Government Executive Magazine - 9/7/00 White House vows to avoid government shutdown

Hoping to ease speculation that the White House may stage a replay of the 1995 government shutdown and then tar Republicans with blame in an election year, top aides to President Clinton Tuesday vowed the President would sign continuing resolutions to keep the government running until a budget deal is reached.

"We will sign short-term CR's as long as it takes to get the job done," Deputy Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia Mathews said at a White House briefing. Republicans were badly scarred after the 1995 shutdown and many GOP officials want desperately to avoid a similar catastrophe this year, when control over the House is hanging in the balance.

White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, who spoke at the same briefing, announced that Clinton would invite Republican leaders to the White House early next week to try to find ways to complete legislation still on the table, particularly the outstanding budget bills.

Podesta charged that only the GOP was broaching the possibility of a government shutdown. "We have no interest in that," he said. But his words may be little comfort to Republicans who want to get out of town and hit the campaign trail, since he quickly added that the White House was willing to work "right up until Election Day" to get all the work done. "Hopefully, we won't have to do that," he added.

OMB Director Jacob Lew indicated that efforts to slog through issues dividing the White House and the GOP could take some work.

"Make no mistake about it, there are a lot of issues to go through," he said. "Even in the Labor-HHS bill, where [Republicans] went to some effort in July to try and make it appear that the differences had been eliminated," serious obstacles remain, Lew said.

Adding money to spending bills, as Republicans have done in certain cases, is not always enough, he indicated.

"If you look at some of the core priorities that the President has-school construction and class size-there's nothing in those bills that guarantees that the dollars that are in those bills will go toward meeting the goals of school construction and hiring teachers to reduce class sizes," Lew complained.

Pointing to past successes in budget negotiations with the Republicans and what he described as the popularity of Clinton's proposals, Podesta acknowledged that "we feel confident" going into this year's endgame. But he also sought to indicate Clinton was not readying a stand for everything on his list and then some.

Clinton has "brought fiscal discipline to bear in this town," Podesta argued. "We're not going to blow in the next seven weeks what we spent seven and a half years building," he said.