The Dulling of a Blue Pencil

With considerable vigor during his State of the Union address last January--so much vigor that he hurt a finger--President Reagan denounced Congress for larding up the omnibus budget resolution with billions of dollars worth of boondoggles and goodies for their home districts. Lacking a line-item veto, the President had no choice but to sign the measure, which accounted for much of the $1 trillion ($1,000,000,000,000) that the federal government is spending this year.

But thumping the 14-pound measure onto the dais, Reagan vowed that he would cull out all the lard and send it back to Congress to be rescinded. Reagan denounced such frivolous or wasteful proposals as cranberry and blueberry research, the study of crawfish and the commercialization of wildflowers.

Only partly true to his word, the President belatedly sent Congress his list of offenders--the things that he would have blue-penciled had he had the line-item veto. But the total involved fell far short of the billions that he alluded to earlier. In fact, it came to only $336 million, or half the amount that Gov. George Deukmejian vetoed with his line-item power from the $40-billion California budget last year. Nor did all the boondoggles sound so foolish or unnecessary. They included $300,000 for a semi-tropical research laboratory in Florida, $6.4 million for the construction of a cancer treatment center in New York, $100,000 for a biotechnology research park in Massachusetts and $4 million for flood-control projects in Kentucky.

In his message, the President said that he had included only the more excessive examples from the spending program. White House officials said that the President lost some of his budget-cutting zeal when he discovered that many of the items that he had attacked were sponsored by Republicans. The chances are that Congress will largely ignore the President’s recision request and that the White House will not do much to push it.

As has been the case with the President in the past, the talk of sweeping budget reductions has come easy. Actually making them has proved to be somewhat more difficult.