WASHINGTON — Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski's $13 billion Interior spending bill sailed through the appropriations committee Thursday, and is headed to the Senate floor with a unanimous bipartisan vote for the first time in as long as anybody could remember.
Murkowski, a Republican who chairs the Interior and Environment subcommittee, credited the move as a bipartisan effort that was only possible with agreement from Democrats on the committee.
The appropriations bill, which funds the Interior Department and agencies like the Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Environmental Protection Agency, is a notoriously heavy lift in Congress, since the agencies it funds deal with some of the most fraught partisan issues, like climate change and natural resources development. This year, the committee members agreed to forgo "poison pill amendments" — policy changes tied to the budget that make the bill unpassable for one party or another.
In the House of Representatives, where Republicans have a more substantial majority, there is no such agreement. That body passed a similar appropriations bill earlier this month with a provision that would give Native corporations a share of state revenues from oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Murkowski said she could not include a similar provision on the Senate side, but would do what she could to support it in conference between the House and Senate.
The full Senate intends to begin consideration of the bill Monday.
"It could be that the wheels fall off the bus next week," Murkowski said.
But she was hopeful that they could get it done. "Some call me overly optimistic, but I need to believe that we can fix an appropriations process that has just been allowed to founder," Murkowski said Thursday.
The last time a bipartisan Interior bill moved out of committee was in 2010, Murkowski said. When one was last unanimous, they were unsure, she said.
But in recent years even bills that Republicans moved out of committee were "viewed as not ready for stand-alone action on the floor, and it was always rolled up into an omnibus package," she said. "An omnibus bill is not a good process," she added.
Murkowski's success is a major step toward potentially passing appropriations through "regular order" this year. That means passage of 12 appropriations bills, one from each appropriations subcommittee in the House and Senate. Congress has only passed all its appropriations bills on time (by the start of the fiscal year) four times in the last 40 years, according to the nonprofit Pew Research Center. The last time was in 1997.
More commonly, Congress finds itself unable to meet its deadlines and rolls multiple bills into a must-pass "omnibus" spending bill. The annual appropriations bills only cover discretionary federal spending. About two-thirds of federal spending goes toward programs that have spending levels mandated by law: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment and similar programs.