Will LSC Suffer as Federal Budget Negotiations Come Down to the Wire?
Late last week the Blog of the Legal Times noted that, amid all the political fuss related to the federal budget/shutdown debate, LSC is silently twisting in the wind and could wind up facing millions in cuts:
The next week will likely determine whether the Legal Services Corp. is forced to make sharp midyear cuts in its budget, as lawmakers and Obama administration officials attempt to finish negotiations for federal spending through Sept. 30.
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As part of a broad Republican plan to trim federal spending, the House in February approved a $70 million midyear cut to the Legal Services Corp., the nation’s largest funding source for civil legal aid to the poor. The proposal failed in the Senate, but a cut could still be part of any compromise. The agency’s leadership says the cuts would devastate local grantees nationwide, even as those programs see increases in demand related to foreclosures and the stagnant economy. The agency’s budget is $420 million.
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Neither Reid nor other Senate Democratic leaders mentioned the agency as among their top priorities…
Substantial cuts in discretionary spending are a certainty in the current negotiations. Democrats in particular are going to have to pick and choose which programs they defend from cuts. And while folks are going to bat for popular programs like NPR, we’ve not recently heard elected officials issuing any staunch, public defenses of legal services funding. A memo last week from Don Saunders, Vice President for Civil Legal Services at the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, to legal services executive directors highlights the uncertainty about which federal programs are likely to see cuts:
At this point, there is no public information available on what cuts the Democratic leadership is considering offering to reach a level of $33 billion or what the priorities for cuts are within the Republican House leadership. We, and our allies, remain very active on the Hill and continue to hear strong statements of support from a variety of Senators and House members for LSC funding. Unfortunately…we will have to continue to wait for specific information as this how this process will finally be resolved.
As an interesting aside, Senators Brown of Massachusetts and Thune of South Dakota, both Republicans, recently joined executive branch officials and others in helping to raise over $400K for the DC-based Legal Clinic for the Homeless at a charity basketball event. But the Legal Clinic is not an LSC grantee, and we doubt that either of these senators will stand up to preserve LSC funding at current levels (although Sen. Brown has voiced concern about broad-based cuts to social safety net programs).