$410b federal spending bill is sent to White House

Obama to sign earmark-laden measure today

Senate majority leader Harry Reid spoke to the media after a Senate policy lunch yesterday. (Brendan Hoffman/Bloomberg News)

WASHINGTON - A once-bipartisan bill to fund the government limped out of Congress last night, dismissed by the White House as a vestige of the Bush administration and derided by Republicans as an example of the Democrats' reckless spending.

The Senate voted 62 to 35 to cut off debate, then approved on a voice vote the $410 billion bill full of lawmakers' pet projects and significant increases in food aid for the poor, energy research, and other programs.

Obama will sign the measure today, the White House said, but he will also announce steps aimed at curbing lawmakers' penchant for pet projects.

By approving the measure, the Senate agreed with the House to skip the automatic cost-of-living pay increase they are due next Jan. 1, conscious of the deepening recession and 12 million of their constituents out of work. Lawmakers' annual play will stay at $174,000 until at least 2011, but they will keep their annual automatic pay raises after that.

The legislation ran into an unexpected political hailstorm in Congress after Obama's spending-heavy economic stimulus bill and his 2010 budget plan forecasting a $1.8 trillion deficit for the current budget year. And Republicans seized on Obama's willingness to sign a bill packed with pet projects after he assailed them as a candidate.

"If it had not been for the stimulus and the budget proposal it might have been . . . noncontroversial," said House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio. "The stimulus bill riled an awful lot of people up. . . . And then the budget proposal comes out."

Within Democratic ranks, there was relief, not jubilation.

The huge, 1,132-page spending bill has an extraordinary reach, wrapping together nine spending bills to fund the annual operating budgets of every Cabinet department through Sept. 30 except for Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs.

The $410 billion measure was written mostly over the course of last year, before projected deficits quadrupled and Obama's economic recovery bill left many of the same spending accounts swimming in cash.

Democrats had long feuded with Bush over domestic spending levels and stopped action on the nine bills last year, gambling that Obama would win the election and restore hundreds of cuts proposed by Bush.

And, to the embarrassment of Obama - who promised during last year's campaign to force Congress to curb its pork-barrel ways - the bill contains 7,991 pet projects totaling $5.5 billion, according to calculations by the Republican staff of the House Appropriations Committee.

Massachusetts lawmakers inserted dozens of earmarks for projects across the state, including $30 million for the Fitchburg commuter rail line and $22 million for an addition to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

Obama is set to announce new reforms of the earmark process today.

The big increases - among them a 12 percent boost for a popular program that feeds infants and poor women and a 10 percent increase for housing vouchers for the poor - represent a clear win for Democrats who spent most of the past decade battling with Bush over money for domestic programs. Congress also awarded itself a 10 percent increase in its own budget, bringing it to $4.4 billion.