Painful Realities for Congress, Reagan : Pressure From Public May Spur Reductions in Deficit

Congressional leaders, citing strong political pressure from voters, vowed Friday to meet the Gramm-Rudman law’s drastic deficit-reduction targets, even though a three-judge federal panel Friday overturned key provisions of the act and it still faces scrutiny by the Supreme Court.

“I would guess that there is still plenty of pressure to go around,” said Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.). Rep. Mike Synar (D-Okla.), who had led the group of congressmen who sued to have the law overturned, agreed: “All of us who don’t have the courage to make the tough decisions and hard choices ought to seek other employment.”

Pledge by Reagan

And President Reagan pledged that the decision would not “diminish the determination of this Administration--or the responsibility of Congress--to meet the (law’s) targets for deficit reduction--targets set by Congress and agreed to by our Administration.”

Ringing as such declarations are, it is far from clear whether Congress and Reagan--if finally freed from the threat of massive, automatic budget cuts threatened by Gramm-Rudman--will, in fact, face up to the politically painful realities of significantly reducing the budget.

After all, it was frustration over Congress’ failure to bite the bullet on spending last year that spawned the dramatic proposal by Sens. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) and Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.).

Living Up to Rhetoric

And, thus far at least, when it has come to implementing deficit reduction, Congress and the President rarely have lived up to their rhetoric. Congress year by year has concluded that the political cost of raising taxes or slashing programs dear to voters outweighed its anxiety about the ill-defined consequences of rising deficits.

All that could change this time. But skeptics noted that Congress has yet to approve the relatively modest package of spending cuts and additional revenues that it ordered in the budget it approved last August.

“What we’ve lost (if the court decision is upheld) is the principal club,” said Rep. Leon E. Panetta (D-Monterey), who had been a key negotiator in producing the compromise version of Gramm-Rudman that became law in December. “Without it, I’m afraid we’re back in that logjam.”

The Gramm-Rudman law essentially was conceived as a way of insulating budget-cutting decisions from political pressure. In effect, it was a way to take deficit reduction out of the hands of politicians.

Decisions Left to Computer

Under Gramm-Rudman, Congress and the President were required to agree on budgets shrinking the deficit in specified stages over the next few years and eliminating it entirely by 1991. If they failed to agree on the cuts necessary to meet each year’s deficit ceiling, the law provided that trims would be made automatically in a wide range of programs. In effect, as Synar put it, the tough choices would be left to “a computer in some bureaucrat’s basement.”

Gramm-Rudman’s supporters argued that those blind, automatic cuts were a political club so frightening that it would never be used. They said that the mere prospect of such blunt reductions would force lawmakers and the White House to agree to a “grand compromise” by Oct. 1, when Reagan is scheduled under the law to order the next round of cuts, expected to be at least $38 billion.

Some said that Reagan would even be willing to abandon his pledge not to raise taxes rather than see huge reductions in the Pentagon budget.

In anticipation of a legal challenge, Gramm-Rudman’s drafters included “fallback” provisions that would still allow the sweeping reductions, but only if both houses of Congress voted for the cuts and Reagan signed them into law.

Veto Possible

Under that procedure, Congress would not be able to achieve the cuts without a vote. Only weeks before a crucial election, it would be forced to leave its fingerprints on domestic spending cuts certain to anger important blocs of voters. Moreover, with half the cuts coming from military spending on the eve of Reagan’s next summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, it is possible that the President would veto the bill.

“They (would) have to vote and put their hands on all these cuts,” House Budget Committee Chairman William H. Gray III (D-Pa.) said. “That’s an important political change.”

In the immediate aftermath of Friday’s court decision, many who have been involved in congressional budget deliberations discounted its significance. They argued that the Draconian provisions of Gramm-Rudman, which could always be reversed by the same lawmakers who enacted them, have never been the real key to reducing the deficit. Instead, they say, it is public pressure that will force lawmakers to succeed where they have failed before.

“What’s the ultimate sanction?” asked John A. Svahn, White House director of policy development. “I think the elections of November.”