2 Senators to Warn Reagan on Defense : Goldwater, Nunn Fear ‘Budgetary Disaster’ Could Hit Pentagon

Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) said today that he and Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) plan to meet in a few days with President Reagan to lay out a “budgetary disaster” that could hit the Pentagon in the next few years.

Their message: It’s impossible to keep on with massive defense spending under the restraints of the Gramm-Rudman budget balancing law and not increase taxes.

As the Senate debated cuts to Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” Nunn laid out what he called the “cold, hard defense budget realities” he and Goldwater, the Armed Services Committee chairman, plan to present to Reagan and Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger.

Reasoning Questioned

Nunn said he cannot understand Reagan’s reasoning in light of the Gramm-Rudman law, which protects entitlement programs from the budget ax, citing Reagan’s insistence that defense must be protected and his pledge to veto any tax increase to pay for military spending.

“We’re not playing with a full deck of cards (in budgeting),” Nunn said. “We’re playing with a half deck of cards and defense is caught in a squeeze. I don’t know why the President doesn’t understand it.

“We must put the puzzle together and play with a whole deck of cards.”

Nunn, the ranking Democrat on Goldwater’s committee and an influential defense figure on Capitol Hill, said the defense budget now being dealt with compounds the problem. That bill authorizes $292 billion in programs for 1987 and future years and allows $279 billion in actual spending.

‘Mission Impossible’

That $292 billion cannot be translated into $279 billion in spending, he said, and the actual figure is more like $286 billion. Meeting both targets, he said, is a “mission impossible.”

The $292 billion is in budget authority, or permission for programs that may stretch over more than one year. For example, a $1-billion submarine will count fully in the $292 billion total, but the actual spending in 1987 for that might be just $100 million, which would count against the $279 billion. In later years, as the submarine moved toward completion, more would be counted.

Nunn said the way the $292 billion was structured in various Pentagon programs, it is impossible to reach $279 billion in actual 1987 spending, or “outlays,” and the figure actually produces spending of around $286 billion.

If the current bill is projected over the coming years, he said, there will be a shortfall between what is approved and what can be spent of $323 billion and perhaps even $450 billion. That is far more than enough to run the Pentagon for a year at current spending rates.

It could produce, he said, “a budgetary disaster in the next five years.”

“It is absolutely incredible that this large reality . . . does not seem to have penetrated the thick walls of the Department of Defense,” Nunn said.