Senate Votes 84-9 to Pass Amended FY 2020 Funding for NTIA, USDA, Others
The Senate voted 84-9 Thursday to pass an amended version of the House-passed minibus FY 2020 budget bill (HR-3055) that includes funding for NTIA, other Commerce Department agencies and the Agriculture Department. An amendment approved Wednesday replaced the text of…
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HR-3055 with similar Senate Appropriations Committee-cleared measures S-2522 and S-2584 (see 1910300054). Both bills allocate $42.4 million to NTIA and $3.45 billion to the Patent and Trademark Office. The Senate bill would allocate $753 million to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, $2 million more than in HR-3055 and $353 million above what the administration sought. The Senate adopted en bloc Thursday a set of 45 amendments, including one from Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., that increases the amount of funding for USDA's distance learning and telemedicine grant program $1 million to $35 million. That's $40 million less than the $75 million the House allocated to DLT in HR-3055, an issue that Reps. Greg Pence, R-Ind., and Anthony Brindisi, D-N.Y., are raising with House and Senate Appropriations leaders (see 1910300056). An amendment from Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner, D-Va., would direct the attorney general to report to Congress on implementation of the 2018 Ashanti Alert Act to create a nationwide alert system for missing adults on the model of the Amber Alert system for children (see 1901020054). An amendment from Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., would direct the NOAA to report to Congress on its supercomputing capacity and how weather forecasting would be improved by “significant investment” in more capacity. The Senate, meanwhile, failed on a 51-41 vote to invoke cloture on the House-passed FY 2020 minibus budget bill (HR-2740) that aimed to increase CPB annual funding to $495 million. Senate leaders have been eyeing replacing the House-passed legislative language with a Senate Appropriations substitute that would maintain annual funding at $445 million, despite the increase sought by America’s Public Television Stations (see 1909180058). The Senate version also includes $20 million for upgrades to the public broadcasting interconnection system.