no control, and such a review may or may not lead to a decision to change the targets. On balance, I plan to vote for this bill because I believe that pay comparability may be the only solution to the problems faced by the Veterans' Administration retention and recruitment of medical personnel and because I believe we cannot allow mandatory reestimates to crowd out necessary legislation such as this. But I want my colleagues to be fully aware that this bill will add an additional $70 million to an already oversubscribed target for veterans benefits and services.
In closing let me reiterate the difficulty we face when we receive estimates from the administration that are substantially understated. While I recognize the difficulty of making accurate estimates, I would point out that requirements in the veterans area have been chronically understated by the administration for the past several years. Nor is this the only case — a new table in this week's scorekeeping report, on page 13, shows that for the budget as a whole such underestimates since adoption of the first concurrent resolution on the budget now total $1.8 billion in budget authority and $2.7 billion in outlays. These figures are, if anything, conservative. I believe it is time for the administration — with all the analytic capability available to it — to do a better job. We simply cannot tolerate the underestimating practices of the past if the congressional budget process is to be meaningful.