The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The #Cromnibus is a classic piece of legislation that contains the good, the bad, and the ugly. Rarely does a piece of legislation make it to the President's desk without going through many stages of reconciliation with riders added that make it hard for original supporters to stomach.

First the Good:  The bill provides $260 million to respond to a surge of unaccompanied children from Central America coming to the U.S.
The bill provides $3.06 billion in worldwide assistance to refugees of humanitarian crises around the world, an increase of $1 billion.
The bill provides $500 million more to meet the health care needs of Iraq and Afghanistan vets.
The bill provides $7.42 billion for health care and support services for homeless veterans.
The bill includes $40 million more for Veterans Benefits Admin to hire additional claims and support personnel at regional offices.
The bill provides a $108.9 million increase for Social Security administration. 
The bill will increase the max Pell Grant award. There will be 8.7 million Pell Grant recipients next yr, an increase of 142,000 students.
The bill has $2.6 billion, increase of $36 million, for grants to states to provide job training skills and assistance to dislocated workers.
The bill increases funding for the agency responsible for protecting the public against unreasonable risks of injury from consumer products.
The long-term funding bill increases the budgets for the SEC and CFTC, to increase monitoring of financial markets.
The bill provides $1.64 billion (increase of $86 million) for nonproliferation activities that reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism.
The long-term funding bill provides a pay raise for military and civilian DoD personnel.
The bill provides $7.3 billion for the National Science Foundation (NSF), $172 million more than fiscal year 2014.
The bill dedicates $1.1 billion to helping states, the ATF, the FBI, and the DOJ combat gun violence.
The long-term funding bill provides $30.3 billion for NIH, an increase of $150 million in base funding + $238 million for Ebola research.
The bill will support benefits for the more than 8 million individuals expected to participate in Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program.
And it will fund the government until September 30, 2015! source: @SenateDems
And now the Bad: It's $1.1 Trillion dollars and not all of it is spent the way everyone wants, especially Tea Party Republicans.
It's over 1600 pages.
It allows pension benefits of some retirees to be cut.
It allows truck drivers to stay on the road longer.
Probably more bad to be found.
And now the Ugly: Citi Group provided a rider that Republicans slipped into the bill. This allows elimination of a Dodd-Frank requirement that banks separate their trades of financial derivatives, which played a key role in the 2008 financial collapse, from traditional bank accounts, which are backed by the federal government.

Language in the bill would increase the limit on individual donations to national party committees tenfold, from $32,400 to $324,000. Source:  http://www.cbsnews.com/news/left-right-congress-agree-shutdown-spending-bill-stinks/

So, there you have it, the good, the bad, and the ugly. This is reality folks. There's nothing pure or perfect in politics. More details here:  http://www.gps.gov/policy/funding/2015/