Inouye Creates Refugees, Aids Them : Bizarre Riders Added to Vital Spending Bills

The scenario was too bizarre to be fiction; it could only be legislation. A senator from Hawaii, acting at the behest of an organization from New York, obtained $8 million from the U.S. Treasury to help a group of Jews from North Africa run private schools in France.

Yet, offbeat as it was, the end-of-the-year gift by Democratic Sen. Daniel K. Inouye was only one of dozens of unheralded and unusual provisions that influential congressmen slipped into two massive spending bills that Congress passed as it headed toward adjournment.

Reading the Fine Print

Only now, weeks after the bills were approved, have budget analysts, Administration officials and reporters begun to discover the provisions in the fine print.

The two bills ostensibly had straightforward purposes. One was supposed to pull together the budget cuts and tax increases--$72 billion over two years--that White House and congressional negotiators had agreed on in their budget negotiations in November.

The other, a 2,100-page omnibus appropriations bill, provides $604 billion to fund government programs. The law covered roughly half of all federal spending for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, 1988. The other half is composed of interest payments on the national debt and benefit checks to individuals--Medicare, Social Security, pensions and the like--items not subject to the budget process.

Magnet for Pet Projects

But, because both bills had to be passed to keep the government running, they became nearly irresistible vehicles for pet projects of lawmakers.

Not all of the add-ons are parochial. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), for example, attached amendments that increased nutrition aid to pregnant low-income women and young children.

Another provision would establish a 12-member commission on the future of the U.S. economy. Proponents of the idea hope that the panel, whose members would be appointed by President Reagan and congressional leaders, could do for the next President what a similar commission on Social Security did for Reagan in his first term--provide a consensus to allow politicians to act on politically unpalatable measures to restrain the federal budget deficit.

All the provisions have at least one thing in common: Because the bills had to be passed in a hurry, projects were added in secrecy, bypassing the usual legislative process.

The pattern has led to increasing numbers of complaints, particularly from the Republican minority, which charges that last-minute law-making gives too much power to a handful of senior Democrats who control the legislative schedule.

“There are only one or two votes” that determine billions of dollars, House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.) said. “During deliberations on ‘mega-bills,’ individual members usually aren’t able to read them or understand fully all of their provisions.”

Contradictory Amendments

In some cases, more legislation probably will be required this year. On one major federal farm subsidy program, for example, the two bills carried amendments that directly conflict. One bill tried to sharply limit appropriations for the Commodity Credit Corporation, requiring a vote later this year. The other, designed to avoid another vote, provided an “open-ended” appropriation.

No provision in either bill, however, surpasses Inouye’s in the annals of the unusual. It began in a meeting between Inouye, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that handles foreign aid, and a friend, New York real estate developer Zev Wolfson. Wolfson is a member of the board of Ozar Hatorah, a charitable group established to aid the Jews of North Africa and other predominantly Muslim areas, known as Sephardim.

Many of the Sephardic Jews have settled in France, which has been willing to provide land and money for schools but not for religious instruction or for teaching Hebrew. Wolfson asked Inouye if the U.S. government could provide money for those purposes, which required officially classifying the Sephardic Jews in France as refugees. In addition, he provided a $1,000 contribution for Inouye’s reelection.

Needier Groups Cited

The State Department opposed the request, saying that the world has many groups far more needy and that neither France nor the United Nations considers the Sephardim to be refugees.

Since the provision became public earlier this week, Inouye has denied that Wolfson’s campaign contribution had anything to do with his decision. “I don’t solicit money. I don’t have to,” said the senator, who has regularly been reelected.

His decision, he said, was based on sympathy for the persecution Jews have encountered around the world. “Religion, language and culture is the thread that provided their survival,” he said.