The House has approached the appropriations process for FY 06 with the intent of completing work on the bills well before the start of the fiscal year in October. And while many on Capitol Hill are hoping the Senate will be able to focus mainly on appropriations during the month of July, it appears that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) also plans to use that time to move other high-priority bills. Frist has stated his intent to work on both matters of border security and economic growth. However, legislation in the Senate has been slow moving all year due to repeated legislative and partisan disputes, so the ambitious agenda put forward by First has little chance of being completed. If the current House schedule is met, all 11 spending bills will be passed before the July 4 congressional recess. In fact, the House only has the Foreign Operations and Transportation/Treasury/HUD/Judiciary/District of Columbia spending bills left to consider on the floor, while the Senate has not considered a single bill yet. The frantic pace with which the House is moving on appropriations work has not been seen in a decade of House GOP control, and is partially due to the new chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA). Last week, the House voted on both the Legislative Branch and Labor-HHS spending bills, on June 22 and June 24, respectively. In addition, last week, the House passed its version of the defense appropriations bill on June 20 by a vote of 398-19. The $408 billion bill allocates $363.7 billion in base military spending -- $3.3 billion below the budget resolution. The spending measure also includes $45.3 billion in emergency "bridge" funds to cover the cost of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan from October to March 2006. On the other side of the Hill, Senate leaders are discussing plans to move at least five and as many as seven spending bills before the August recess, including two next week, leaving larger and more complex appropriations bills for this fall. What is unclear is the timing for work on the Senate's defense spending bill, which the White House and congressional leaders want signed into law before Sept. 30 to avoid potential interruptions in troop funding. Senate GOP leaders are considering moving to a $26.2 billion FY06 Interior spending bill as early as June 27 and are pushing to complete work on a $30.9 billion FY 06 Homeland Security measure, which aides said is a priority to send to the president's desk before August. Yet much work still remains on all the other bills. Senate Appropriations Chairman Thad Cochran (R-MS) has iterated his major goals are to complete all Senate spending bills on time, and stay within the strict spending limits Congress has set for itself under the guise of "fiscal discipline." With Frist's plans to possibly move legislation on both economic growth and border security, the Senate may begin to run out of time to devote to the spending bills before the end of the fiscal year. If so, as has become increasingly common in recent years, all unfinished spending bills may be folded together into one big omnibus package. Omnibus bills are bad legislative practice: they remove transparency and accountability from the appropriations process and usually lead to fiscal irresponsibility. The bills are massive, with plenty of cover to hide extra spending items, legislative changes, and special interest items that end up making the bill more fiscally irresponsible than if the bills where passed separately. Removing transparency and accountability from the process by which Congress allocates government funds, even for other members of Congress, is troubling. The Senate should follow the House's lead in order to avoid omnibus bills which have, in the past few years, seemed to have replaced the regular appropriations process with a complex, unaccountable, and irresponsible system.