Nunn Proposes $80 Billion in Pentagon Cuts

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday proposed cutting the Pentagon budget by between $80 billion and $85 billion over the next five years, setting the stage for a confrontation between Congress and President Bush over how far to slash defense spending in the post-Cold War period.

The proposal offered by Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.)--the leading figure on defense issues in the Senate--is close enough to a $91-billion cut approved by the House at the urging of Nunn’s counterpart, Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), to enable congressional Democrats to offer a definable alternative to Bush’s plan.

The President has insisted that he will tolerate no further cutbacks beyond the $50 billion that he proposed in January.

Nevertheless, some analysts speculated that Nunn’s proposed reductions could offer a ripe target for eventual compromise. An agreement on defense spending is the key issue in determining the size of the so-called peace dividend and how much of it can be rechanneled to domestic programs or to reduce the federal budget deficit.

Nunn warned that defense spending for fiscal 1993, which begins Oct. 1, could not be cut more rapidly than the $7.4 billion that Bush has proposed, for fear that it would hurt employment and environmental cleanup efforts.

By contrast, the House approved Aspin’s recommendation for a $14-billion cut in the Pentagon budget for fiscal 1993 and has earmarked $1 billion in Defense Department outlays to help defense-related industries adjust to the cuts.

Nunn’s recommendations, which were about at expected levels, were contained in a letter to the Senate Budget Committee, which is about to begin work on a Senate version of the budget resolution.

In a related matter, the House is scheduled to take up legislation today that would eliminate a provision in the current budget law prohibiting lawmakers from using defense savings to finance more domestic spending. Bush has warned that he will veto the measure if it passes.

Bush proposed total defense spending of $281 billion for fiscal 1993.

The Bush and Nunn proposals include a request that Congress rescind previously approved appropriations for about $7.7 billion in programs that lawmakers pushed through last year against the Administration’s recommendations. The House figures include only some of those rescissions.

Nunn asserted in his letter that Congress must either approve the President’s proposed rescissions in full or find additional cuts elsewhere just to get back to the defense spending levels that the President proposed.

Reaction to Nunn’s proposal was cautious. Gordon Adams, director of the Defense Budget Project, a nonpartisan research group, said Nunn essentially had accepted Bush’s budget for the coming year and put off any real fight about defense spending to the future.

“To some degree, he’s booted the problem of choosing among defense strategies out a year,” Adams said. “What matters most is what he (Nunn) wants to do about the coming fiscal year. The part about later years is so up-in-the-air it’s almost irrelevant.

“This is not a huge fight to the death between the Congress and the President, even though it’s being called that . . . . These (differences) are not very big numbers.”

Nunn’s proposals are expected to dampen recommendations by other senators for more radical reductions in defense spending.

Some Senate Democrats and Republicans have proposed far sharper cuts in defense spending over the next five years, ranging from $100 billion in cuts recommended by Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) to $210 billion by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

It still is not clear what the lawmakers will do with the savings from any cutbacks in defense spending. The House has voted tentatively to rechannel 60% of the peace dividend to domestic programs and to use the rest to reduce the deficit.

However, still to be decided is whether lawmakers will be able to eliminate the prohibition in the current law that prevents them from transferring the savings from defense cuts to the domestic area.

Congressional strategists said the House vote on that issue today is expected to be unusually close, with conservatives in both parties prepared to oppose the elimination of these “fire walls.” They predicted that there will not be enough votes to override a Bush veto.

Worry about the impact of especially sharp defense cuts on the economy is another major factor in making some lawmakers leery about going beyond the reductions recommended by Bush. In areas of the country with heavy concentrations of defense industries--such as Southern California--such cutbacks could throw thousands out of work.

The Senate Budget Committee is expected to go along with Nunn’s recommendation in drafting the budget resolution.