Omnibus Spending Bill - What's in it for Musicians?

As the year wraps up, Congress is scrambling to pass the year-end spending bill before the congressional term.  As always, FMC’s watching close to see how the provisions in this massive bill will impact musicians.

What’s an “omnibus”?

Congress has a standard process for allocating federal spending..  However, most of the time, they fail to meet the normal budget deadlines. 

If Congress doesn’t pass a budget by the start of the fiscal year (in October), they can instead use a “continuing resolution” to temporarily fund government activities, but if they don’t do this, the government is forced to shut down. The current continuing resolution expires at the end of the year.

This presents opportunities for legislation on a wide variety of issues to be folded into the year-end “omnibus” spending bill, which must pass to avoid a government shutdown. The process often involves so many amendments and riders that the result is often likened to a “Christmas tree”, with “something for everyone.” “Omnibus” is latin for “for everything,” and this year’s bill ended up being over 4,000 pages. The process of determining what goes in and what stays out is the product of complex negotiation.  Here’s where this year’s bill has ended up:

Antitrust—some good news and some disappointments

After lots of discussion during this congressional term, many antimonopoly advocates had hoped we’d see some movement on a range of antimonopoly measures. In the end, the bill only includes the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act (S.228/HR 3843)  This bill will increase the fees paid by massive corporations when proposing mergers and acquisitions.  The money generated by increased fees will in turn help support efforts to enforce laws that protect competition and guard against unlawful mergers.  For musicians concerned about too few companies having too much power, that’s a big win.

However, many antimonopoly advocates had hoped that other more ambitious legislative priorities would be included, like the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Open App Markets Act.  Despite clear bipartisan interest in these measures, Senate leadership never scheduled a vote, and they were left out of the omnibus bill as well.

No tax measures

Many musician advocates had hoped that the year-end bill would provide a vehicle for some changes to tax policy that would help musicians.  The Help Independent Tracks Succeed (HITS) Act (H.R.1945/S.752). would allow recording artists to deduct up to $150,000 in expenses for sound recordings in the year they were made, the same way that film and TV productions can currently be deducted.

Another bill, the Performing Artists Tax Parity Act (PAPTA) would update a provision allowing artists to deduct expenses.  As one of the bill’s sponsors, Senator Michael Bennet explains:

The Qualified Performing Artist tax deduction has not been updated since its inception in 1986 and is currently only available to those making less than $16,000 a year, meaning that very few artists qualify […]  The Performing Artist Tax Parity Act will update and increase the income ceiling to $100,000 for individuals and $200,000 for married joint filers, allowing many more lower and middle-income performing artists to receive tax relief for work-related expenses.

However, the decision was made not to include any new tax code measures in the year-end bill, and so neither HITS nor PAPTA has been included in the omnibus.  Artists will have to look to the next Congressional term to resolve these issues.

One bright spot: big increases in the federal arts budget

The appropriations bill includes $207 million each for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  This is in real dollar amounts the highest allocation for these agencies ever, and is a significant victory for the broad coalition of arts & culture advocates that have been dutifully fighting to grow that allocation.

However, our celebration must be tempered by that the increase hasn’t kept up with inflation, and is stunningly low compared to most of our peer nations.

To put this in perspective, we sometimes use this chart which compares the NEA budget to the cost of Mission Impossible films.  It’s disheartening that our annual federal arts allocation for all art forms in the entire country still amounts to less than the cost of a single Tom Cruise movie.

Another point of comparison: Canada’s annual arts budget is more than twice as big, despite having only about a tenth of the US’s population—and unlike the NEA, Canada’s Council for the Arts does provide direct grants to individual artists, including musicians.

For comparison, the Shuttered Venues Operating Grant program, which offered pandemic aid to music venues, amounted to $16 billion—and while this was a massive victory for live music, that money didn’t go to musicians themselves, even as it preserved live music infrastructure necessary for many artists to be able to earn a living.

Health care provisions

The omnibus bill reauthorizes funding a broad array of crucial health programs, including funding for mental health treatment and resources. It also makes it easier for health care providers to dispense buprenorphine, a drug used to treat opioid addictions. Musicians are among the populations at elevated risk for mental health challenges and substance use disorder, so measures to increase access to effective treatment are very welcome.

National Labor Relations Board funding

NLRB, the federal agency that protects workers’ rights to organize, has received an additional $25 million allocation in the omnibus.  This will help the agency effectively investigate violations of labor law and work with the FTC on issues of mutual interest, including the problems of labor market concentration, one-sided contract terms, and labor developments in the ‘gig economy.’  Musicians experience these issues acutely, so this too is a welcome development.

What’s next

Much about next year’s Congress is uncertain—with the House of Representatives shifting to Republican control and committee leadership questions unresolved.  As always, we’ll be watching closely and working to make sure musicians needs and perspectives are represented.