Budget-Cutters in House Shift Into High Gear

House Republicans, caught up in a budget-cutting fervor that surpassed even their own predictions, took aim Thursday at an array of federal housing, poverty and low-income assistance programs, as well as President Clinton’s cherished national service initiative.

In a series of meetings, subcommittees of the House Appropriations Committee voted to recommend about $10 billion in cuts on top of the $7 billion tentatively approved by other Appropriations subcommittees on Wednesday. The recommendations now go to the full committee, which can make changes before sending them to the House floor.

The $17-billion total more than doubles the cuts that Republicans said earlier this week they would make to offset federal spending on disaster assistance last year, most notably aid that followed the Northridge earthquake.

As the round of cuts began, subcommittees and their chairmen seemed to be clamoring to outdo each other by making more and more reductions. Their actions prompted Democratic lawmakers to complain that Republicans were trying to kill programs that aid the poor so they would have extra money to pay for a capital gains tax cut for the rich.

The reductions, some approved in nine- and 10-hour sessions lasting well past midnight, are shaping up as a prelude to the even more difficult steps and vigorous debate that loom ahead if Congress is to balance the federal budget. Republican leaders contend that the cuts must be made if Washington is serious about capping the spiraling budget deficit.

Along with the national service and housing programs, other reductions were made Thursday in spending for veterans hospitals, medical equipment and law enforcement. Some $30 million was cut from high technology grants, an initiative sponsored by Vice President Al Gore.

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Republican leaders also turned down the Clinton Administration’s request for $672 million in funds for international peacekeeping activities and $159 million in proposed spending for a dozen new federal office buildings and courthouses across the country.

In meeting after meeting on the House side of the Capitol, the determination of Republicans and the ire of Democrats rose to new levels.

Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.), who as chairman of the full House Appropriations Committee sat in on many of the subcommittee sessions to make sure that cuts are deep and genuine, praised his Republican colleagues.

“People want a return to fiscal sanity,” Livingston said. “They want to cut spending.”

But Democratic leaders like Rep. David R. Obey of Wisconsin argued that the process is Draconian and eventually will harm only the poor.

“I’ve been in this town for 25 years and the worst thing that can happen is when you begin to believe your own baloney,” he told his Republican counterparts. “And I’m certainly hearing a lot of baloney today.”

The political division is so wide that Clinton, when word first surfaced that the cuts were coming, threatened to veto any proposal that impinges on his national service program. The program is designed to allow high school and college students to help pay for their education by working on community projects.

The Veterans Administration, Department of Housing and Urban Development and independent agencies subcommittee decided to eliminate the $210-million increase that was to have gone for the program over the next year, freezing it instead at the existing level of about $700 million.

Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands) vowed that more cuts are to come. “This puts us on a very clear path toward the incremental phaseout of this program,” he said.

Outside his packed hearing room, Clinton supporters charged that the Republicans were targeting the national service initiative specifically to attack the White House.

“It’s all political,” said Ivan Frishberg, who had helped set up the initiative as a project director of the Public Interest Research Program. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) is using the national service cuts “as a political bat to get at Clinton,” he said.

Next to him was Jim McNeill of Boston, who helps run a federally assisted housing program for the elderly that the Republican budget-cutters are reducing and eventually hope to eliminate.

“It’s gone,” McNeill lamented. “It’s all on its way out the door. They’re killing our program.”

Five other Appropriations subcommittees voted Wednesday to trim about $7 billion from a score of health, education and other social programs.

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They voted to kill a program to help the poor pay utility bills and reduced spending for job training and AIDS prevention and care. The panels also trimmed and sliced their way through various energy and water projects ($212 million), park and cultural programs ($327 million) and agricultural and food initiatives ($212 million).

One panel, while voting not to touch the $285 million budgeted for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting this year, decided to cut its spending level $47 million next year and $94 million the following year.

“We’re talking about being incapable of providing money for incredibly important issues and we can’t tell public broadcasters they can raise the final 14% of their budget in the private sector?” Livingston asked. “Good Lord. We’ll never balance the budget.”

Endowments for the arts and humanities were cut by $10 million in the subcommittees, including $8 million in direct grants for performing artists.

Debate over the proper level of federal support for the arts prompted actor Christopher Reeve, appearing Thursday before a subcommittee of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, to call on Congress to transform the National Endowment for the Arts into a self-supporting institution and free it from political oversight.

“The arts should not have to grovel every couple of years and beg for the federal government to renew its promises,” Reeve said.

Also decrying the proposed cuts were two Clinton Administration officials--Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, who were upset over elimination of $1 million from last year’s anti-crime legislation to create a national domestic-violence hot line.

“At a cost of less than one-fourth of a penny per American, this hot line is a bargain, not a luxury,” they said in a joint statement. “It is a model of how a reinvented government can help millions of battered women to prevent further abuse and to start reconstructing their lives.

“Now is not the time to break our contract with the women of America.”

But Republicans vowed that they will not be deterred from an effort they say will bring down the deficit. “We take seriously our responsibility to cut spending,” Lewis said. “This is the beginning, not the end, of the process of identifying real savings.”