Under Pressure From ‘Drug War’ Office, Cabinet Budgets Grow by $115 Million : Policy: The Martinez agency threatened to expose what it deemed inadequate requests. Most of the extra money would be for ‘demand reduction.’

The Office of National Drug Control Policy has waged intense battles behind the scenes to force six Cabinet agencies to request $115.3 million more for the Bush Administration’s “war on drugs,” according to documents obtained by the Associated Press.

The drug policy office’s real power lies in its ability to expose agencies that ask for amounts it deems too small to carry out the President’s anti-drug strategy.

Revealing such problems required breaching the Administration’s usual reluctance to tell outsiders--that is, Congress--about squabbles in the executive branch.

The drug control policy office threatened to do just that late last year, after less drastic measures failed to persuade six departments to raise their drug enforcement budget proposals for fiscal 1993.

After being warned, all six departments increased their total budget requests by $115.3 million, mostly to pay for demand-reduction programs, according to documents that the drug policy director, Bob Martinez, sent to the Senate Judiciary and House Government Operations committees.

The Administration has asked Congress to allocate $12.7 billion to federal anti-drug efforts in fiscal 1993.

Thus far, the office has not used its ultimate weapon: sending a department head a letter, signed by Martinez, declaring his or her department’s anti-drug funds to be inadequate.

The office has fired some warning shots, however.

“We’ve threatened, by sending over drafts of unsigned letters that would decertify agencies, and that got an answer,” Bruce Carnes, the drug agency’s director of planning, budget and administration, told a Senate panel last week. “There we’ve got definite, big-time power.”

Because the congressional committees requested the drafts, as well as the signed letters certifying every department’s final budget request as adequate, threats to expose allegedly reluctant drug warriors to Congress became, unintentionally, reality.

The documents show that the secretaries of Education, Health and Human Services, Treasury, Housing and Urban Development, Veterans Affairs and Labor all received the draft letters.

After receiving the letter, the Education Department boosted its proposal for Drug-Free Schools and Communities grants by $62.5 million.

Other increases were:

--Treasury, $14.9 million for IRS money-laundering investigations.

--VA, $11.4 million for veterans’ drug treatment.

--Labor, $10 million for its Employment and Training Administration program.

--HUD, $8.25 million for public housing drug elimination grants.

--HHS, $8.2 million for the Administration for Children and Families and the Centers for Disease Control.

Representatives of those departments denied they were slackers in the “war on drugs.” They said they faced tight budget constraints, and that the volleys between them and the drug policy office were part of the normal negotiating process.

Mary Brunette, HUD’s assistant secretary for public affairs, said the Office of Management and Budget told the department to keep its budget request 5% under the cost of current services plus inflation.

“We determined to apply across the board, to all programs, a 5% reduction,” Brunette said.

Labor spokesman Bob Zachariasiewicz said the dispute was “all part of the give and take” that always accompanies budget-making.

Mark Barnes, counsel to Health Secretary Louis W. Sullivan for drug abuse policy, shrugged off the drug office’s warning and the fact that Congress knows about the Administration’s bickering.

“While the process is far from a perfect one, it seems to work as intended,” Barnes said.

Carnes, of the drug control policy office, said he understood that departments were hobbled by a budget agreement with Congress that left “very, very little money available. . . . That meant we were cutting into bone, or muscle at least, from other programs.”

Congressional critics of the President’s anti-drug budget have complained that too much money, about 70%, is spent for law enforcement and international efforts, and too little is devoted to efforts to reduce demand for drugs, such as education and treatment.