Washington Insight

ENOUGH REFORM, ALREADY: Look for President Bush to propose new, less stringent, financial disclosure rules for federal appointees this spring. It has taken Bush more than a year to fill the major vacancies in his Administration, and the lengthy process has left the President and his aides frustrated--particularly at the mountain of paper work needed to clear each appointee.

The biggest culprit is financial disclosure, White House aides insist, saying current rules are too burdensome. The Administration, says White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, would like to get the rules changed now, while the initial round of nominees is in place. After the second year of an Administration, some of the original appointees always begin to leave. The White House timetable calls for new proposals to be drafted and sent to Capitol Hill before Congress recesses at the end of June.

READ THIS VISION: Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) predicts that Bush will have to break his no-new-taxes campaign pledge, and soon.

“In February, 1991, Bush will call for a new tax increase,” says Bradley, a member of the Senate Finance Committee.

The potential 1992 Democratic presidential contender says his “hunch” is based on Bush’s other campaign promises--in such areas as education and the environment--that will require significant new funds if they are to be kept.

As Bradley sees it, the “music” of Bush’s promises is helping him win high ratings in the polls. However, he adds: “Ultimately you are going to have to see some substance behind the music.” By then, Bradley predicts, “the political debate . . . will be over which tax to increase.”

CALL THE MOVERS: During the Ronald Reagan years, White House science advisers changed so often they became known as the “stealth advisers.”

But not so with D. Allan Bromley, Bush’s director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. In less than a year, Bromley has become perhaps that office’s most influential occupant ever, thanks in part to his status as an assistant to the President.

The Yale physicist’s star appears to be ascending still. Last week, he learned of his election to the National Academy of Sciences while in the midst of relocating from the Old Executive Office Building to the coveted West Wing of the White House.

His growing staff (which has doubled to 35 and is expected to go up to 45 by next year) also is preparing to move, en masse, into the Old Executive Office Building, next to the White House.

ON THE CIRCUIT: Until recently, Stasys Lozoraitis Jr. was leading a lonely existence as the diplomatic representative in Washington of a nation that existed only on paper.

The charge d’affaires of the Lithuanian legation here spent his days renewing passports that no nation recognized and patiently waiting for an audience with low-level State Department officials. Those days are clearly over.

Now that Lithuania has declared its independence, Lozoraitis has become the toast of Washington, welcomed at the highest levels of the U.S. government and in demand by the news media.

Recently, when a reporter who interviewed Lozoraitis--when Lithuania’s independence was only diplomatic fiction--called him at the legation, he was told by a secretary that Lozoraitis was not in. In the old days, the man answered his own phone.