Kevin V. Mulcahy

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is the legislative ward of the
House Committee on Education and Labor working through
subcommittees variously entitled Select Education, Post-secondary
Education, Labor-Management Relations and the Subcommittee on
Education, Arts, and Humanities of the Senate Committee on Labor and
Human Resources. From its creation in 1965 until 1985, the NEA has had
six sets of hearings before these Senate and House authorizing
subcommittees. ¹ Succinctly defined, "an authorization is a statement of
legislative policy, while an appropriation is the funding of that policy." ² The
legislative process, then, is a two-step procedure whereby programs must
be authorized before funds can be appropriated for their implementation. ³
Furthermore, an authorization may or may not be permanent. If a
program is not permanently authorized, the legislative committee, after
some specified time period, must reauthorize it. ⁴ The time period for such
authorization may be annually; more commonly it is two to five years.
About 40 percent of the federal budget involves annual or periodic
extensions of legislative authority. ⁵

While the appropriations decisions are crucial to the survival of an agency,
reauthorizations provide occasions to review a public program, re-evaluate
its operations and impact, and reassess the amount of funding made
available. ⁶ Reauthorizations also present opportunities for the substantive
committees to influence budgetary outcomes through their spending
recommendations. ⁷ However, it should be noted that over the past twenty
years there has been a decided rise in the importance of the

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