S&L; Bailout Funds Won’t Be ‘Hidden’--Brady : Thrifts: The Treasury secretary says the Administration still hasn’t decided how to budget up to $100 billion to pay off depositors of failed S&Ls;.

Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady, attempting to mollify lawmakers on one of the most contentious issues dividing the Bush Administration and Congress, said Tuesday that the White House will not propose to hide off-budget the extra $40 billion to $100 billion in temporary borrowing needed to help finance the costly savings and loan cleanup operation.

But Brady acknowledged that the Administration still has not settled on a way to deal with the wide year-to-year fluctuations resulting from the need to pay off the depositors of hundreds of failing S&Ls; well before the money can be recouped by selling the assets of those institutions.

The disclosure came as Brady and White House budget director Richard G. Darman, testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee, ran into continued partisan sniping over Bush’s budget proposals.

Last year, Congress approved an S&L; bailout bill requiring taxpayers to fill a minimum $50-billion gap between the liabilities and assets of hundreds of S&Ls; that need to be closed.

But lawmakers were surprised when regulators disclosed late last year that an additional $40 billion to $100 billion in “working capital” would probably be needed to speed up the operation. The extra money will not come from taxpayers unless the Administration has miscalculated the worth of buildings, land and other assets in the hands of the failing S&Ls.;

But some members of Congress fear that giving regulators a blank check to borrow additional billions would give regulators massive sums of money to spend without effective legislative control. Others are worried that the accounting would allow the White House to manipulate the flow of funds to mask deficits elsewhere in the budget.

Brady, vowing to “work with Congress” on the issue, said the Administration is “not . . . going to propose” an “off-budget solution” to the problem of raising billions of dollars in working capital for the Resolution Trust Corp., the agency that oversees the disposal of failed S&Ls.;

Brady warned, however, that relying on the Treasury to borrow the funds directly from the public could run afoul of the Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction law. The law requires Congress and the White House to reach agreement on a plan to steadily shrink the federal deficit or face automatic, equally spread spending cuts in a wide variety of domestic and defense programs.

Unless the Administration and Congress figure out a way to account for the RTC’s large annual funding swings, Brady said, “it will yo-yo the Gramm-Rudman targets in a way that nobody will be able to understand them.”

Brady and Darman were under pressure from Rep. J. J. (Jake) Pickle (D-Tex.) to defend Bush’s new budget against the charge that it fails to deal with several hidden “Pac-Men” that Darman himself identified as threats to the nation’s future fiscal health.

“If (the RTC working capital) is off budget . . . that’s a hidden Pac-Man in it,” Pickle charged.