White House Must Take Lead on Budget, Dole Warns

If the White House does not move to forge a budget compromise that could avoid the painful cutbacks envisioned under a new balanced-budget law, it “might find the House and Senate sitting it out, too,” Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) warned Monday.

“We’re not going to go out on a limb again,” Dole said bluntly, recalling Senate Republicans’ effort last year to reach an early budget compromise with the White House, only to see it disintegrate. “ . . . Either we are going to work out a budget (with the Administration) or everybody is going to go on strike.”

High-Stakes Standoff

Thus, the prospects for an early compromise appear dim as the debate over the fiscal 1987 budget develops into a high-stakes standoff. Each of the three leading players--the White House, the Republican-led Senate and the solidly Democratic House--is waiting for one of the others to move first.

The White House strategy, crafted by Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan, envisions waiting Congress out.

However, one Administration adviser who asked not to be identified expressed concern that the Regan plan may prove “ill-conceived and unachievable,” particularly if it pits President Reagan against his own party in the Senate.

“Everybody’s holding back,” a Republican Senate aide said Monday. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t do anything until September.”

At that point, however, it will be perilously close to Oct. 1, the date on which the new legislation--known as the Gramm-Rudman law, after sponsoring Sens. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) and Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.)--could force deep and wide-ranging automatic spending cuts. Meeting this year’s deficit ceiling of $144 billion would require spending cuts estimated at $38 billion, to be divided equally between defense and non-defense programs.

Sharp Pentagon Cuts

For Reagan, that would mean a sharp reversal of his top-priority military buildup--by some estimates, cutting Pentagon spending back to levels near those of the Jimmy Carter Administration.

Reagan’s concerns about Pentagon spending are shared by some Democrats. Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Thomas J. Downey (D-N.Y.), who heads a House Budget Committee task force on defense, said in a statement issued Monday: “Defense is going to require all the help we can give it merely to survive the coming year.”

Moreover, the cuts would loom over Reagan as he prepares for a second summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

The automatic spending cuts in non-defense programs, which would be made just before the November mid-term elections, pose an equally dismal prospect for congressmen from both houses, but particularly for Republican senators, who are in danger of losing their fragile three-vote Senate majority. A total of 22 GOP-held seats will be on the ballot, almost twice the number of Democratic-held seats at stake.

Senate GOP Gun-Shy

However, last year’s experience has made Senate Republicans leery of proceeding on their own: After agreeing to a Senate budget plan that put GOP senators on the record as supporting a politically explosive curb on Social Security benefits, Reagan withdrew his backing and threw it behind an alternative plan that he had worked out with House Democratic leaders.

Meanwhile, the House Democratic leadership is hoping that, if it forces Reagan to confront the possibility of slashing Pentagon spending, it may push the President to do just what his chief of staff fears: abandon his pledge not to raise taxes.

House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) repeated his insistence Monday that any proposal for higher taxes “must emanate from the White House.”

Although many of both parties in Congress have said that the Gramm-Rudman law makes new taxes almost inevitable, Democrats still are nursing the political wounds they suffered in 1984, when their presidential nominee, Walter F. Mondale, lost to Reagan in 49 states after promising to raise taxes.

‘Opening Our Breasts’

One Democratic House leader said recently that again proposing a tax increase would amount to Democrats’ “opening our breasts and saying: ‘Stab it in.’ ”

Moreover, with Republicans controlling both the White House and the Senate, “we have to bear the realistic limitation that what the Administration will not support and the Senate will not support will not become law,” said Rep. Thomas S. Foley of Washington, the House’s third-ranking Democrat.

Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), another member of the House Democratic leadership, agreed that his party has “a responsibility to act and to lead but we don’t have the power to control the outcome.”