Congress beat us. Less than 43 hours after the Conference Report filed the House and Senate sent $124.2B in “emergency” spending to the President’s desk. 45 hours after we got our hands on the conference report (and even less after the joint explanatory statement), TCS has updated the “See How the Emergency Spending Bills Stack Up Chart”. While peanut storage, spinach growers, 2008 nominating conventions, mormon cricket eradication, hurricane citrus program and many others got left on the cutting room floor, Congress still found room for mapping fishing grounds ($24M, $4M more than before), stopping marijuana growers on Forest Service lands ($12M), and Emergency Flooding Needs in North Dakota, Idaho, New York, Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Oregon, South Dakota, and Alaska ($24M) and much too much more. The Farm Service Agency got $30M to help them implement the $3.5B in agriculture disaster assistance – I guess that means write checks.

Procurement for DOD grew from $24.8B in the House version and $24.5B in the Senate version to more than $25.6B in the final bill. After promising not to use the supplemental to backfill procurement needs, the house and Senate added more aircraft than either of them approved individually.

Because of the President’s promised veto, lawmakers are going to have do-over. Considering next years spending bills are practically upon us, lawmakers should strip the extraneous spending out of these bills and let it compete in the regular budget.

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