Photo by Fedsib
The House Appropriations Committee yesterday passed a bill authorizing the slice of the District’s budget that comes from the federal government, and once again, Congress is up to its annual shenanigans. In the bill, which passed on a 27-21 vote, the panel’s Republican majority continued a ban on the District using its own local revenue to provide funding to low-income women who seek abortion services.
The 2014 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations, which lays out $636 million for the District, also repeats the long-standing prohibitions of the District using federal funds to pay for needle exchange and medical-marijuana programs.
But perhaps the most drastic funding change is a 50-percent reduction to funding for the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant Program, which helps college students from the District pay for their education by providing up to $10,000 toward the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition at public universities around the country. The program received $30 million in fiscal 2013.
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton said July 9 that she intends to fight to restore funding for the program, or possibly to even increase it to $35 million as requested by President Obama in his proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year. Mayor Vince Gray also released statements earlier this month calling for funding to the program to be restored, saying that halving DCTAG would be a “real hardship for hard-working District families who use the program to send their children to college.”
The spending bill also includes funding for D.C.’s judicial system, Medicaid program, and HIV/AIDS prevention efforts. On that last item, the House committee is proposing $2.5 million, half of what was laid out last year.
And though the District get 70 percent of its $9.6 billion budget from locally raised revenue, the ban on using any of that money to help low-income women pay for abortions remains wedged in there. The Washington Post reports that the committee’s Democratic members failed in attempting to pass an amendment removing that restriction.
“Every other state in the U.S. has the right to spend its local funds as it sees fit, but we have somehow decided to constrict funds in D.C.,” said Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), one of the amendment’s sponsors.
Quigley later noted that he had recently gotten an apartment in the District. “I like spending time here, but I’m not sure I want to live here,” he said. “I prefer to live in a free state.”
The committee also said in its report for the bill that it sees a budget autonomy amendment to the Home Rule Charter that D.C. voters approved by a wide margin in April as more of an opinion of District residents, and not legally binding.
The Senate Appropriations Committee, where Democrats are in power, has not yet taken up a D.C. spending bill for the upcoming fiscal year, though it is unlikely to include the abortion language.
