nationalreview.com/ponnuru/p … 160841.asp
In a front-page Washington Post story on Monday, Jim VandeHei reported that President Bush’s vaunted education bill “is threatening to backfire on Bush and his party in the 2004 elections.” Bush is being criticized for not providing states with the funds needed to meet the bill’s new requirements.
The story’s biggest fault is that VandeHei doesn’t give the Republicans much opportunity to respond to the charge of underfunding. The truth is that spending on education has been rising fast over the last few years, including the late-Clinton and early-Bush years. The Democrats’ complaint is merely that funding has not risen to the levels authorized in Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. Bush is therefore supposedly breaking the promise he made in that act. To see why this charge is phony, you have to understand the distinction, familiar to everyone who follows Washington’s budget process, between “budget authority” and “budget outlays.” The budget “authority” is essentially a spending cap: It says that this much, and no more, can be appropriated for a program when the budget is being written. To spend beyond the authority, you need to pass a new authorizing law. Nobody treats budget authority as a promise to spend up to the cap. The No Child Left Behind Act was a reauthorization of programs that had last been authorized in 1994, when there was a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress. They didn’t spend up to the authorized levels, either.