Bush Urges Restraint on Defense Spending Cuts

President Bush urged lawmakers Wednesday to spare key Pentagon spending programs from the budget ax as the White House and top congressional leaders moved toward completing separate proposals this week for cutting $50 billion from next year’s federal budget deficit.

White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said that Republicans and Democrats plan to offer blueprints “simultaneously” aimed at eliminating as much as $500 billion in red ink over the next five years by reducing spending and raising taxes.

But Democrats on Capitol Hill said that it is still unclear whether the budget negotiators actually will be prepared to start serious bargaining by Friday, a week before the House plans to adjourn for more than a month.

The negotiators, who are trying to avoid automatic spending cuts of roughly $100 billion this fall under the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law, have made little headway so far because neither side has been willing to take the political risk of proposing a broad package of tax increases and spending cuts.

Fitzwater said that the White House is now putting the finishing touches on its own plan, while House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said the two sides had tentatively agreed to extend from 1993 to 1995 the Gramm-Rudman goal of balancing the budget.

How far to cut defense spending continues to be a key area of dispute. Bush has started to move toward a Pentagon spending proposal favored by Senate Armed Services Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.).

But Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, complained Wednesday that the defense budget that the Administration still has in mind is “much bigger . . . than I think is going to come out of this process.”

Under Nunn’s proposal, Bush’s original military budget request would be trimmed by $10 billion, leaving most programs relatively intact for now.

But most Democrats are demanding larger immediate reductions than those proposed by Nunn, and Gephardt said that the budget negotiators remain divided over how deeply to cut into next year’s Pentagon budget.

Aspin has called for halting production of the B-2 Stealth bomber after the first 15 planes are built.