Details of what's been cut.
[quote="
Washington Post"]Lawmakers and the White House have come to an agreement on the federal budget for fiscal 2011. The bill, which contains roughly $38 billion in cuts, means slashes in spending for a number of government departments and agencies.
Details regarding the budget cut amounts continue to emerge. The Post’s Philip Rucker has the story. We detail agency-by-agency cuts, as we know them:
The House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) has released a summary of the continuing resolution that would keep the budget funded through September 2011, as well as a list of the key cuts that would be implemented. The original bill text has also been released.
An important note about these figures: The documents released by the House Appropriations Committee detail the amount in cuts relative to two different figures: the first being the amount allotted in the fiscal 2010 budget as passed by Congress, and the second being the amount requested by the president in his fiscal 2011 budget request. Below, we detail the departments and agency cuts relative to the amount they were allotted by Congress to spend in fiscal 2010.
DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT
The resolution would cut $942 million from the funds enacted in fiscal 2010 for the Community Development Fund, which includes block grants designed to help rehabilitate housing and invest in primarily low-income neighborhoods.
Another $456 million would be slashed from the Public Housing Capital Fund, a source of funding that public housing authoritiesthroughout the country use to maintain and repair everything from roofs to boilers in their housing units.
The HOPE VI program, which aims to revamp severely distressed public housing and replace it with mixed income communities,would lose $100 million.
CONSUMER PRODUCT SAFETY COMMISSION
A new public database of consumer product safety complaints which had been targeted for extinction by Republicans emerged unscathed from budget negotiations over the continuing resolution. The Consumer Product Safety Commission would continue to operate the Web site
www.saferproducts.gov, which went live in March.
The $3 million searchable database accepts safety complaints from virtually anyone who can provide details about a safety problem connected with any of the 15,000 different kinds of consumer goods regulated by the CPSC. When the agency receives a complaint, it notifies the manufacturer, which has 10 days to respond before both the complaint and the response are posted on the database.
The database was required as part of a sweeping consumer law passed by Congress in 2008, as a way to give consumers better, faster information about safety risks associated with everyday products. Congress took the action after a record number of consumer product recalls in 2007, many of them imported products aimed at children.
The CPSC already collects reports of defective products from a wide range of sources, including consumers, health-care providers, death certificates and media accounts. But most of that information had been shielded from public view - the only way for consumers to access it was to file a public-records request with the CPSC. And that could take time - the agency is required by law to consult with the manufacturer before releasing information about products, and the company can protest or sue to stop disclosure. If the agency thinks a dangerous product should be pulled from the market, it must negotiate a recall with the manufacturer, a process that can take weeks or months. Meanwhile, unwitting shoppers may continue to buy the item.
"The whole idea is to provide more useful information, faster, to consumers," said Rachel Weintraub of the Consumer Federation of America.
But major manufacturing groups say the database is ripe for abuse, and that bad actors can ruin brand names by posting inaccurate information about products. Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) sponsored a bill that passed the House in February to defund the database, and he unsuccessfully pushed to attach it as a policy rider to the continuing resolution to fund the government. "There are a lot of competing interests and it got knocked out," Pompeo said..
But Pompeo is not declaring defeat. He and other Republicans want to amend the 2008 consumer law and change the rules governing the database to allow fewer people to file complaints, give manufacturers more time to respond and require the CPSC to more carefully vet the reports before posting them.
Since the database was launched, the CPSC has received more than 600 complaints and found 44 were inaccurate, CPSC spokesman Scott Wolfson said. Of those, most were cases where the complaint misidentified the manufacturer and the agency did not post those erroneous complaints on the website, he said. The agency is getting about 30 complaints a day, he said. It is designed to handle only safety complaints, not gripes about reliability or performance.
The continuing resolution does include a provision that directs the Government Accountability Office to study how the database is functioning and report back to Congress within 180 days.
THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
The National Science Foundation would take a cut of $53 million over last year’s budget of $6.9 billion, which means it would fund 134 fewer grants to outside researchers than it did in fiscal year 2010, said agency spokeswoman Maria Zacharias. That cut would translate to a loss of NSF support for 1,500 researchers and support personal, she said.
But advocates for science and technology research expressed relief that the new budget would sustain most federal science programs at current funding levels rather than cutting them deeply as House Republicans had proposed earlier. Funding for NASA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (part of the Department of Commerce) would remain flat.
“The worst that we had anticipated did not come to pass,â€
