On 7/30/01 the House passed its VA-HUD spending bill, on a roll call vote of 336-89. The Senate passed its VA-HUD appropriations bill on 8/2/01, by a roll call vote of 94-5. Both the House and Senate bills call for $80 million for community technology centers (CTCs), under the Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) program, in the form of grants to create or expand CTCs in high poverty urban *and* rural communities and to provide technical assistance to those centers.

While no plans have yet been circulated for a HUD CTC program, it is likely that a CTC program would be administered through HUD's Neighborhood Networks initiative, a program started in 1995 (yet never funded) to create CTCs for residents of public and assisted housing, mostly in urban areas. The proposed $80 million under the VA-HUD bill would be earmarked for grants that would be open, on a competitive basis, to state and local educational agencies, higher education institutions, business, public and private nonprofits, or consortia with the capacity to provide computer access and support services.

This would strongly suggest that, pending full passage and signing by the President, the program will operate out of HUD, instead of through the existing Department of Education program, to which Congress appropriated $65 million in FY 01. A "transfer" of CTC activities has raised concerns that funding for the existing CTCs, which is slated for three years under the current program, would be cut, and the attendant America Connects Consortium technical assistance network would be eliminated just as it completed its first year of activity.

Ironically, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) serves as the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Veterans Administration, Housing and Urban Development and Independent Agencies (VA-HUD), but also sits on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. This past May, Senator Mikulski and Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) were successful in getting authorizing language for the federal CTC program added to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act bill, the reauthorization of which was a top Bush Administration priority. That language authorized $100 million to be spent for the creation/expansion of 1,000 CTCs under the existing Dept. of Education program. The amendment's passage was seen as an indication that there would push to keep the existing federal CTC program under the auspices of the Education Department, instead of HUD, as proposed by President Bush. There is uncertainty, at this writing, whether CTCs might also be included in a Labor/HHS/Education spending bill.

While the proposed level of funding for federal support of CTCs was increased, the level of funding recommended for another key technology grant program, the the U.S. Department of Commerce's Technology Opportunities Program (TOP) was dramatically cut. In FY 01, TOP received $45 million for grants to help develop the national telecommunications and information technology infrastructure to help deliver social services -- including education, health, employment, and public safety -- to underserved rural and urban areas across the country, and provide program model research and evaluation to help replicate those services.

Under the original FY 02 budget plan, $16 million dollars was available for TOP, of which around $13 million was designated for new grants. The House version of the Commerce-State-Justice (CJS) spending bill, passed by a vote of 408 to 19. On 7/0/ 01, the Senate Appropriations Committee finished the markup of Senate CJS bill. Both bills provide only $15.5 million for TOP, under the heading of "Information Infrastructure Grants"-- a reduction of $30 million for the program, insufficient to sustain the current level of activity, and to accomodate the rising level of need and interest in this vital program.

An interesting consideration to keep in mind is the potential impact of Rule 28, reinstated through language added at the last minute to the FY 2001 omnibus (Labor-HHS, Legislative Branch, Treasury-Postal, and other appropriations) conference report. This rule bars the inclusion of language for "extraneous" provisions in conference reports (including, but not limited to appropriations items) that are not in either the House or Senate version of a bill. If an offending item somehow find their way into any conference report, a Senator can cause the entire report to be rejected by calling a "point of order" and sustaining it by a simple majority. Appropriations bills, especially those considered last in the process, tend to be the means for programs to be added that would never survive consideration on their own merits. So the rule may be ignored, or invoked frequently when the spending bills are considered by the House and Senate later this year.