Agenda for Bush

No matter where he looks, President-elect George Bush finds the growing national debt warping and blurring his view of America’s future. Just to help balance the budget without making a dent in the debt itself, he must cut billions of dollars a year from the planned growth of the Pentagon budget for the next five years. If he wants American business to be competitive, he must increase productivity, and that requires billions of new dollars both for education and for bridges, roads, water supplies and sewage plants--the life-support systems of industrial societies. Bush cannot easily do either, because the federal debt confiscates for interest more than 10% of the best budget that he can devise.

Holding the winner’s feet to such fires was clearly intended as a kindness by former Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter when they undertook a year ago to put together a briefing, called American Agenda, for the next President--a project financed by Times Mirror Co., publisher of The Times.

Drawing not only on their personal experience but also on the work of a cast of dozens of specialists in every field that they discuss, they have produced a unique document. Other Presidents have counseled their successors, but the messages have been passed in private, and until very recently it was considered poor form for a former President even to comment on the way a successor was doing. American Agenda is a public briefing, filled with advice that voters can share with the next President.

Ford and Carter call their document the “short list,” which is obviously some sort of in-joke. The global demands on the modern presidency would be a very long list for any other job.

The deficit heads their list of problems of the utmost urgency, partly because it “dominates all other decisions” and partly because “nobody has a credible plan for getting the deficit below $120 billion yearly, much less pay off the national debt.” When Ford and Carter met with Bush on Monday to present copies of the report, both made it clear that tax increases--at least on gasoline, alcohol and tobacco--must be part of any deficit-taming package. Other bedrock issues on the “short list” include:

--Bush must make very early decisions on a new mix of missiles that will continue to make the Soviet Union shrink from firing the first nuclear shots. He also must follow up without delay on arms-control talks, starting with those designed to dismantle intercontinental nuclear missiles.

--The organization that insures savings-and-loan associations is technically insolvent, and Bush must start searching soon for up to $100 billion to prevent millions of Americans from losing their savings when the savings banks inevitably fail.

--For the United States, neighboring Mexico is not just a Latin American country but the Latin American country. Bush must do everything possible to help Mexico recover economically and grow. His meeting on Tuesday with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari is certainly in keeping with the tone of the report.

--America’s trade deficit and the debt of Third World countries are problems too crucial to be left to technicians, and the President must get to work directly on both.

--It is intolerable in “history’s richest nation” that one child in five lives in poverty and that the United States can afford to admit only 20% of the children who are eligible for the early school program Head Start. The nation’s children demand “first-priority” action, and education in general also needs presidential leadership.

--The next President must give highest priority to both the global warming trend--the Greenhouse Effect--and ozone depletion.

With luck, there will be no surprises in the American Agenda for Bush or his staff. Its real value will lie in the bipartisan approach to problems. Asking specialists from both parties to examine problems together does not, it turns out, necessarily produce Pablum. The best forecast that we have seen of the future of Western Europe emerges, short and lucid, in one paper by Warren Christopher and Lawrence S. Eagleburger. The report mentions several times a consensus that Japan can help the West more by providing financial aid to developing nations than by rearming.

It may be that Ford and Carter are unique in history as the only ex-Presidents temperamentally suited to such a bipartisan endeavor. If so, it would be a shame, because American Agenda should set a precedent for future transitions at the White House. It has value as a checklist for a Republican White House preparing to deal with a Democratic Congress. It also is a guide for Americans who care how closely the new Administration follows advice formulated the hard way--from experience.