Major Themes Are Repeats : Reagan’s New Budget Recycles Old Proposals

The grand total for the government’s new budget is new--it surpasses $1 trillion for the first time--but there’s not much else that the Reagan Administration hasn’t proposed previously in one form or another.

There’s a new wrinkle in the Administration’s effort to trim farm subsidies; there’s a new plan for trying to overcome congressional opposition to unloading Amtrak; the proposal to cut student aid is sharper than usual, and economic assumptions are less optimistic, closer to those of outside analysts.

But the big themes, as well as a lot of the details, are familiar indeed as President Reagan heads toward his seventh year in office.

He is calling for a new increase in military spending but cuts in numerous other places, declaring that this would cut the federal deficit from last year’s record $220.7 billion to about half that much in fiscal 1988, which begins next October.

As usual, Reagan is calling for no income tax increases.

In one much-publicized area, the Administration, under heavy pressure to increase its efforts to combat the deadly AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, is asking for an increase in federal spending for that purpose.

There are also requests to increase spending for safety and reliability in the space shuttle program and to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system.

Among other changes:

--Recommendations to cut farm programs include not only a reduction in agriculture target prices, which the Administration has requested before, but a “decoupling” of direct farm subsidies from production--a change that could reduce what the Administration says is an incentive for farmers to overproduce.

--Amtrak would be sold off, if a buyer could be found. This would be a more direct way of getting the passenger railroad off the government’s hands than previous recommendations, rejected by Congress, to merely halt federal subsidies.

--Most federal subsidies for college students’ loans would be eliminated, a bigger cut in student aid than the Administration has proposed in recent years.

--The President, accused in the past of basing budget figures on overly rosy predictions about the national economy’s health, scales back a bit for 1988, talking of less economic growth and more inflation than he has the last several years. But he still sees a stronger economy than most private economists do.

In his budget message accompanying the 1988 figures, Reagan conceded that many of the cost-cutting recommendations had been made before.

“Congress . . . has rejected most of these proposals; hence, our progress toward reducing the deficit has been much more modest than it could have been,” he said.

Critics also noted a lack of new initiatives.

“There’s nothing really new in it,” said Gary D. Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a research and advocacy group that monitors the Office of Management and Budget.

He called the new document “largely unimaginative.”

Commenting on the proposal to cut student aid, Allan W. Ostar, president of the American Assn. of State Colleges and Universities, said, “As President Reagan would say, ‘Here they go again.’ ”

Ostar said, “The Congress has rejected cuts of that size every time, and I think the Congress will reject it again.”