USDANEWSVOLUME 57 NO. 8 - OCTOBER 1998

USDA's Budget For FY 1999 Is Signed Into Law

by Ron Hall, Office of Communications

Whew! Following a presidential veto on October 7 of an earlier agriculture appropriations bill, followed by six governmentwide short-term funding bills or "continuing resolutions," USDA's appropriation for FY 1999 was signed into law on October 21. What follows are some highlights thought to be of particular interest to USDA employees.

The new budget law combined 8 out of 13 federal appropriations bills for FY99 into one large, $500 billion-plus "omnibus spending bill" for FY99. USDA's funding was one of those 8 appropriations signed into law 21 days into the new fiscal year.

Steve Dewhurst, director of the Office of Budget & Program Analysis, said that USDA's FY99 budget provides $63.2 billion in budget authority for the Department. The figure includes $2.6 billion for the Forest Service which, for budget purposes, was part of the "Interior and Related Agencies Appropriations" component of the omnibus spending bill for FY99.

That $63.2 billion funding figure, the end product of congressional conference committee efforts and subsequent negotiations with executive branch budget officials, compared to $57.3 billion in budget authority originally passed by the House of Representatives, $59.1 billion in budget authority originally passed by the Senate, and over $61.0 billion in budget authority requested by the Clinton Administration as part of its FY99 governmentwide budget proposal.

The original budget proposal for USDA called for a federal staffing level for FY99 of 97,050 full-time equivalent positions, or staff years. That would have represented a decrease of 1,964 federal staff years from the FY98 staff year level which was estimated on February 2 to be at 99,014.

As detailed in a story in the March 1998 issue of the USDA News, 7 USDA agencies or offices reflected proposed increases in federal staff years, 13 reflected proposed decreases, and 8 reflected no proposed changes from FY98 in federal staff year levels.

However, based on the funding figure passed into law, Dewhurst projected that the staff years for nearly all USDA agencies would basically remain at FY98 levels.

Of particular interest
Dewhurst noted that USDA's final budget for FY99 includes information on these items thought to be of particular interest to employees:

• It provides the requested level of funding for civil rights enforcement activities at USDA.
• It includes language which waives the application of the statute of limitations for certain program-related discrimination complaints that were filed before July 1, 1997 and that alleged discrimination at USDA between 1981 and 1996.
• It includes language that would make foreign national employees of the Foreign Agricultural Service, killed or injured in the August 7, 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, eligible for certain types of compensation. The September 1998 issue of the USDA News carried a story about the response by USDA employees in the aftermath of those bombings.
• It provides an increase of $50.2 million for USDA's component of a governmentwide Food Safety Initiative above FY98 levels, to total $116.5 million at USDA. This includes such activities as education through the Food and Nutrition Service of school food service workers in safe food handling practices, food safety-oriented research conducted by the Agricultural Research Service and by universities, consumer education through the Cooperative Extension Service, and funding through the Food Safety and Inspection Service for upgraded state laboratories for pathogen testing as well as training to state employees who are inspectors in the new state-of-the-art meat and poultry inspection system known as the "Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points" system or HACCP.
• It provides authority for the continuation of the long-term personnel demonstration project, cosponsored by ARS and the Forest Service, designed to test several innovations in federal recruitment and hiring practices. The September 1989 issue of the USDA News carried a story about that project.
• It does not provide the proposed funding for gleaning and food recovery efforts sponsored or initiated by USDA. USDA's proposed budget for FY99 had requested $20 million for a new community-based grant program to continue a focus on efforts to support food recovery. ¤

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