Democrats Demand Bigger Cuts in Pentagon Budget : Defense: Sen. Sasser attacks Bush plan but others argue that deeper reductions would harm U.S. preparedness and add to jobless problems.

President Bush’s State of the Union proposal for $50.4 billion in defense spending cuts encountered another sign of potential trouble on Capitol Hill Monday as Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee branded it inadequate and demanded larger reductions to finance domestic programs.

At an initial hearing on the proposal, panel Chairman Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.) dismissed the Bush plan as “hesitant when it should be bold” and “indecisive when it should seize the historic opportunity to convert peace to domestic gain.”

“If it indeed is as low as we can go, we are putting a very low ceiling on the kind of investment we can make in America,” he said.

Sasser’s views were echoed by many of the committee’s Democrats, but Republicans--and some Democrats as well--agreed with the Administration’s argument that cutting defense spending beyond what the President wants would hurt U.S. preparedness and add to unemployment woes.

Nevertheless, the panel’s decidedly mixed reaction appeared to confirm that the defense issue will continue to be controversial this year, even if the Administration is able--as some believe it will be--to hold the cuts close to what the President has proposed.

Although members of the Senate Armed Services Committee informally agreed with Bush’s defense spending levels in a hearing Friday, the budget panel usually is more reflective of Congress’ views and has broader say in any trade-offs between military and domestic spending.

As it did in the Armed Services Committee hearing, the Administration emphasized both the preparedness question and the job issue Monday. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney warned that cuts which are too rapid would leave the United States ill-prepared to deal with Third World threats.

Monday’s hearing demonstrated again how reluctant many lawmakers--even some liberal Democrats--are to risk exacerbating the unemployment problem by cutting defense spending too much, a move that Cheney warned would throw soldiers and defense workers alike out of work.

Taking issue with Sasser’s call for deeper cuts, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) told the committee that lawmakers ought to determine what threats the armed forces should be prepared to deal with before they begin cutting the defense budget sharply.

“I’m very concerned about what is happening to our industrial base regarding our submarine technologies,” said Dodd, whose state has been hard-hit by cutbacks in shipyards and repair facilities for submarines.

“The President has not . . . paid enough attention . . . to the thousands of people who will lose their jobs . . . as a result of this down-scaling,” he told the defense secretary. “There is some sense that . . . they may have been a bit forgotten.”

But Sasser and some other Democrats on the panel chided the Administration repeatedly for not having cut enough--particularly, they said, in view of this last weekend’s accord between the United States and Russia in which each side declared the other to be a friend.

“Something less than seizing the day is going on here,” Sasser told Cheney and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who accompanied the defense secretary during his appearance Monday. “The reward for peace (seems to be) a modest sliver.”

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N. D.) agreed, arguing that more of the money now being spent on defense should be rechanneled to aid the domestic economy. “The largest threat to our security is to our economic vulnerability,” he said.

Conrad also contended that U.S. allies should foot more of the West’s defense bill themselves. “Why do we continue to pay the bill for Europe and Japan when we can’t afford it?” Conrad asked. “It’s time for burden- shedding, not just burden-sharing,” he said.

But Powell countered that despite the end of the Cold War and the series of disarmament proposals that the United States and Russia have proposed, there still is the danger of instability in the former Soviet Union and that U.S. forces must be prepared.

Noting that Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin himself had warned last weekend that the Cold War could return if reforms in his country fail, Powell cautioned: “We don’t know quite where Russia is going. They don’t know quite where they’re going.”

Cheney and Powell are scheduled to testify next before the House Armed Services Committee, which opens its own hearings Thursday in what is expected to be a major review of defense spending. The House Budget panel will hear similar testimony later.

NEXT STEP

Lawmakers will make their first choices on the trade-off between military and domestic spending later this spring when the House and Senate budget committees draft an overall spending resolution designed to set ceilings on specific categories of outlays. Then the two Armed Services panels will draw up authorizing legislation, and the House and Senate Appropriations committees will draft money bills for defense spending and domestic issues.