Washington DC, Sept 2013 - Rep. Nita M. Lowey, D-NY, who now chairs the House Appropriations Committee, testifies with then-chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky., on an appropriations bill to fund the government and avoid a shutdown (the 2013 shutdown lasted 16 days). Image: J Scott Applewhite/AP/Shutterstock
The House Appropriations Committee has advanced several restrictions on Trump administration plans for reorganizing agencies — bills set to come to House floor votes in upcoming weeks, where they almost certainly will meet opposition from the White House over those provisions.
The bill covering the Interior Department, for example, rejects the requested funds to create a standard regional office structure among the department’s components, which currently have a mix of structures, and to move some employees out of the Washington area to field offices. For example, regarding the Bureau of Land management, the report on the bill says that the committee “is not convinced of the efficacy of moving additional personnel out of the headquarters area when approximately 93 percent of Bureau employees are already working in the field and directs that no additional relocations of headquarters staff take place.”
The report further says that while the committee supports consolidating certain administrative functions, it “does not support any other reorganization, including the department-wide reorganization, or consolidation.” The department has failed to provide “even the most rudimentary data explaining how such costs eventually pay for themselves or translate into better service for the American public,” it says.
Also, a subcommittee-passed version of the spending bill for Agriculture would block the department’s plan to move out of the national capital area the Economic Research Service and the National Institute for Food and Agriculture while also barring the department’s plan to put the ERS, currently part of the USDA’s research branch, directly under the office of the secretary.
Another possible move, once the bill gets to a vote in the full committee or on the House floor, would be to attempt to block a plan announced last week to merge into the Labor Department two dozen Job Corps Conservation Centers, which prepare young people for conservation and other public lands work, raising the prospect of cutting about 1,000 USDA jobs in those centers.
Further, the bill covering Commerce, Justice and science and related agencies bars reorganizations without prior notices to Congress that include a list of specified information. Similar language is in previously passed bills covering HHS and related agencies and State and related agencies.
The Senate soon will start drafting its own versions; a bill to stop the USDA moves already is pending there.