Budget Clash Likely to Slow California, Oklahoma Aid : Appropriations: Bill containing disaster, bombing funds is target of a veto threat by Clinton. He objects to cuts totaling $16.4 billion.

President Clinton’s threatened veto of a $16.4-billion spending cut bill is likely to slow aid for California disaster victims and bomb-struck Oklahoma City, congressional leaders predicted Wednesday, as the White House and Congress began a new clash over spending priorities.

Vowing to veto the first legislation of his presidency, Clinton declared the bill unacceptable because it would cut out vital aid for education and training, while increasing spending on highways, courthouses and other projects that he considers pork.

“I believe that a bill that cuts education to put in pork is the wrong way to balance the budget and I will veto it,” Clinton said at an appearance in White Plains, Md., to promote a program to train teen-agers not bound for college for the work world.

Republicans promptly counterattacked, denouncing Clinton for imperiling the disaster aid that was part of the 1995 “rescissions” package, so named because it would rescind funds previously committed but not yet spent on scores of federal programs. They charged that he had ignored their pleas to find common ground on a bill so that he could score political points.

The threat was a “tawdry manipulation of the process,” House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said. Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) said that “the message from the White House was . . . ‘Clinton to California: Drop dead.’ ”

Nevertheless, most analysts said that the political support in Congress for disaster relief to California is so great that it is likely to be included in another bill if the measure does not survive.

Rep. John Porter (R-Ill.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that deals with the issue, said he believed that the aid would be delayed but not eliminated.

The bill, approved by a conference committee Tuesday, would give $6.7 billion in disaster relief to California and 31 other states, as well as designating $240 million for counterterrorism activities and the reconstruction of the bombed federal building in Oklahoma City. The budget cuts are primarily in federal housing programs, which would take a $6-billion hit; airport and airway improvements, another $2 billion; environmental regulation proposals, $1.2 billion.

Clinton objects to specific GOP cuts of $619 million from education; $500 million from environmental spending; $230 million from housing and veterans accounts; $31 million from crime prevention; $20 million from the women, infants and children program; and $14 million from community banks.

The measure is scheduled for final votes in the House today and the Senate next week before going to Clinton.

The clash marked an important opening battle in the long campaign over the federal budget that has just begun. The White House hopes that the veto threat will establish Clinton’s concern for popular social programs and demonstrate that he has the courage to reject a measure, despite his exposure to political risk.

Clinton offered an alternative $16.5-billion spending cut plan that would trim accounts for highways, courthouses, federal office space, government travel and foreign aid. “I want to make this very clear: I am not against cutting spending,” he insisted.

House Republican leaders asserted that Congress has run out of time to rework the rescissions bill. “It’s so late in the process that the issue will have to be dealt with in the usual appropriations cycle,” said Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

Sen. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Ore.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, did not offer such a dire prediction. “I don’t want to see it as a fait accompli ,” he said. “It’s still possible to correct this particular program.”

Environmentalists were ebullient Wednesday about Clinton’s threat, because the bill would open federal forests to the harvesting of billions of additional board-feet of lumber.

In his remarks, Clinton said that the language “would basically direct us to make sales to large companies, subsidized by the taxpayers, mostly in the Pacific Northwest, that will essentially throw out all of our environmental laws and the protections that we have that surround such timber laws.”