Pete Domenici: “I believe one of the most difficult bills to appropriate and stay within the caps and the allocations under the Balanced…”

“I believe one of the most difficult bills to appropriate and stay within the caps and the allocations under the Balanced Budget Act is the bill that the distinguished Senator, Senator Harkin, is referring to. It is difficult every single year. It will be difficult this year; he knows it and I know it. I want to make sure that everybody understands that the Senator from New Mexico did not adopt OMB numbers in arriving at the corrections that were made in the amounts of money available for the Defense appropriations bill. We will be very glad to show Senators precisely what we did. In fact, I am going to insert a statement into the Record--I won't give it--showing that we actually made policy adjustments that permitted the changes in the expectation of expenditures, and then on top of that we allowed for the sale of assets that were a certainty, and we counted those sales in terms of receipts that could be spent in this bill. What I am going to say to Senator Specter, chairman of the committee--and I told him this already--is that the staff and I are going to work with them, and we intend to do everything in our power to adjust the numbers so that they get the benefit of any policy changes that are justifiably on the side of OMB's different numbers. If that yields more money to spend, we are going to do that, and we are going to try our best.…”