Congress OKs $8.2 Billion in Budget Cuts

Congress gave final approval Thursday to an $8.2-billion package of budget spending cuts that resolves a bitter dispute with the Bush Administration over funding for the B-2 bomber and the Seawolf nuclear attack submarine.

The cuts, most of them from the defense budget, passed the House 404 to 11 and the Senate 90 to 9.

President Bush, at odds with Democrats over conflicting proposals to cut funds for the Seawolf, the B-2 and the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), appeared ready to accept the final figures following a compromise reached by House and Senate negotiators Wednesday night.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney told lawmakers before the House vote that the compromise looked like “a package we can live with.”

Bush originally requested nearly $8 billion in budget cuts for the current fiscal year. But the Administration then deadlocked with House and Senate Democrats who hoped to preserve the Seawolf program, over the Pentagon’s objections, by shifting funding from the B-2.

In the end, the lawmakers agreed to cut $1.3 billion from the Seawolf program and $500 million from the B-2, a compromise that will keep the B-2 program alive while allowing construction to proceed on one of the two Seawolf submarines that Bush wanted to scrap.

In all, the cuts approved by Congress will slash nearly $7.25 billion from this year’s defense budget, a sum that some Democrats, hoping for a bigger peace dividend, complained was not enough.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd (D-W. Va.) said he and other Democrats wanted to cut $1.3 billion from the “wasteful . . . pork pie in the sky” SDI program. But they agreed in the end to avoid a presidential veto by reducing spending for the anti-missile defense system by only $200 million.

In addition to the defense cuts, nearly $1 billion was pruned from non-military programs, including $2 million in National Science Foundation research grants to find the answers to such questions as why people are afraid of their dentists and why fish in Nicaragua are sexually aggressive.