Republican Budget Cuts Nick Even Supporters : Government: Rep. Ron Packard and head of area Private Industry Council learn hard, new realities when federal programs are slashed.

Presiding over one of a series of federal budget-cutting sessions recently, Rep. Ron Packard (R-Oceanside) was in no mood to hear excuses.

Like his fellow “cardinals”--a title afforded to chairmen of House Appropriations subcommittees--Packard needed to slash the budgets of the agencies under his panel’s jurisdiction.

Everything, he had proclaimed, from new book purchases for the blind by the Library of Congress to the planned renovation of the Botanic Gardens, was on the table.

Yet here was the obscure office of the Architect of the Capitol asking for more money. But that would just be too bad. Packard’s report to the Appropriations Committee would cut that office’s budget by $2.5 million.

That’s the kind of budget cutting Santa Ana businessman Art Weaver voted for last November when he backed the reelection of Packard and the rest of Orange County’s Republican congressional delegation.

That’s what he wanted to hear, all right, until one of the cuts nicked him just a little too close to home.

“I don’t want to be guilty of saying, ‘Cut somebody else’s (program), but don’t cut mine,’ ” Weaver confessed. “But I don’t think they should take money away from the summer youth program this year.”

Weaver, chairman of the Orange County Private Industry Council, now finds himself in the awkward position of fighting to save the Summer Youth Employment and Training Program, which was expected to create summer jobs for 4,500 Orange County youths. The county and the cities of Anaheim and Santa Ana were expecting $7.6 million for the program, which was scheduled to begin in June.

The two viewpoints--that of a powerful Orange County congressman and of a small-businessman who finds good in at least one federal program--offer an insight into the effects of the new Republican politics.

The jobs program, serving “at risk” or low-income youths between the ages of 14 and 21, was one of several that landed on the cutting-room floor last week when the full Appropriations Committee took back $17.1 billion that already had been appropriated for the current budget. A House floor vote is expected this week.

Although Packard voted to cut the jobs program when the full committee met, he conceded not knowing much about it because it was not handled by his own panel, the Legislative Branch Subcommittee.

But what he saw within the bureaucracies of the congressional offices funded by his subcommittee gave him enough reason to suspect gross waste and inefficiency.

“The old boy network existed before, where everyone was looking (out) for everybody else on the committee,” Packard said. “ ‘You take care of my projects on my committee and I will take care of your projects on your committee.’ ”

But House Speaker Newt Gingrich had demanded a “change in attitude” by the new “cardinals,” and that’s what Packard promised to deliver. “This year, we are cutting people’s projects off. . . . In fact, we are not giving out money,” he said.

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Looking for cuts, Packard honed in on some eyebrow-raising revelations:

* The Government Printing Office delivers each day 18,000 copies of the Congressional Record--a recap of the previous day’s proceedings. All of the pages produced during the last session of Congress would make a line 198,422 miles long, almost the distance from the Earth to the moon. Packard said the copies are not only wasteful, but useless when one considers the information is now available on computers.

* The Office of Technology Assessment, which is supposed to give members of Congress information about scientific elements of pending legislation, took two years to deliver a study on the space station--months after Congress had approved the orbiting lab.

Packard said some of the loudest squeals of protest have come from his own congressional colleagues.

“The members are very protective of their domain, of their agencies that support them,” he said. “I’m getting a lot more flak than I thought I would from them.”

So protective are they, apparently, that House Republicans voted not to consider cutting their personal staffs. Packard said he won’t push the issue. “I am not suggesting it, nor do I have plans to do it,” he said.

Of the $17.1 billion in cuts recently approved by the Appropriations Committee, Packard’s panel contributed only $20 million. But he promised that talks on next year’s budget, which begin later this spring, will result in agencies being “eliminated or severely cut back.”

But for Weaver and those supporting the summer youth program, the first round of proposed cuts had plenty of sting.

“These kids are already at the door asking for applications,” said Patti Nunn, Santa Ana’s economic development manager. “We’re talking about hard-core, at-risk kids. . . . I tide kids over so that they can get groceries for their families. Somewhere in Washington, they have kind of forgotten that not everybody is a middle-class, high achiever.”

Earning a wage of $4.25 per hour, the students work for about nine weeks in local hospitals, schools, libraries, automobile repair shops and other businesses. Advocates say that, along with basic job skills, the students are taught how to apply for future jobs and are required to attend summer classes to improve reading and math skills.

And it keeps them busy.

“I don’t want to put a bad rap on these kids, but if these kids don’t have anything to do, what do they do?” said Jane O’Grady, who oversees the program for Orange County. “I don’t want to talk politics here--between Republicans and Democrats--but there’s sort of strong disbelief about what’s going on because of the strong bipartisan support that this program has received over the last 20 years.”

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News of the program’s proposed demise broke just as Weaver, Nunn and O’Grady were arriving in Washington for a national meeting of Private Industry Councils.

In the past, they would have knocked on the doors of their congressmen and pleaded for help. But because the Republican-controlled House has steamrollered implementation of the GOP campaign promises, Weaver said they didn’t visit the Orange County delegation while in Washington, even though he served on the campaign committee for Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton).

Instead, they met with the staff of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

“If we are going to do any good, you have to do it in the Senate and not in the House, because (the budget cuts) will go through the House with no problem,” he said.

Weaver does not hold out much hope that the current funding will be restored, and he doubts the program will survive next year’s budget negotiations.

The only chance for survival, Weaver said, lies in speculation that the dozens of job training programs may be consolidated, possibly leaving room for youths.

“What are we going to end up with?” Weaver wondered. “I don’t know.”