The challenge is immense: In the opinion of many the appropriations process is a train wreck, the clearest example of what has gone wrong with congressional oversight in what some now dub the "broken branch" of the U.S. government.

With the fiscal year already a month old, Republicans have passed only two spending bills, and now plan to adjourn Congress this week after passing a long-term "continuing resolution" -- essentially permission for the administration to go on spending at current budget levels.

The resolution will authorize spending until the middle of February, by which time President Bush will have already presented his budget for Fiscal Year 2008, the act which starts the clock ticking on the appropriations process.

But alongside the budget, the administration will also submit a huge supplemental funding request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for other expenses in the war on terror.

So appropriators will still be working on both regular and supplemental spending bills for the current year, fiscal 2007, when the 2008 budget comes down.

Democrats say that one way they hope to make the job easier is by restructuring the appropriations panels of both chambers, but critics charge the reforms are cosmetic.

Democrats told United Press International that details of changes to subcommittee jurisdiction had yet to be finalized, but confirmed that the aim was to bring the two chambers' structures into alignment by adding two subcommittees on the House side.

"The objective is to have the subcommittees (in each chamber) mirror each other," said one senior Democrat Senate appropriations staffer. "That is the key."

The staffer said that prior to a series of changes enacted by the GOP House leadership two years ago; the structure of the two chambers' sub-committees had been "identical, except for some very minor technical differences."

Democrats maintain that by eliminating two subcommittees on the House side -- responsible for funding the Legislative Branch and the District of Columbia respectively -- and moving other elements of jurisdiction around between the remaining 10, Republicans made the complex job of reconciling the House and Senate versions of spending bills that much more complicated, because the bi-cameral conferences doing the work had to involve lawmakers from as many as four different subcommittees.

"Those changes created some difficulties when (appropriations) bills were conferenced," said Ronald Platt, a Washington veteran who chairs the federal government practice of the law firm Buchanan Ingersoll, and follows appropriations matters.

A spokesman for the Republicans on the House committee denied that.

Jurisdictional difficulties were "not insurmountable ... not a substantive problem," John Scofield told UPI.

Conservatives argued that doing away with two of the powerful appropriations subcommittee chairman, known as "cardinals," helped reduce earmarks and keep spending under control. Scofield said it was inefficient to have a whole subcommittee devoted to a small spending bill for the District of Columbia.

"The real inefficiency is when the subcommittees don't line up," retorted Platt.

Scofield expressed disappointment that House Democrats had, as he saw it, caved in to their Senate counterparts. "On (the creation of a single appropriations subcommittee for) homeland security, we took the lead," he said, adding that the Senate had eventually "come along" and followed the House's lead.

Platt said that incoming House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rep. David Obey, D-Wisc., had the support of Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi for the changes he wanted.

"She and Obey have worked it out," he said, adding that creating new subcommittees would allow the leadership to get round the normally inviolable rules of seniority for appropriators, and give them more flexibility in appointing subcommittee chairmen.

In the Senate, staffers said members of the committee would meet Wednesday with its incoming Chairman Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., to thrash out the details of the changes there. "Some re-structuring will be on the table," said another Democrat appropriations staffer.

In addition to abolishing two subcommittees, GOP House leaders also made a series of other changes two years ago, moving oversight of about $40 billion of defense spending, mainly on health and basic housing, into the subcommittee that deals with the Veterans' Administration and military construction spending bill.

Scofield said that was a change that made sense, and was supported by veterans' groups and military families, in part because of the extra flexibility it gave lawmakers to fund veterans' programs.

"In a tight discretionary year, you can use defense monies to boost" those types of programs, he said.

Democrats said that changing the Senate subcommittee's jurisdiction to match the House one, rather than the other way round, would be considered by senators at Wednesday's meeting.

The military construction and Veterans Administration bill is also the only one which may get passed before Congress shuts up shop for the year.

Winslow Wheeler, a veteran Hill staffer with three decades of experience of defense spending oversight, said the changes were cosmetic.

"It won't make a dime's worth of difference" to the real problems with the appropriations process. "Oversight will still be non-existent," he said.

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