Senate Panels OK Unfunded Mandates Bill : Congress: Fast action targets practice of telling states and localities what to do without giving them the money to do it. Measure has Clinton’s approval.

Moving quickly to pass major reform legislation that would ease financial burdens on local governments, two Senate committees voted Monday to curb unfunded federal mandates and stop forcing states and local governments to pay for expensive programs ordered by Washington.

The action by the Budget and Governmental Affairs panels sends to the Senate floor as early as Wednesday a measure long sought by local officials who have complained that Washington is robbing them of the financial means to govern themselves.

The measure, with broad support from both political parties, also is scheduled for committee action in the House today and could become the first sweeping piece of legislation in the new Congress to reach the White House, where it also has the support of President Clinton.

But while both Democrats and Republicans rallied around the legislation in the second week of the 104th Congress, it was clear that their unity on other matters would be short-lived.

Democrats opened new battle lines Monday on the next major piece of legislation expected to be sent to House and Senate floors: a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to balance the budget by the year 2002. Democratic leaders introduced what they called a “right to know” budget amendment, which would force Congress to spell out, in detail, how it would cut $1.5 trillion in spending over the next seven years, as the balanced-budget amendment is estimated to require.

Democratic leaders stressed that they support budget-balancing efforts. Several Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said that they would vote for a balanced-budget amendment, whether or not their disclosure measure passes. But they said that the “right to know” amendment is needed to assure that Americans understand what programs will have to be killed or reduced to achieve a balanced budget.

House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.), speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, suggested that Democrats are bent on killing support for the balanced-budget amendment with their proposal. If Congress is confronted with the scale of program cuts that will be necessary to balance the budget, he told reporters, its “knees will buckle” and it will back away from reducing the deficit to zero.

House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), who opposes such a constitutional amendment as inflexible and unnecessary, said Monday that the Republicans’ opposition to the “right to know” amendment is “proof that they want to govern by gimmick” rather than face the difficult challenge of winning public support for unpopular spending cuts.

The unfunded mandate legislation has been tied to the balanced-budget amendment by many state and local officials. State governors have expressed fears that lawmakers seeking to cut the federal deficit would shift more program responsibilities to them. As a result, they have demanded that the unfunded mandates bill be passed and signed by Clinton before Congress considers a resolution calling for a balanced-budget amendment.

In exchange for such assurances, many governors have vowed to work for passage of the constitutional amendment by state legislatures. Thirty-eight state legislatures must approve the amendment before it would become part of the Constitution.

Some Democrats, such as Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, while voting for the mandates measure in the Budget Committee meeting, cautioned that Congress is moving too fast without truly thinking over all the ramifications of the move.

“This is a very significant piece of legislation,” Dodd told his colleagues. “And if we start steamrolling on these matters and use this as a precedent, it’s going to create havoc.”

But Budget Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) was adamant that the bill should go to the Senate floor as quickly as possible, particularly after it cleared the committee by a vote of 20 to 0.

Under the measure, Congress no longer would be able to order state and local governments to take on new programs costing more than $50 million without Washington first agreeing to pay the costs.

Many of these mandates, while ordered to help local communities combat problems ranging from pollution to welfare, have become expensive. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the financial burden on local governments has risen from $225 million in 1986 to $2.8 billion in 1991.