Dole Predicts ‘a Watered-Down Nothing’ as Budget Leaders Strive for Agreement

Top-ranking members of the House and Senate budget committees struggled until early today to patch together a budget agreement, but Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said that all they are likely to produce is “a watered-down nothing budget.”

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N. M.), after more than 10 hours in a private session, told reporters that he and House Budget Committee Chairman William H. Gray III (D-Pa.) reached “tentative agreement on as much as we can. There are a few issues remaining.”

Full Conference Today

The two committee chairmen planned to bring the full conference committee of House and Senate negotiators together later today, but Domenici warned that he was “not able to predict whether we are going to get a budget.”

Among the toughest issues yet to be resolved, sources said, are spending levels for defense and Medicare.

President Reagan already has rejected two other deficit reduction measures--tax increases and curbs on Social Security benefits--that had been proposed by Senate Republicans. Each would have violated a pledge that Reagan made during his 1984 reelection campaign.

The House and Senate have passed separate budgets that would trim the next fiscal year’s deficit by about $56 billion below the estimated $230 billion that it would reach without spending reductions or tax increases.

But the two versions of the budget would set dramatically different spending priorities. The House package focuses its spending cuts on the military; the Senate plan would eliminate or sharply cut scores of federal social programs. Those differences are continuing to absorb the attention of the congressional budget negotiators.

Cuts in Social Programs

Domestic spending apart from Social Security remains a target of the budget cutters, but the Democratic-controlled House has been unwilling to go as far as Senate Republicans in cutting social programs, arguing that they already had suffered in the first Reagan Administration.

As for defense, a sharp disagreement has surfaced between the House and Senate over the bill authorizing next year’s defense spending levels. House Democrats have been sharply critical of a House-Senate conference committee’s recommendation that new defense spending commitments for next year be allowed to grow with inflation, as the Senate had sought.

House Democrats are pressing for a defense spending level closer to that in their original version of the defense authorization bill, which would have allowed no increase.

‘Noise’ From Democrats

House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) said that there probably would be “a lot of noise” from Democratic House members over allowing an inflation-related defense increase but predicted that a bipartisan coalition could pass it when it comes to a vote in September. Even an increase for inflation would represent a significant cutback from Reagan’s original defense request of 6% growth on top of inflation, which is expected to run about 4% next year.

Even if House and Senate budget committee leaders can strike a tentative deal on a fiscal 1986 budget, they will need to seek the approval of party leaders and the full budget committees in the two houses before it can be put to votes on the House and Senate floors.

Thus, whether any spending blueprint could clear both houses before Congress adjourns this week for its August recess remains in doubt. And, when Congress returns in September, only a few weeks will remain before the 1986 fiscal year begins, on Oct. 1. By then, there will be little time for any budget resolution to influence the spending course that is already being set as appropriations bills move through the House and Senate.