BUSH LABOR DEPT. BUDGET:
MORE FOR JOBLESS BENEFITS

GOP President George W. Bush’s proposed federal budget for the year that starts Oct. 1 contains billions of more dollars for unemployment benefit funds--a silent admission that the economy may be sliding into a recession.

The fiscal 2009 spending plan for the Labor Department calls for $2.71 billion in federal advances to the unemployment trust fund--no money was sent to the fund in the current fiscal year--and a $2.53 billion increase in the unemployment trust fund base.

That’s money the feds use to help the states administer the unemployment insurance and employment service programs. The budget proposal says the other $2.71 billion is an advance to the black lung disability trust fund.

GOP Labor Secretary Elaine Chao did not talk about the additional funds when she unveiled her $53 billion budget proposal, part of Bush’s overall $3.1 trillion federal spending plan, on Feb. 4. Without those two items, overall Labor Department spending would decline compared to this year. But when asked about how the additional jobless money would be administered even as her department seeks to cut staff running the jobless programs, Chao cited waste and duplication.

“When you walk into a 1-stop career center” that DOL runs for the jobless, ”there’s the one stop on the right and a separate room on the left, housing programs set up under JTPA and CETA,” the Job Training Partnership Act and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, “doing the same things,” she said.

The Democratic-run 110th Congress is likely to sharply revise Bush’s plan. Among his proposals that drew past fire, but which he restated in this budget:

• A $66 million cut, to $15 million, in the Bureau of International Labor Affairs, which funnels U.S. money to international programs, notably the worldwide campaign against abusive child labor. Bush unsuccessfully proposed the same cut last year.
• A 30%, $13 million increase in the Office of Labor-Management Standards, to $58 million. That office, pushed by the Radical Right National Right to Work Committee, has been used by Bush and Chao to impose new and onerous reporting requirements on unions and individual unionists.

The rules force unions to declare how they spend their money and their time on everything from payroll to paperclips, and how staffers spend their time on everything from organizing to community service. A separate set of Bush rules force rank-and-file unionists to disclose their personal finances to avoid what Chao called “potential conflicts of interest.” The AFL-CIO has sued Chao to overturn that second set of rules.