Clinton Budget Kills 115 Programs, Slashes Others

President Clinton will ask Congress on Monday to kill 115 federal programs--and make sharp cuts in hundreds more--as part of an austere 1995 budget that would reduce total federal spending by as much as $30 billion, Administration officials said Friday.

Senior White House officials projected that the elimination of programs would save more than $3 billion--a relatively small part of the $30-billion decline in overall federal spending.

The programs the Clinton Administration hopes to eliminate are scattered throughout the federal government and include the Education Department’s school-dropout prevention program, mining programs at the Interior Department, the Agriculture Department’s export subsidies for certain crops, and major weapons systems such as the Air Force’s F-16 fighter.

Savings from the elimination of nine programs at the Pentagon would account for nearly half of the $3-billion reduction.

Almost all the programs have strong constituencies in private industry and in Congress, where the battle over the proposed budget cuts is certain to be fierce this spring.

As is usually the case, the mix of cuts and spending reductions ultimately approved by Congress may be far different than the one the Administration proposes.

Many of the programs are perennially cited as obsolete by critics of government spending and were targeted for elimination by the Administration’s “reinventing government” task force last September.

“We tried to find programs that seemed to have lived out their usefulness,” said one senior White House official.

Yet most of the targeted programs, including the F-16--which at $299.5 million is the largest project slated for elimination--have survived efforts by previous administrations to do away with them.

In each of the last five budgets, for example, Republican and Democratic administrations have proposed eliminating the $5-million Clean Lakes Program at the Environmental Protection Agency. But Congress restored the funding for the program each time.

The Administration has also targeted a range of public works projects, each of which has strong local backing.

In the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, the White House has proposed eliminating $10.3 million for Columbia River fish hatcheries in the Northwest, cutting $400,000 for buoys in Chesapeake Bay and $500,000 for a fisheries center in Alaska.

Such proposals almost always run into roadblocks in the powerful appropriations committees in the House and Senate, where the local interests of key lawmakers often outweigh White House influence.

“Everybody in Congress approaches this as Clinton’s budget proposals--a starting point--and then we go from there,” said Pat Collins, a spokesman for the House Budget Committee. “But this is going to be a year of very hard choices, and Congress is going to have to recognize we are going to have to have real cuts.”

The Administration is proposing the steep cuts to avoid repeating its mistakes of last year. Last spring, the White House did not take seriously congressional demands for deep spending cuts and proposed spending more money than Congress would allow under spending caps approved during the George Bush Administration.

This time, White House officials carefully scoured the entire government to pick and choose which programs to kill and which to save so that the budget would be in compliance with the terms of the five-year, $500-billion deficit-reduction agreement passed by Congress last August.

The Administration’s goal is to reduce spending by 10% across-the-board in low-priority programs in order that some money would be left over to finance Clinton’s top priorities--such as health care reform, job training and the Head Start program for disadvantaged children--and still reduce the deficit.

When he unveils the Administration’s $1.5-trillion budget Monday, Leon E. Panetta, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, is expected to say that the spending cuts will help reduce the federal budget deficit dramatically.

For 1995, the Administration expects to predict that the deficit will fall below $180 billion. The Congressional Budget Office has already issued a slightly more upbeat prediction that calls for the deficit to fall to $171 billion next year, down $84 billion from the 1993 level of $255 billion.

Yet not all of the new cuts will go directly to deficit reduction, Administration officials acknowledged.

While the White House will propose cutting $30 billion from existing spending, it plans to increase funding for Clinton’s top domestic priorities--his so-called investment agenda--by as much as $16 billion, officials said.

Job training, public health programs, education reform, children’s programs and other initiatives will receive an average funding increase of 18% over last year.

Many of the cuts actually will be absorbed by increases in other programs within the same agencies. Cuts totaling $640 million at the Education Department, for example, will help make it possible for the Administration to increase funding for its education reform proposals.

Because Cabinet departments were able to keep money saved through program eliminations, there was less interagency bickering over the budget cuts, senior Administration officials said.

The exceptions were in the area of national security, where money cut from the Pentagon and the State Department’s foreign aid budgets would help fund domestic programs.

The battle over the Pentagon’s budget was particularly fierce; then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin battled Panetta over how to pay for military pay raises and whether to increase the budget to account for inflation.

Panetta won the war, forcing the military to scramble to find $21 billion in additional savings over the next five years.