Bush Pledges to Work on Spending Cuts

President Bush, hitting the road to drum up support for his new budget proposal, pledged today to work with Congress on spending cuts and said, “We weren’t sent to Washington to sit on our hands.”

Although members of Congress are pressing him for details on where he wants to make about $10 billion in proposed cuts, Bush deferred that decision to future negotiations between his Administration and Capitol Hill.

In a speech to a joint session of the South Carolina Legislature that was interrupted by applause several times, Bush said he has no intention of sitting by and allowing cuts to be made across the board under provisions of the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law.

“I am prepared to work with the Congress to make those hard choices,” the President said. “We weren’t sent to Washington to sit on our hands, either to pass the cost of indecision on to working Americans by raising their taxes or to fail to reduce the deficit, which will cause the cuts to be done automatically under the law.”

Not a ‘DOA’ Budget

Bush boasted that no one had termed his budget proposal that he delivered last week to Congress “DOA,” or dead on arrival. Leaders of the Democratic-controlled Congress often used that term to describe the budgets that former President Ronald Reagan submitted in the latter years of his Administration.

If anyone wants to use the term DOA now, Bush said, he has his own interpretation of the acronym--”defining opportunity for Americans.”

The President had lunch at the residence of Republican Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr., a longtime friend, before his flight back to Washington in early afternoon.

For the second of his out-of-town budget speeches, Bush chose another state that played a major role in his election victory last year, after visiting New Hampshire on Monday.

Bush won the South Carolina Republican presidential primary on March 5. That victory, which followed his win in New Hampshire, catapulted him toward the near-sweep of the Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses on March 8.