Budget Proposals Produce Splits Among Republicans : Congress: Details of House, Senate documents are raising objections from key lawmakers. Squabbling is not expected to derail either plan.

Republicans are poised to ram their ambitious budget-balancing plans through the House and Senate, but some key GOP lawmakers are none too happy about some of the particulars.

The chairman of the House Agriculture Committee has been fighting a rear-guard action to ease cuts proposed for farm programs. The chief tax writer in the House is cool to proposals to raise revenues by closing corporate tax loopholes.

And the head of the House transportation panel objects to using gas taxes and other transportation fees to reduce the federal budget deficit. And some Republicans say they think that the Senate budget provides too little for defense and foreign aid.

None of those objections, by themselves, seem likely to block approval of the budgets that will be debated in the House beginning today and in the Senate later this week. But these skirmishes are symptomatic of the intraparty tensions that are likely to mount as the budget debate progresses from generalities to specifics.

The first big showdown will occur on the House floor, where lawmakers will be debating a far-reaching seven-year plan to balance the budget for the first time in a quarter-century.

As approved by the House Budget Committee, the plan calls for dramatically slowing the growth of Medicare and Medicaid, abolishing three Cabinet agencies and cutting spending for hundreds of programs.

It also makes room for a $350-billion tax cut over seven years. The plan approved by the Senate Budget Committee does not, but Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) plans to offer an amendment that would bring the Senate budget in line with the House on tax cuts.

While the intraparty dispute over taxes has grabbed public attention, other battles have been waged among Republicans behind the scenes.

One of the most politically sensitive involves proposals to cut farm subsidies, which are the economic lifeblood of many Farm Belt Republicans--many of whom came to office as part of this year’s big freshman class.

By the time the Budget Committee drafted its plan, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) persuaded GOP leaders to scale back proposed cuts in key farm programs from $16 billion to $9 billion over five years.

GOP leaders on Tuesday rebuffed Roberts’ efforts to further roll back the cuts, but they agreed to an amendment that calls for changes in tax, trade and regulatory policies that affect farmers.

Another area of potential controversy involves proposals to curb special-interest tax loopholes that some have dubbed “corporate welfare.”

House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich (R-Ohio) has said his panel’s budget assumes that the Ways and Means Committee will raise about $25 billion in revenues over seven years by closing such loopholes. However, those assumptions are not binding, and Ways and Means Chairman Bill Archer (R-Tex.) is resisting the idea.

Archer aired his concerns earlier this month at a closed-door party retreat, where he argued that one person’s “loophole-closer” is another’s tax increase, according to one Republican participant.

Archer said Tuesday that his panel--which also will be responsible for saving money in Medicare and welfare--would meet the deficit-reduction targets set by the budget resolution, but not necessarily the way the Budget Committee suggested.

“I don’t care what their assumptions are,” Archer said.

Another committee chairman dissatisfied with the Budget Committee plan is Bud Shuster (R-Pa.), who heads the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Shuster has long sought to take the government’s transportation trust funds out of the federal budget, so that gas taxes and other fees that finance federal highway, airport and other transportation programs would be used only for their designated purposes.

Shuster wanted to offer an alternative that would do that, but the House Rules Committee rejected it.

The Rules Committee did agree to allow the House to vote on other alternatives. The major one was drafted by conservative Democrats Charles W. Stenholm (D-Tex.) and Bill Orton (D-Utah). It would balance the budget by the year 2002 but drop the GOP tax cut and ease proposed cuts in health care, education and agriculture programs.

Although GOP leaders voiced confidence that they would beat the plan, they acknowledged that the Stenholm alternative would put Republicans in a politically sticky position of voting against a plan that increases funding for popular programs while still balancing the budget. Indeed, the proposal is very similar to the GOP plan approved by the Senate Budget Committee.

Later this week, the Senate is expected to take up its budget, which also has come in for some GOP criticism.

Defense hawks have complained that the Senate budget does not provide enough for the Pentagon.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) said Tuesday that he would seek to add $12 billion back into the 1996 defense budget and complained that the draft budget by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) did not even keep military spending frozen at this year’s level.

And last week, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on foreign aid, called the proposed cuts in foreign aid devastating.

At the end of the seven years covered by the budget, McConnell said, “the United States would have as visible and viable an international role as Ghana.”

Times staff writer Melissa Healy also contributed to this story.