Senate Passes Bipartisan Budget Act
On Thursday, members of the Senate passed H.J. Res 59, the Bipartisan Budget Act. The final recorded vote was 64 to 36. With this confirmation, the bill will now head to the White House for President Obama’s signature. He is expected to sign.
As highlighted last week, below are the main provisions of the bill:
- The Bipartisan Budget Act does not eliminate sequestration. Although NAHMA and other industry leaders advocated for its removal, the sequester will continue well past its original end date of 2021. Instead, this budget provides $63 billion in sequester relief for fiscal years 2014 and 2015; this relief comes with the condition that in 2022 and 2023, the future President will be required to sequester the same percentage of mandatory spending resources as will be sequestered in 2021 under current law. There are more specific deficit-reduction provisions in the bill that offset the reduced sequester in 14 and 15, with mandatory spending savings and non-tax revenue totaling approximately $85 billion. The committee estimates that the Bipartisan Budget Act would reduce the national deficit by between $20 and $23 billion.
- Discretionary spending would be set at $1.012 trillion for FY 2014 and $1.014 trillion for FY 2015. These figures for the next two years fall between the amounts that were pegged by the House ($967 billion) and Senate ($1.58 trillion) in their original, separate budgets. The appropriations process should be smoother now that the two chambers are working under the same discretionary spending levels.
- Lawmakers have agreed to preserve the advanced appropriations (totaling $400 million for FY 2014) for the Tenant-based and Project-based Section 8 programs. An advance appropriation is an appropriation of new budget authority that becomes available one or more fiscal years beyond the fiscal year for which the appropriation act was passed. These advanced appropriations provide funding to continue contract renewals after a fiscal year is over and the new one officially begins.
The discretionary spending figures in the bill serve as a blueprint for the House and Senate to compile the necessary Appropriations bills for federal programs including the final funding amounts for HUD and USDA multifamily housing programs in FY 2014. This week, NAHMA sent out a grassroots action alert for members to call their Congressional representatives to ask them to pursue full funding for multifamily housing programs. We have also been collaborating with industry partners on letters to the Senate and House Appropriations chairmen that urge them to fully fund project and tenant-based section 8 plus Section 521 rural rental assistance. As one of the major recipients of HUD funding, project and tenant based section 8 were slated to receive large cuts in the House’s previous T-HUD appropriations bill. NAHMA will continue to advocate for full-funding for all HUD and USDA multifamily programs as the eventual appropriations bills for FY 2014 are drafted.
To learn more about this bill and to view its text, please follow
this link to its summary and status page.
