A House-Senate conference committee has approved a FY2008 budget plan that calls for spending $1.779 billion on the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant and increasing the budgets of the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP), Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).

President Bush is expected to veto the measure, however.

The block-grant funding represents a $20-million increase over the $1.759 million appropriated in FY2007, falling roughly between the figures approved by the House and Senate in their respective budget bills for the Departments of Labor, HHS, and Education. The National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors (NASADAD) reported that the committee bill did not include language tying funding to a set of National Outcome Measures -- which many in the field objected to.

If the plan is signed into law, the CSAP budget would rise $4.8 million to $197.7 million, and CSAT's budget would increase from $398.9 million in 2007 to $417.3 million in 2008, up $18.4 million.

CSAT's budget represented a compromise between the House and Senate figures, but the CSAP budget actually ended up being higher than either house of Congress had originally approved. The FY2008 budget plan for CSAP calls for spending $5.5 million on the Sober Truth on Preventing Underage Drinking (STOP) Act, including $1 million for an Advertising Council underage drinking campaign, $4 million for Community Coalition Enhancement Grants, and $500,000 for the Intergovernmental Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking, Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA) noted.

Included in the CSAT budget was $30.8 million for drug courts, $9.9 million for Addiction Technology Transfer Centers, $12 million for residential treatment for pregnant and parenting women, $29.6 million for screening and brief intervention programs (SBIRT), and $98 million for the Access to Recovery treatment-voucher program.

NIDA's budget would remain above the $1-billion mark, increasing $25 million to $1.026 billion, while NIAAA would receive $447.2 million, an increase of $9.9 million. As with CSAP, the final budgets for the two research agencies were slightly higher than in the earlier House and Senate appropriations bills.

The one big budget loser was the state grants portion of the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities program, which conference negotiators decided to fund at $300 milllion, down from $346.5 million in 2007.

President Bush's veto threat stems from the fact that the budget plan is $9.8 billion more than his request, according to NASADAD. The Labor/HHS funding plan was combined in conference with the budgets for the Veterans' Affairs department and the Military Construction budget -- with supporters betting that Bush would be loathe to veto funding for veterans and the military -- but Senate Republicans succeeded in de-linking the funding measures in a floor vote this week, casting the fate of the Labor/HHS bill in further doubt.

"It is clear that after the President has followed a course of greater fiscal irresponsibility than any president in history -- borrowing huge amounts of money for tax cuts and the war in Iraq -- he is now desperately trying to shore up his remaining strength on the far political right by engaging in an unnecessary diversion of a fight over this year's appropriations bills," said Rep. David Obey (D-WI), chair of the House Appropriations Committee, at the National Press Club this week. "It is simply not credible for the President to ask us to spend ten times as much again this year  for the never-ending war in Iraq and then with a straight face object to our efforts to invest one-tenth of that amount in key education, health, science, law enforcement, energy research and medical research on the grounds of fiscal rectitude."