White House Presses for Budget Pact : Congress: Talks evidently bog down on capital gains. President threatens to veto a bill that would delay spending cuts due to start Oct. 1.

The White House, raising the pressure on Congress for a budget deal, threatened Monday to veto Democratic-sponsored legislation that would delay about $100 billion in mandatory spending cuts scheduled to start Oct. 1 if there is no agreement.

Marlin Fitzwater, spokesman for President Bush, said that the chief executive opposes any move to relax the Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction law’s provisions for massive automatic cuts in most federal programs because they are “an important discipline.”

Democrats, however, charged that it would be a “national disaster” to allow the cutbacks to take effect, and House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) said that he expects “an agreement in principle” on major parts of a deficit-cutting package to be achieved this week.

Foley’s optimism, however, is not widely shared and sources close to the budget summit negotiations said that the thorny issues of capital gains tax cuts and offsetting tax increases on upper-income Americans still are unresolved.

Three White House officials and five top congressional leaders met for more than three hours Monday night, and the Administration negotiators reported they had made progress but would continue talks today.

“We’re making progress on cutting spending,” John H. Sununu, White House chief of staff, told reporters.

Taking note of Democratic plans to postpone the Oct. 1 deadline until Oct. 20 to keep the government running as usual while the negotiators work toward an agreement, Fitzwater said: “We don’t agree it should be extended.”

But the White House spokesman said that the negotiators are “sticking with it” and that Bush would sit in on the talks “pretty close to the end. . . . When it’s necessary, we’ll be there.”

Foley, whose previous optimism has proven to be unfounded, said that the current talks are coming to a climax.

“We believe they will lead us to an agreement in principle on all the general areas and categories of the agreement,” he told reporters.

Meantime, frustrated House Republicans accused the Democratic leadership of bringing the nation to the brink of “Armageddon” and used parliamentary guerrilla warfare to delay by many hours the usually routine approval of less controversial bills.

The GOP tactics triggered Democratic counterattacks accusing Bush of deadlocking the budget negotiations by insisting on tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and tax increases for almost everyone else.

It was a day of blistering partisanship in the House, indicating the political tensions over the painful choices in deficit reduction and a feeling of helplessness about whether the budget ax would fall on hundreds of federal programs and lead to furloughs for hundreds of thousands of government employees.

“The Democratic leadership of the House has fiddled while Rome is burning and there’s not much of Rome left,” said Rep. Bill Frenzel (R-Minn.), who participated in the budget talks until recently. “We have 24, or 48, or maybe 72 hours to negotiate.”

But Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Berkeley) argued for postponing the Gramm-Rudman deadline rather than to allow such deep spending cuts to cripple the federal government.

“It’s one thing to put a gun to your head--it’s another thing to pull the trigger,” Dellums shouted during the emotional debate over budget negotiations.

The House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to approve a resolution today that would waive the Gramm-Rudman targets for deficit reduction until Oct. 20. Senate leaders indicated that they prefer an extension of the deadline only to Oct. 13, however.

Rep. Jamie L. Whitten (D-Miss.), chairman of the panel, said failure to do so would “destroy the country” by allowing $100 billion to be cut from the budget, divided equally between the Pentagon and domestic spending. Some programs--such as Social Security benefits--would be exempted from the reductions but nearly everyone agrees the cuts would be extremely severe.

In another development, Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady told Congress that the government would run out of borrowing authority Oct. 4 unless Congress raises the public debt limit to $3.509 trillion before that date. Legislation to raise the debt ceiling always is controversial and it will be more so this year without a deficit-cutting pact.