How Does the Federal Budget Compromise Affect the Legal Services Corporation?
The good folks at the National Legal Aid & Defender Association put out a short piece this morning explaining how LSC’s FY2011 funding was affected by the shutdown-averting agreement on the Hill last week. All in all, it could have
been a lot worse for LSC; they’ll see a cut of less than 4% between FY2010 and FY2011 funding levels. From NLADA:
The House and Senate leadership have agreed on an overall spending package for FY 2011 that includes cuts in LSC basic field funding of $15 million plus an additional recision of .2%, bringing the total cut to basic field funding to $15.81 million. The final FY 2011 overall appropriation for LSC is $404.19 million. The final appropriation for basic field programs is $378.19 million. This amounts to a basic field cut of 3.77% for FY 2011.H.R. 1473, the FY 2011 appropriations bill, was released late last night. The measure contains $38 billion of spending cuts, more than half of which hit programs in education, labor and health. The LSC cut is significantly less than other cuts in the Justice Department and other functions within LSC appropriations subcommittee.
The bill is expected to be taken up in both the House and Senate by the end of this week. The current Continuing Resolution expires Friday, April 15.
LSC also issued a press release today, including a quote from its board chair:
“Every dollar provided for civil legal assistance helps low-income individuals gain access to our justice system. We are grateful that funding cuts will not be as deep as initially proposed, and we look forward to working with the Congress on Fiscal Year 2012 funding to provide even greater access to justice for the growing number of low-income Americans in need of civil legal assistance,” LSC Board Chairman John G. Levi said.
Assuming that Congress finalizes this compromise and avoids a (ridiculously unneccessary and useless-for-spending-reduction-purposes, but we digress) shutdown, the real battle for LSC will begin when lawmakers get to the FY2012 budget. A House appropriations subcommittee held an LSC funding hearing last week; we aggregated some hearing coverage in item 3 of last week’s Public Interest Law News Bulletin.
