Now that President Bush has laid on the table his budget blueprint for fiscal 2008, Congress will spend the next nine months pulling it apart, line by line, hopefully coming up with a new budget by Oct. 1, the start of the new federal year.
Last year it didn't, and government has been running since on a continuing resolution, basically keeping government afloat with the 2006 budget with no raises or accounting for inflation.
We will need to look at the budget blueprint from the perspective of how Minnesotans will fare. According to the White House, the budget includes such things as $123 million, a 7.85 percent increase, in Title I education grants to help Minnesota devote new funds to reform high schools by improving students' college readiness while also increasing funding to elementary schools. Or $43.6 million to buy 10 acres of land at Warroad and construct a state-of-the-art port of entry facility.
We must also look at the budget for what it doesn't include. One of the most disturbing cuts in domestic spending is that of energy assistance to the low income, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. President Bush would seek $1.78 billion, down from $2.16 billion for the 2007 budget never adopted and a 56 percent cut from 2006's $3.16 billion.
To Minnesota, it represents a cut of at least $19 million. The impact of the cut wasn't lost on U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar, DFL-8th District, who noted that "it's ironic that this budget was released on a morning when it was 23 below zero in northeast Minnesota." And that with the new Bush budget, war totals in Iraq and Afghanistan reaching $662 billion also wasn't lost on Oberstar. "We can't keep spending $9 billion a month in Iraq and pretending that isn't affecting anybody."
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Minnesota has fought long and hard over the years to fully fund LIHEAP, behind bipartisan efforts of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, of former Sen. Mark Dayton and of Sen. Norm Coleman.
In a cold-weather state that imports much of its energy, the LIHEAP program has often meant the difference between staying warm, putting food on the table or taking prescribed medicines. Often, the poor and the elderly can do one, or two, but not all.
The program makes grants to states and American Indian tribes to aid low-income households with high energy costs through payments to eligible households, energy suppliers and weatherization providers. With oil and natural gas prices threatening again to soar, and this winter's current deep freeze, maintaining full funding for LIHEAP is a battle that must be renewed by our delegation, including Coleman and new Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and Oberstar and Rep. Collin Peterson. It is unfortunately a battle with which most of them are all too familiar.
