Columbus Fellowship Foundation illustrates austerity struggles in Washington

This is the great survivor in the vast ecosystem of federal funding: a 20-year-old program that gives out cash prizes for science. President Obama has called it inefficient and redundant. Both Obama and the House GOP — people who agree on almost nothing — have tried to eliminate it.

Each time, however, it has been saved by a powerful friend in the Senate.

Now, Washington is bracing for another crisis over spending. It will begin in earnest next week, as Republicans press Obama for spending cuts in exchange for raising the national debt limit.

But the Columbus foundation shows that both parties are still struggling to turn their hard-nosed rhetoric about austerity into action. After all, it would be hard to imagine a less painful cut than this one: a program with two full-time employees and bipartisan enemies.

And yet, it lives.

"Cutting . . . is actually a lot harder than people think," said Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.), who made her own failed effort to kill the program last year.

In all, there have been seven explicit efforts to ax this program since Obama took office. The president has made four of them, asking for its demise in all of his official budgets.

Three Republicans have also introduced bills to end it. Besides Emerson, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) filed a bill to enact Obama's suggestion in 2011. And, last year, the foundation was targeted by a program run by the House's GOP leaders: YouCut, in which online voters choose among possible spending cuts.

One week, the voters picked the Columbus foundation.

"We have a serious budget deficit," Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), who'd been assigned by the GOP to shepherd the bill to cut the foundation, said in a Web video. "Spending on nice-sounding but unnecessary programs represents the low-hanging fruit of spending."

All failed.

Emerson's and Coburn's efforts went nowhere. Gosar's bill died in committee, part of a broader fizzle for the YouCut program. Of the 36 cuts that its voters chose, only eight of them got a vote in the full House. Only two became law in some form. The GOP, distracted by the debt ceiling, health care and other fights, missed its chance to compile a House-approved wish list of cuts-in-waiting.

An aide to Gosar said he was not available for comment this month. He said Gosar did not plan on reintroducing the bill in this new Congress.

All along, as Obama and these Republicans were making a show of trying to cut the foundation, another Republican, Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), was doing the quiet work necessary to keep it.

On the Hill, aides said Cochran has repeatedly requested the funding from Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who oversees appropriations for small government agencies.

Year after year, Durbin has agreed, and the full Senate has voted in favor.

Source: http://www.theusalinks.com/2013/01/22/columbus-fellowship-foundation-illustrates-austerity-struggles-in-washington/