Clinton’s Domestic-Spending Plans Fare Poorly in House : Congress: Lawmakers slashed the initiatives by 47%, according to a White House tally. Panetta expects budget constraints to continue.

President Clinton’s domestic-spending initiatives have been slashed 47% by the House, according to the first internal Administration score card of Clinton’s “public investment” agenda.

While Clinton has been scrambling to try to keep his budget bill, covering taxes and entitlements such as Medicare and Medicaid, intact in Congress, his domestic-spending initiatives have been moving more slowly through the legislative process on a separate track.

The Administration has compiled estimates showing that it has obtained only 53% of the money requested for 1994 for projects touted by Clinton as central to his vision of economic change.

Only a few relatively small programs, for items such as public housing, have received full funding.

The House so far has refused to provide the big spending increases Clinton sought for road-and-bridge construction, job training, education, child nutrition and other public health programs.

With the House about to complete work on the proposals, the Administration tally shows that it has approved just $8.8 billion of the $16.7 billion Clinton initially requested for fiscal 1994.

Faced with severe, legally mandated limits on discretionary federal spending, Congress has been forced to put many of Clinton’s new programs on the back burner.

Clinton may convince Congress to restore some of the cuts before it completes its work, but to do so would mean winning a zero-sum game: He would have to convince powerful lawmakers to kill existing spending programs to make room for his projects under the budget ceilings.

Leon E. Panetta, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, warned Wednesday that the budget constraints will limit Clinton’s ability to propose new initiatives for the foreseeable future.

“We are dealing with a hard freeze in spending, and we are going to be facing it for the next several years,” Panetta said. “This is not a case where you are suddenly going to get new monies. It means a lot of fundamental decisions have to be made on what programs will receive priority.”

During last year’s presidential campaign, Clinton repeatedly stressed that the nation faced an “investment deficit” that was just as severe as the federal budget deficit. He argued that Washington should be willing to increase spending on domestic programs that would have a long-term payoff for the nation’s productivity and global competitiveness.

While his economic plan released in February was highlighted by new taxes to finance deficit reduction, it also included more than $100 billion over four years to increase spending on an array of programs that he termed “public investments.”

Clinton felt so strongly about the need to fund such programs that his first budget deliberately exceeded the congressional spending caps to provide extra money for his investment agenda. The tactic had the effect of forcing Congress to cut other spending to stay within the spending caps--or cut Clinton’s programs.

So far, however, Clinton’s investment projects have fared worse on Capitol Hill than almost any other aspect of his budget.

One of the most severe cuts was to the proposed expansion of the Head Start program. Of a proposed increase of $1.29 billion for next year, the House has approved $425 million. Lawmakers had concerns about whether the Head Start program could efficiently handle such a massive funding increase without further reforms in the program, Panetta said.

Clinton’s education-reform program will receive $134 million, less than a quarter of the $585 million requested.

Marshall Smith, undersecretary of education, said the Administration is still confident that it can get the reform program started with the limited funding.

“Certainly we would have preferred more, but we can get this money out to the states and schools fast,” he said.

Another initiative taking a big hit is a Housing and Urban Development Department program that provides block grants to cities to fund affordable-housing programs. It was slashed from $511 million to $236 million.

Clinton’s proposal to sharply increase funding for AIDS-related programs also suffered in the House. The Administration had requested $1.042 billion in AIDS research and women’s health programs, as well as $310 million to fund the Ryan White Act, which provides block grants to cities facing an AIDS crisis.

Instead, the increase in funding for AIDS research and women’s health programs has been reduced to $511 million, while the Ryan White program will receive $224 million.

Among other cuts:

* A request for an extra $350 million for the WIC program, which provides nutritional supplements for poor pregnant women and small children, was reduced to $274 million.

* A summer youth-employment-and-training initiative, aimed at the summer of 1994, has been scaled back from $1 billion to $300 million.

* Highway funding has been sharply scaled back from an extra $2.6 billion sought by the Administration to $1.5 billion.

So far, Clinton’s national service program, which he hopes will create a corps of youths who will perform public services in exchange for college funding, has not suffered any funding cuts. The Administration has asked for $394 million for the program, and Panetta said he expects Congress to provide full funding once it passes the legislation necessary to create the system.