Weinberger Told Budget Will Be Cut : Pentagon Proposal Gets Cool Reaction From Senate Panel

President Reagan’s $313.7-billion defense budget received a cool reception from the normally friendly Senate Armed Services Committee on Monday, and Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger was told in no uncertain terms that next year’s spending plan will be cut.

From conservative Republicans, led by committee Chairman Barry Goldwater of Arizona, to moderate and liberal Democrats, Weinberger and Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, heard a message that varied in tone--but not in content.

The reaction from the committee members was similar to that voiced all around Capitol Hill as members of Congress got their first official look at the President’s plan for spending $973.7 billion in fiscal 1986, which begins Oct. 1.

$180-Billion Deficit

The Reagan Administration officially unveiled the federal budget Monday, presenting a plan that envisions a deficit of $180 billion, $12 billion more than Reagan’s goal as part of a long-range effort to reduce government red ink.

Budget Director David A. Stockman, emerging from a meeting with the House and Senate Budget committees, predicted that “the politics of this are going to be difficult.” Many of the proposed reductions, he said, “affect entrenched interest groups” that lobby for such programs as farm subsidies, small business loans and export subsidies, which are slated to be cut or eliminated.

Under the spending plan, the Pentagon would receive 5.9% more next year, after inflation, than it has this year. But Sen. J. James Exon (D-Neb.) predicted that once enacted, the defense budget will show an increase closer to 3%.

‘Highly Irresponsible’

Goldwater, a longtime Capitol Hill ally of the Pentagon, said that freezing defense outlays--as part of an overall effort to hold government spending to current levels--might be “temporarily popular” but would be “highly irresponsible” in the long run. However, he added, “that is not to say that defense spending cannot be trimmed. It can and will be reduced.”

In a four-hour hearing devoted more to the overall scope of the defense budget and less to specific weapons requests, Weinberger argued that “it would have been easy” to produce deficit savings by cutting the defense budget. “But the result would be an unavoidable weakening of our defense posture now and into the future,” he asserted.

Reagan and Weinberger portray the defense budget in relation to what they see as the threat from the Soviet Union, insisting that it must be viewed in that context and not simply as an element of the overall federal spending picture.

“The Soviet Union has been engaged in a continuous across-the-board military buildup,” Weinberger said. “Its strategic offensive forces have grown dramatically during the last decade. It has developed and deployed a global offensive capability which far exceeds anything it could require for its own defense.”

Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.)--who has often taken the lead in forging compromises with Republicans on defense spending--said too much attention was paid to funding new, expanded programs in the first four years of the Administration’s $1-trillion defense buildup. Now, he advised, “we’ve got to focus more on what we’re getting out of the defense budget.”

“The resources aren’t going to be there to carry out the program Secretary Weinberger is laying out here,” Nunn said. “We’ve got a Pentagon plan that simply cannot be funded.”

Although nuclear weapons programs for years have consumed no more than 15% of the Pentagon budget, Nunn questioned whether they are “squeezing out” money for conventional forces.

Even Sen. John C. Stennis (D-Miss.), among the Senate’s staunchest Pentagon supporters, told Weinberger: “I may not vote for all these items this year. I just want to sound that serious note.”

In his presentation, Weinberger signaled a renewed effort by the Administration--unsuccessful so far--to build up the nation’s ability to fight a war using highly toxic chemical weapons.

“We face a potential opponent with an enormous chemical capability,” he said.

Wherever members of Congress gathered, the budget was the No. 1 topic Monday.

Among the key players in the coming debate, Sen. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Ore.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the document “a fantasy budget conceived in the land of never-ending deficits.”

He said it “seeks to achieve the highest possible defense figure rather than a responsible compromise. A freeze on defense spending remains the absolute minimum requirement.”

But House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) declined to criticize the overall budget, except to say that it would hurt the middle class. He called on Reagan “to take the time to educate the country on his various budget proposals and to tell people how they will be affected.”

Sen. Lawton Chiles of Florida, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, said that if Congress enacts the President’s budget, the nation will be faced with “two unacceptable choices” by year’s end: either the Federal Reserve Board will be forced to adopt a looser monetary policy, re-igniting inflation, or interest rates will rise.