A Mess in a Quagmire

The Gramm-Rudman Act was billed as a simple, neat way to eliminate the budget deficit over five years in massive annual whacks. It is turning out to be a moral, legal and logistical mess.

The moral defect was clear from the start: Congress and the President seized on Gramm-Rudman late in the 1985 session of Congress as a way to squirm off the political hook of annual $200-billion deficits that were becoming unacceptable to the people. It really was a means of appearing to do something constructive while actually evading responsibility.

Now the brainchild of Sens. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) and Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) is embroiled in a constitutional quagmire. One legal theory is that it is unconstitutional because it improperly delegates presidential powers to Congress. Another theory is that the law is unconstitutional because it improperly delegates congressional powers to the President. It is quite possible that Gramm-Rudman is unconstitutional both coming and going.

One legal attack was put forth with surprising directness and dispatch by the Reagan Administration in a brief filed by Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III in response to a lawsuit brought by Rep. Mike Synar (D-Okla.) and 11 other representatives. The Congress members had sought to have key portions of Gramm-Rudman declared unconstitutional.

While Meese agreed with Synar on the unconstitutionality of Gramm-Rudman, he asked that the suit be thrown out on the ground that Synar did not have cause to sue. President Reagan earlier expressed constitutional reservationsabout the bill, and said he hoped that they would be resolved promptly. That goal can hardly be achieved when another arm of the Administration is seeking dismissal of the best available vehicle for resolving the legal tangle, the Synar suit.

At first Gramm-Rudman was embraced eagerly by the Administration. By the time the Administration understood the possible damage of Gramm-Rudman to the defense budget, it was too late to withdraw its support. Now it seems that the Administration is trying to wiggle out from under the act through legal creativity.

Meanwhile, the bureaucracy is threading its way through a logistical nightmare in itemizing the current-year reductions mandated by the law. While the cuts will be limited to $11.7 billion, the cuts to be ordered by March 1 will produce “shock therapy” in Washington, one Administration official predicted. The job is complicated by the fact that spending is achieved through a variety of accounting procedures in various agencies and departments. Decisions that have to be made are bound to run afoul of laws stipulating how certain spending is to be made. The resulting lawsuits from aggrieved parties could paralyze entire programs.

The whole experience should demonstrate graphically what has been apparent all along: Automatic, arbitrary reductions are not the way to cut the budget deficit. They defy constitutional law and common sense. Gramm-Rudman is not simple, but merely simplistic.

How to get out of this fix? Develop a budget that reduces the deficit while maintaining realistic defense and domestic programs. This will require some tough, selective spending reductions and some new tax revenues--not an easy task in an election year, but possible.

To do this, congressional leaders of both parties may have to do to the President what he often has threatened to do to them: Make him see the light or feel the heat (in this case the heat of substantial defense cuts). This should be done early in the session in private negotiating sessions directly involving the President. It may be the only way to achieve a package that will not trigger Gramm-Rudman into action for the next budget year in case the law is not thrown out by the courts.

Neither Congress nor the President can duck responsibility for the alarming size of the deficit. In particular, neither can afford to rely on a half-cooked notion like Gramm-Rudman to solve the problem for them.