While the House is moving ahead with plans to reorganize the subcommittee structure of the House Appropriations Committee, including moving NASA from the to-be-defunct VA-HUD subcommittee to the Commerce-State-Justice subcommittee, the Senate has been less than enthusiastic. If the Senate doesn’t reorganize, then the House and Senate versions various appropriations bills cannot be reconciled, requiring an omnibus budget bill like last year.
In a bid to avoid that, CongressDaily reported Friday that Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) has proposed an alternative restructuring that would keep the number of subcommittees on the Senate side at 13, but align them to match the reorganized House structure. Under that format, “environmental and science programs”, including NASA, would be moved from the VA-HUD committee to “a new subcommittee”, although the report doesn’t say if they would be the only agencies in that subcommittee or not. (EPA would be moved not to this subcommittee, but the Interior subcommittee, just as in the House plan.)
The Hutchison plan has the advantage—for her—that it would maintain the number of subcommittees: according to the report, Hutchison would lose her chairmanship of the Military Construction subcommittee if the Senate went along with the House proposal. That seems unlikely to happen, but the Hutchison proposal also seems unlikely to be enacted: the spokesman for Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), chairman of the VA-HUD subcommittee, called it “Tom DeLay-lite.”
