Meese Trims Stops on Tour to Curb Costs

Although the Justice Department is emphasizing reduced travel to achieve Gramm-Rudman cutbacks, Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III next month will lead a U.S. drug enforcement mission to Burma, India, Pakistan, Thailand and Italy, department officials said Wednesday.

To save time and money, however, Meese already has scrapped three stops--South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong--that were on an earlier itinerary, the attorney general’s spokesman, Terry Eastland, noted. He stressed that the trip, “as everything else in the department, is being carefully scrutinized” from an economic standpoint.

At a budget briefing Wednesday, Deputy Atty. Gen. D. Lowell Jensen said that the department would attempt to meet mandatory Gramm-Rudman reductions in its fiscal 1986 budget, largely through department-wide travel cuts and deferred hiring. This way, Jensen said, no employees will have to be laid off or programs eliminated.

Predecessor’s Trips Noted

Although no cost estimates on Meese’s trip were yet available, Eastland said it “does not compare with (former Atty. Gen. William French) Smith’s, in terms of the people going and the travel expense. . . . We’re looking for efforts to economize at every stage possible.”

Smith, Meese’s predecessor, was criticized for taking nine international trips during his five years in office, and was the most traveled attorney general in history. Smith rejected the criticism, however, on grounds that “any attorney general who does not travel extensively is derelict in his duty.”

Meese, who has assigned a high priority to crimes involving drugs, will sign a narcotics treaty with Thailand and will meet with officials in Burma, India and Pakistan on narcotics production and enforcement matters, Eastland said.

Two Trips Combined

In what Eastland described as another economizing factor, Meese will fly to Rome on the way home, to meet with Italian Interior Minister Oscar Scalfaro--a mission originally set for Jan. 26 by Jensen and Assistant Atty. Gen. Stephen S. Trott.

That date had to be changed for other reasons, and Meese’s stopover will save the department the cost of a separate trip to Europe, according to Eastland.