Broad Agenda for Change Proposed : Reform: Think tank with close ties to Clinton offers ambitious, politically risky blueprint for new Administration.

The Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank with close ties to President-elect Bill Clinton, Monday released a 340-page blueprint for sweeping changes in the federal government.

Entitled “Mandate for Change,” it urges Clinton to take on an ambitious and politically risky agenda to redirect government policy across the entire range of domestic, national security and foreign policy.

On many issues, the book restates proposals that Clinton enunciated during the campaign. But it goes beyond his campaign agenda in several politically sensitive areas: It argues for cuts in Social Security and other entitlements, a major reform of civil service laws to loosen restrictions on firing or transferring federal workers and a “carbon tax” to discourage the use of fuels that contribute to global warming.

Modeled on the “Mandate for Leadership” study the conservative Heritage Foundation produced for Ronald Reagan’s incoming Administration 12 years ago, the report is bound to be closely read for clues to Clinton’s direction because many of its authors advised the President-elect during the campaign and are involved in transition planning.

In the months to come, however, the real question about the report may be whether these recommendations represent a guide to the Administration, or a standard of centrist reform against which Clinton’s promise to “remake” the Democratic Party is measured.

In areas where the institute’s recommendations do not overlap with existing Clinton proposals, it is unclear how much weight the book’s ideas will carry. But in the past Clinton has regularly drawn on ideas advanced by the institute--such as his proposal that would allow young people to borrow money for college from the government and repay it with two years of work in community service.

In response to the report, transition communications director George Stephanopoulos said: “The guide to the Administration will be when Bill Clinton produces his legislative program. But clearly this work will inform his thinking and help guide him.”

Assessing the institute’s call for Clinton to launch such politically explosive battles, Stephanopoulos suggested that the incoming Administration will move cautiously: “For Clinton, it will be first things first--which means focusing first on the plan he put forward” during the campaign.

The institute is affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist group that Clinton chaired until he declared his candidacy; Al From, the council president and one of the report’s authors, heads planning on domestic issues for the transition.

Despite those ties, the Progressive Policy Institute is now only one of many voices from across the ideological spectrum seeking to define policy in the new Administration. Clinton already has received an agency-by-agency 760-page transition report from more liberal elements of the party associated with consumer advocate Ralph Nader and New York City Consumer Affairs Commissioner Mark Green.

Echoing Clinton’s own campaign rhetoric, the group labels its agenda an effort to build “a new governing philosophy” for the Democratic Party that charts a “third way” between traditional liberalism and conservatism.

“What we have tried to do is lay the intellectual groundwork for a transforming agenda,” said Will Marshall, the institute’s president.

In the organizing principles it proposes for the Administration’s policies, the institute’s report parallels Clinton’s focus on “personal responsibility” as the centerpiece of social policy; investment in education, training and infrastructure as the basis of economic policy, and support for democracy and free markets as the cornerstone of foreign policy.

But in defining an agenda to implement those goals the report endorses many individual initiatives that could cause Clinton to clash with key elements of the political coalition that elected him.

After an election in which he ran strongly among the elderly, for instance, the report urges Clinton to pursue deeper cuts in Social Security and other entitlement programs than he was willing to consider during the campaign.

In the section on the budget, institute vice president Robert J. Shapiro, a Clinton campaign adviser now working on infrastructure issues for the transition, proposes that the new Administration accelerate a planned increase in the age of retirement for Social Security recipients. Under current law, the retirement age is expected to rise from 65 to 67 by the year 2027; moving that up to the year 2008 could save $60 billion over the next 20 years, Shapiro writes.

The report also urges Clinton to raise taxes substantially on Social Security benefits for upper-income Americans--an idea that the President-elect occasionally raised during the campaign--and impose “modest” limits on federal and military pensions for affluent retirees.

Such limits, though, could bring Clinton in conflict with government employee unions who staunchly supported him throughout the primaries.

The book contains other ideas that may rankle Clinton’s union supporters: Although Clinton proposed to eliminate 100,000 federal jobs through attrition over eight years, the institute urges him to cut twice that many positions in his first term.

Rob McGarrah, director of public policy for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees--which backed Clinton--says the union is open to discussion of major reforms in federal operations, but warns that efforts to set such “arbitrary targets” for reductions would likely meet stiff resistance.

The report’s suggestion that Clinton consider a carbon tax raises a different political problem: During the campaign he denied he plans such a tax when Republicans said he would impose one.

Though it extends beyond Clinton’s ideas in many areas, the report criticizes his proposals only in one. It denounces the centralized federal price controls over health care costs that Clinton proposed during the campaign. Instead, institute vice president Jeremy D. Rosner urges a system built around tax credits to help the uninsured buy coverage, financed partly by the elimination of federal tax breaks for employer-provided insurance that provides more than basic coverage.