U.S. Aid Plan for Ex-Soviet States in Trouble : Congress: Administration officials concede the $620-million package has little chance in election year.

Only a month after asking Congress for $620 million in aid for the former Soviet Union, Bush Administration officials concede that their chances of getting approval of the package have melted away in the political heat of an election year--much of it generated by Republicans.

“What the President asked for isn’t going to materialize,” a senior official said in an interview this week. “Asking (Congress) for foreign aid these days is the functional equivalent of seeking funding for the Spanish Inquisition.”

As a result, the Administration’s plans for helping Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and his democratic reforms are quietly being reduced to stop-gap measures that can be cobbled together with funds transferred from other foreign aid accounts, officials said.

“We can still get enough for a start,” a State Department official said grimly. “But we won’t be able to do a lot of what we had wanted.”

Democrats on Capitol Hill contend that the main problem is a failure of courage on President Bush’s part.

“We will stand foursquare with the White House in support of whatever needs to be done to help the former Soviet Union,” said Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees foreign aid. “But there’s only one guy with a megaphone big enough to make people understand why it’s being done and that’s the President. It’s going to take leadership, and we haven’t seen much of that.”

But Republican legislators say that a major new commitment of foreign aid this year is out of the question.

“From the President’s standpoint, it would be absurd,” said Rep. Mickey Edwards (R-Okla.), the senior Republican on the House panel. “If (President Bush) thinks people are going to stand still for more foreign aid, it shows that he’s out of tune with the country. I don’t think the Administration is in sync on this at all.”

A senior Administration official acknowledged that, “There is a political judgment about this in an election year. The concern is Bush’s image as the international President versus the domestic President.”

Several senior officials said that they still expect Bush to fight for at least some aid to Russia and its newly democratic neighbors. But the amount--and the intensity of the fight--may be far less than they expected only a month ago, they said.

That could prove something of an embarrassment for the President and Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who have argued that it is important for the United States to help Yeltsin’s government succeed--and head off an economic collapse that could usher in a less friendly government in Moscow.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Baker told members of Congress last week, speaking with unusual passion. “I think we must find a way to be there. We have spent trillions and trillions of dollars over the last 40 years in winning the Cold War and we really should be willing . . . to spend the millions or maybe billions that it takes to secure the peace--because otherwise, we’ll find ourselves right back in another Cold War.”

Baker and other officials, praising Yeltsin’s sweeping economic reforms, have urged Congress to approve two kinds of economic aid: $620 million in direct U.S. help over the next two years, and a $12-billion increase in America’s stake in the International Monetary Fund, the institution that the Administration wants to take the lead in the reshaping of the Russian economy.

But both requests are in trouble, largely because of Republican lawmakers’ resistance to passing any foreign aid bill during an election year. As a result, senior officials said, they will probably seek congressional approval to “reprogram” up to $150 million for aid to Russia and its neighbors during the current fiscal year--in other words, taking the money from foreign aid initially intended for other countries.

That will allow the Administration to continue its efforts to deliver humanitarian food and medical aid to the former Soviet Union, fund exchange programs for economic and agricultural experts, and launch a modest “enterprise fund” to help fledgling private businesses there.

But it will likely not be enough to fund any large-scale projects, they said. Nor will it give Yeltsin and his colleagues much assurance that American assistance will continue after a new fiscal year begins on Oct. 1.