Leaders want fast results on budget

Expect this year's budget debate to be dominated by one thing: the November elections.

With the Democrats nipping at the Republicans' heels for congressional control, the GOP's game plan is to try to expedite what is traditionally a protracted and headache-filled process. Already, orders have gone out for the Budget committees to try to finish a comprehensive, nonbinding budget resolution by the end of March or the first of April. The Appropriations committees then hope to complete all 13 annual spending bills before the August recess, and all the rest of the work by the first week of October, to give members enough time to go home to campaign.

Given a robust economy and budget surpluses projected to continue for another decade at least, logic would presume that the schedule, though ambitious, could be met. But over the past two years, the budget surplus has acted as a curse and a blessing: the more the surplus has grown, the more intense the partisan rhetoric about how it should be used. Most of the skirmishes have resulted from typical party politics-Republicans push to cut taxes, Democrats push to increase domestic spending and shore up entitlement programs. But one of the biggest fights-whether to revise strict spending caps laid out in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997-has cut across party lines.

Congress and the President enacted the 1997 caps to bring government spending under control. But because a budget surplus was achieved much sooner than expected, calls to lift or revise the caps are growing, especially among congressional appropriators and budget gurus, who believe that the caps are unrealistic and much too austere to meet current fiscal needs, such as increased defense and education spending.

"If you want to get out of here for the election, you need to give appropriators a real number to work with," said Jim Horney of the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

In a surprise move, White House officials in mid-January hinted that the President's budget proposal, due Feb. 7, would ignore the 1997 spending caps altogether and call for a more honest approach to budgeting. Last fall, for the second year in a row, Congress spent $30 billion to $40 billion more than the caps allowed, but masked this rule breaking by using incomprehensible accounting devices and applying the "emergency" label to certain spending items. In addition, the Clinton Administration's new budget will keep projected Social Security surpluses "off limits" for other budget uses-a mantra that Republicans seized upon last year.

Congressional appropriators immediately welcomed the news of the impending death of the spending caps. "It will make our lives easier," said one House appropriations aide. "We won't have to go through the charade that we're actually adhering to the caps." In 1999, appropriators tried but failed to persuade Republican leaders that more-realistic spending assumptions would grease the appropriations process and prevent accusations of budget gimmickry.

Staffers on the Senate Budget Committee have also welcomed the President's suggestion. They noted that because of creative accounting, more than $20 billion in fiscal 2000 spending was carried over to fiscal 2001. But Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici, R-N.M., has yet to make up his mind on the caps issue. "He wants to take the temperature" of his colleagues first, said an aide, and then coordinate any strategy with the Senate and House leadership.

Domenici's counterpart, House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich, R-Ohio, is even less enthusiastic about the idea of lifting the spending restrictions, according to an aide. The caps "have been extremely effective" in reducing spending, the aide noted, even if the political will to keep them seems to be waning in the face of huge projected budget surpluses.

While the aide would not discount the possibility of revising the caps, it is clear that Kasich and many other conservatives will not go along without some mandated restrictions on future spending-and a commitment that some of the non-Social Security surplus will be reserved for tax relief and debt reduction. "We need a new reality that helps us restrain spending, a new hammer over our head," the aide said.