House Panel Slashes Social Spending by $17.5 Billion

Dismissing charges that they lacked compassion for the poor, Republicans rejected Democratic attempts Thursday to restore money cut from social programs in this year’s budget.

The House Appropriations Committee, voting mainly on party lines, approved a $17.5-billion package of cuts in housing, education, veterans and nutrition programs.

Republicans also rekindled the abortion debate by inserting language that states could decide on their own whether Medicaid money could be used for abortions in cases of rape or incest. States are now required to provide abortions when rape, incest or the life of the mother are involved.

Committee Chairman Bob Livingston (R-La.) said the cuts to this fiscal year’s $1.5-trillion budget are “only a first step, but a necessary step, in meeting the obligation to the American taxpayer to downsize the government.”

But Democrats resisted strenuously. “This bill today is not about deficit reduction,” said Rep. David R. Obey of Wisconsin, the ranking Democrat on the committee. “It is about cutting kids and cutting seniors in order to free up money for tax cuts for rich people.”

Rep. Louis Stokes (D-Ohio) gave an impassioned speech describing how he grew up in public housing, one target of the Republican cuts, and saying that he and his brother, now a diplomat, “would be either in jail or dead, we’d be some kind of statistic” without the public assistance.

President Clinton last week said the social program cuts were “making war on kids” and indicated that he would reject the measure should it reach his desk.

The committee defeated, by 35-20, a proposal by Rep. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) to take $4.8 billion of the $5.4-billion budgeted for disaster relief and transfer that money to such programs as Healthy Start, summer jobs, School to Work, the Corporation of Public Broadcasting and others cut by subcommittees last week.

Durbin said states affected by disasters could instead receive loan guarantees from the federal government. He noted that Gov. Pete Wilson of California, the state receiving the bulk of the aid, has recently proposed a $7.6-billion tax cut for his state. “Are we going to underwrite and subsidize his tax cut?” Durbin asked.

The panel also rejected, 29-23, a proposal by Stokes to cut $2.3 billion from the disaster fund and give that to social programs that had been reduced.

The committee did restore $36 million for AIDS programs, accepting an amendment by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) to take the money from Department of Energy waste cleanup programs. It also acceded to a request from Vice President Al Gore and put back $1.5 million for the Justice Department’s Ounce of Prevention Council.

Republicans contended that many of the cuts merely reduced increases sought by the Clinton Administration and that many of the programs could be improved by consolidation.

But Democrats said the cuts hit unreasonably hard on the poor. More than 40% of the planned cuts, $7.3 billion, were in public housing modernization, rent assistance for the poor and other housing programs.

Also proposed are $2.1 billion in reduction to clean water projects, Clinton’s national service program and veterans’ hospitals and medical equipment.