GOP Governors, Congress Vow Teamwork : Politics: State executives anticipate programs will shift to their control. But one senator cautions that slashes in federal funds may follow.

Republican congressional leaders pledged here Tuesday to work hand in glove with the new bumper crop of GOP governors to hammer out a framework for fiscal policy that ultimately could lead to a wholesale transfer of responsibility for running social programs to the states.

This pledge from House Speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich of Georgia and likely Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas was what the Republican governors, assembled here for their biennial meeting, long have waited to hear.

The occasion could hardly have been more appropriate. Having scored a net gain of 11 governorships in this month’s vote, the GOP can look forward next year to being in charge of 30 governors’ offices, the first time since 1970 that they have been in the majority. Moreover, the Republican Governors Assn. made the theme of this gathering “Foundations of Federalism” to underline their determination to shake off the yoke of the Washington bureaucracy.

In casting their ballots, the voters were saying: “We have had it with Washington,” said host Gov. George F. Allen of Virginia in welcoming his victorious colleagues to this historic locale, once frequented by the likes of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson. “They want and are fighting to take back their government.”

The governors found affirmation of this theme in Dole’s disclosure that one of their oldest and fondest dreams--a curb on costly federal requirements for managing programs ranging from the environment to voter registration--would be the first piece of legislation to be introduced on the floor of the Republican-controlled Senate.

The state chief executives saw this as a portent that in the first fully Republican-controlled Congress in 40 years the trend would be toward allowing them more flexibility to run programs their own way. Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt, the new chairman of the Republican Governors Assn., summed up the message that he and his colleagues want to send to Congress and the country at the conclave’s opening news conference on Sunday: “Give us the ball and then get out of the way. We can solve these problems.”

After hearing from Dole and Gingrich, the governors pronounced themselves pleased with their guests’ overall theme of teamwork. “We’re going to be a team,” Gingrich declared. Not only did he promise that he and Dole, who have not always marched to the same philosophical tune in the past, would strive for a harmonious collaboration, but Gingrich added that they would spend extra hours “reaching out to Republican elected officials” from city halls to statehouses all across the land.

Declaring that he is “very, very positive” about the Gingrich-Dole performance, Michigan Gov. John Engler, new vice chairman of the association, added: “What they are really saying is, ‘Let’s build it (the new Republican agenda) together.’ ”

Asked if the governors, who breakfasted privately with the visiting legislators for more than an hour before their public discussion, had received assurances that they would have input into deliberations on Capitol Hill, California Gov. Pete Wilson said: “We got more than assurances. We got an invitation to work very, very closely with them on crafting legislation and making the kind of changes that are absolutely necessary.”

But along with glad tidings, the visitors from Congress brought some sobering reminders of the stark realities of the nation’s fiscal condition.

Tough decisions will have to be made soon, warned Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.), who is expected to be the next chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. He predicted that a balanced-budget amendment would be enacted by Congress and ratified by the necessary three-fourths of the state legislatures by midsummer.

If political pressures keep Congress from cutting into the huge outlays for Social Security and other entitlements to meet the amendment’s requirements, Packwood said, then the lawmakers might have to start slashing grants for federally mandated programs. These grants, most of which go to pay for Medicaid, also cover a range of other programs from highways and housing to welfare and education and will total an estimated $185 billion in the next fiscal year.

The states would be free of federal mandates, “to handle your education problems, your health problems, your education problems, your highway problems,” Packwood said. But, he added pointedly, the states would also be left “with no money from the federal government at all.”

That thought was enough to make even an enthusiast for federalism like Michigan’s Engler blanch. “It’s not possible to go cold turkey on something like that,” he conceded.

But Engler pointed out that Packwood was not yet making a specific proposal to cut deeply into the funds that states have come to rely on from Washington. Rather, he said, Packwood was “making an important point--that this is a serious issue and that the numbers are big numbers and problems are big problems. And I think a lot of people haven’t focused on that.”