Bush Turns His Attention to Shaping Early Agenda

Refreshed from four days spent hunting and fishing, President-elect George Bush returned to Washington Thursday intent on completing his Cabinet selections, filling supporting jobs and sketching the bare-bones agenda for his crucial first months in office.

As he left Beeville, Tex.--where he hunted quail for three days--for an Alabama fishing stop before returning here, Bush said he had set as his top priorities a budget-cutting plan and the introduction of his campaign initiatives in the areas of education, the environment and drug abuse.

Bush said also that he may make further high-level appointments today or Saturday.

“I’ve been on the phone a little bit on that,” he said in Texas. Later, en route to Pintlala, Ala., he described himself as “fairly close” to a decision on selections for energy secretary and “drug czar.”

“I hope we might have another announcement or two this week, but I’m just not sure,” added the vice president, who appeared relaxed and jocular at the impromptu news conference at Beeville’s Chase Field Naval Air Station. “ . . . There’s no definitive plans, but I don’t want to risk misleading you by saying there won’t be.”

Of the Bush Administration Cabinet-level positions, the only ones that remain empty are energy and the newly created post of “drug czar,” the name for the coordinator of the nation’s varied drug-battling programs.

The vice president, outlining the final three-week push before he formally takes office on Jan. 20, indicated that his focus will shift from personnel to policy proposals. According to transition aides, attempts to search out prospective Administration employees have thus far left little time for policy planning.

When asked his priorities, Bush declared that he would be completing upper-level personnel moves “and, most important, formulating the definitive plans for the first 100 days, whether that’s in budget reduction or whether that’s in what I call helping a kinder--make this a kinder and gentler nation. So it’s going to be a full three weeks.”

Bush’s specific emphasis on education, the environment and drug abuse matched his focus during the campaign, and aides say his hope of floating new initiatives has not been dashed by demands that he cut spending to ease the deficit.

Before his election, Bush proposed more than $4 billion of new spending in an extensive “Invest in Our Children” plan. Among other things, he vowed to propose $600 million in new spending for education, a $2.2-billion package of child-care tax credits and increased funds for prosecutors and prisons to convict and detain drug sellers.

In a brief question-and-answer session Thursday, Bush expressed his “horror” that British authorities had determined that plastic explosives downed Pan Am Flight 103 a little more than a week ago, and he said that Americans should “seek hard and punish firmly, decisively” those who planted the bomb.

In concluding three private days at the 10,000-acre ranch, owned by friend and millionaire businessman William Stamps Farish III, Bush enthusiastically endorsed what he called naturalist Isaak Walton’s view of the world.

“The days a man spends fishing--man is in the generic sense here,” he added hastily to a woman reporter, “the days a man spends fishing or spends hunting should not be deducted from the time that he’s on earth.

Exalts Recreation

“In other words, if I fish today, that should be added to the amount of time I get to live,” he said, in mock seriousness. ‘That’s the way I look at recreation. That’s why I’ll be a big conservation, environmental President, because I plan to fish and hunt as much as I possibly can.”

Bush said he had shot fewer birds than in past years and blamed the drought, which affected the area’s quail population.

“It has been sheer heaven anyway,” he interjected. “Being out there in the beautiful clean air, beautiful countryside. Unbelievable.”