Principles of Federal Appropriations Law - US Government ...

Chapter 1
Introduction
Highway and Mass Transit spending established under the Transportation
Equity Act for the 21 st Century (TEA-21) 27 continued through 2003, and
another set of caps on conservation spending, 28 established as part of the
fiscal year 2001 Interior Appropriations Act, 29 were set through 2006. In
addition, the sequestration procedures were to apply through 2006 to the
conservation category. However, Pub. L. No. 107-312, 116 Stat. 2456 (Dec. 2,
2002) eliminated the PAYGO sequestration requirement.
While most of the budget enforcement mechanisms in the 1990 BEA have
expired, OMB uses the same scorekeeping rules developed for use with
BEA for purposes of budget execution. OMB determines how much budget
authority must be obligated for individual transactions. OMB interprets the
scorekeeping guidelines to determine the cost that should be recognized
and recorded as an obligation at the time the agency signs a contract or
enters into a lease. “When an agency signs a contract, budgetary resources
to measure the government’s contribution to each of the terms of the
contract are set aside (obligated). The ‘total score’ refers to the total
amount of resources the government must obligate (set aside) for a given
project.” Letter from Franklin D. Raines, Director, Office of Management
and Budget, to the Honorable William S. Cohen, Secretary of Defense, Re:
Scoring DOD’s Military Housing Privatization Initiatives, June 25, 1997.
In addition to the statutory spending caps, Congress, in fiscal year 1994,
began including overall limits on discretionary spending in the concurrent
budget resolution that have become known as congressional caps. H.R.
Con. Res. 64, 103 rd Cong. § 12(b) (1993). Congress established these caps to
manage its internal budget process, while the BEA statutory caps
continued to govern for sequestration purposes. The congressional caps
were enforceable in the Senate by a point of order that prohibited the
consideration of a budget resolution that exceeded the limits for that fiscal
year (the point of order could be waived or suspended by a three-fifths
27 Pub. L. No. 105-178, 112 Stat. 107 (June 9, 1998).
28 The conservation spending category includes the acquisition, conservation, and
maintenance of federal and nonfederal lands and resources, and payments in lieu of taxes.
2 U.S.C. § 901.
29 Pub. L. No. 106-291, 114 Stat. 922 (Oct. 11, 2000).
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