Health, Refugee Services Hit : Gramm-Rudman Begins Automatic Cuts in Deficit

Congress’ new automatic deficit-cutting measure, the Gramm-Rudman law, sprang noiselessly to life at midnight Friday and began carving a sometimes-bloody swath through the fiscal 1986 federal budget.

Gone was the Public Health Service’s 1986 survey of flu and pneumonia vaccinations, a $200,000 program that helps epidemiologists wage war against winter illnesses of the elderly. Gone too were front-office soldiers in the Agriculture Department’s war against the Medfly, avian flu and citrus canker.

The Census Bureau’s plans to try out new head-counting methods in Los Angeles and Mississippi suffered mild cutbacks, while the National Weather Service has a 90% probability of surviving with nothing more serious than a depleted backlog of weather balloons.

But the State Department’s political refugee program, authorized to grant 67,000 people a new life in America this year, probably will extend the privilege to thousands fewer.

And in Kentucky, the state health commissioner says that 2,500 to 3,000 schoolchildren will miss their federally financed immunizations against measles, polio and rubella.

Such are the first casualties of Gramm-Rudman, the law Senate Minority Leader Robert C. Byrd (D-W. Va.) once dubbed a “monstrosity” and that some others call the last, best hope for a balanced federal budget.

The Gramm-Rudman budget ax is supposed to wipe out the entire federal deficit by 1991 in massive across-the-board whacks, loosed whenever Congress and the President fail to agree on cuts of their own. The first swipe of the ax, scheduled for today, produced more of a nick, lopping a mere $11.7 billion off the fiscal 1986 budget’s roughly $200-billion deficit. But the cuts, if small, were not bloodless.

Except for those areas specifically exempted, including Social Security and a batch of welfare and veterans’ programs, Gramm-Rudman’s indiscriminate blade sliced a uniform 4.3% from 1986 spending in every domestic program and activity mentioned by name in the federal budget or in appropriations bills. And it lopped 4.9% from every defense program except for those, such as “Star Wars,” that President Reagan chose to exclude.

“That gets down to a pretty low level,” said a National Weather Service budget officer. “We’ve got some $100,000 programs that we’ve had to cut $4,300 from.”

Legislative Loophole

Some are trying to stave off the worst effects through “reprogramming,” a legislative loophole that allows budget-makers to move money from less important activities to offset cuts in priority programs. That gambit, which requires approval from congressional subcommittees, is being used by agencies to avoid layoffs.

Even so, some agencies claim to have little room for maneuvering. “The ship leaks in all rooms,” said Stephen Dewhurst, the Agriculture Department’s budget director.

Growers who receive price-support payments for such crops as wheat will find their checks reduced by 4.3%, saving $824 million.

The Federal Grain Inspection Service raises 83% of its money through fees but must cut 4.3% from its overall spending anyway. Expecting the worst, the office long ago reduced travel and supply purchases for this year.

Federal meat and poultry inspectors will suffer more, being furloughed for nine days in the rest of the fiscal year. That could lead to temporary shutdowns of slaughterhouses, which cannot operate without inspectors.

Pressed for Cash

The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which battles the Medfly, killer bees and citrus canker, is studying layoffs of eight headquarters workers. Already pressed for cash, the office has held up $10 million in compensation to Florida orange growers who burned their groves to halt the spread of the deadly canker.

The battle against human ailments fares little better. The Public Health Service’s annual immunization survey, its sole measure of adult inoculations against flu and pneumonia, has been canceled as part of $2 million in cuts at the immunization division in Atlanta.

Yearly grants to the states to purchase vaccines for common diseases also will be sliced, said Alan R. Hinman, director of the division. Carlos Hernandez, Kentucky health commissioner, said that 2,500 to 3,000 children probably will be dropped from his state’s vaccination program, which now reaches 130,000 children.

“We’re very fearful that all the gains we have made in the last few years will be lost,” he said. “It’s a heck of a lot cheaper to immunize everyone to the minimum level than to let the level drop and have an outbreak of disease.”

Some of the cuts may not even affect Americans. In the warrens of the State Department, budget officers have mapped out $119 million in Gramm-Rudman cuts, much of which will fall on international agencies and foreign governments receiving U.S. aid.

War on Narcotics

Nearly $2.5 million of that will be sliced from the department’s aid to allies in their war against narcotics trafficking. Another $14.6 million in cuts will affect the department’s refugee program, which allots emergency aid to foreign nations with refugee problems and also admits and resettles political refugees in the United States--68,000 of them in fiscal 1985.

Among the casualties is one that the Administration welcomes. The White House will slice its annual payment to the United Nations by $12 million, to roughly $169 million. State Department Comptroller Roger Feldman said: “There’s a reasonable school of thought that says the U.N. could adjust and revise the way it does some things . . . to accommodate some belt-tightening.”