Iowa car dealers have in less than two weeks sold at least 2,300 vehicles under the popular "Cash for Clunkers" program, but more than half of those dealers were making sales conditional as they waited to get reimbursed about $9.7 million from the federal government and to see whether the Congress would authorize $2 billion more for the program.

The Senate voted 60-37 on Thursday night to approve the additional money, and President Barack Obama signed the legislation on Friday. The bill cleared the U.S. House last week.

"I'm not complaining," said John McEleney, a Clinton, Iowa, auto dealer who's chair of the National Automobile Dealers Association. "I'm very pleased; dealers in general are very pleased we have this program. It gives us some confidence that business is turning around. There's pent-up demand, and people are willing to buy cars. We would have preferred much less bureaucracy, but we understand it's a government program."

The Iowa legislature's budget subcommittees worked this week to craft budgets for various areas of state government that would cut an average of 12 percent after state revenue estimates were lowered by $269.9 million next fiscal year, making layoffs almost a certainty.

Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal called the decline in state revenues "the worst I've ever seen" in 27 years in the legislature and said everything is at risk of being cut.

"I wouldn't say there's anything off the table," said Gronstal (D-Council Bluffs). "These are incredibly challenging times. ... We will do, probably in some cases, across-the-board stuff. We will also make selective cuts."

Approval of the $790-billion economic-stimulus bill in Congress and a signature by President Obama will set the stage for the Iowa legislature to establish its budget targets and determine how much will still need to be cut, Democratic leaders said Thursday.

"We believe it will, in fact, provide some flexibility for state budgets and that will need to be taken into account before we make final judgments on our budget," said Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal (D-Council Bluffs). "All of us knew from the start that that was a moving target. None of us made any kind of judgments and now, once we get those numbers from the feds, we can start to make those judgments."