Federal Agencies Ordered to Observe Spending Freeze : White House: Budget chief imposes limits embodied in $16-billion bipartisan deal stalled in the Senate. Measure has been passed by the House.

Acting to preserve a bipartisan budget-trimming deal, President Clinton’s budget chief has ordered federal agencies to freeze any funding covered by a $16-billion spending-cut bill that stalled in the Senate last month, officials said Thursday.

Alice Rivlin, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has ordered federal department heads to observe the limits imposed by the spending-cut bill as if the measure had already passed.

The compromise bill, produced after weeks of negotiation between the White House and Republican congressional leaders, passed the House last month but foundered in the Senate because of objections from two liberal Democrats, Sens. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) and Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.).

The senators complained that President Clinton had agreed to excessive cuts in the bill in heating aid to the poor, job training and other social programs. But their last-minute resistance embarrassed both Clinton and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), who had promised to help pass the bill by Congress’s July 4 recess.

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The long-delayed bill also includes almost $5 billion in new federal spending to help California recover from the Northridge earthquake, as well as aid for Oklahoma City to rebuild from the April 19 bombing that killed 168 people.

An OMB spokesman said that Rivlin acted both to stop federal agencies from spending the $16 billion between now and the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30 and to make it clear that Clinton is sticking by the hard-fought deal.

“We needed to do something to instruct departments and agencies not to spend the money,” said Larry Haas, associate director of OMB. “And in case there was any doubt in anyone’s mind, we wanted to make it clear that the President is fully committed to the compromise that he negotiated.”

White House officials said that they hope Wellstone and Moseley-Braun can be persuaded to quietly drop their objections and allow the bill to pass when the Senate returns from its vacation next week.

Clinton wants the bill for important political reasons--to demonstrate both his own zeal for slashing federal spending and his ability to work productively with the Republican leadership in Congress.

But Wellstone, perhaps the most liberal member of the Senate, did not take the White House rebuff quietly. In a letter to Clinton that his office quickly released, the Minnesota senator said that he was “astonished” by Rivlin’s action and charged that Clinton may be overreaching his presidential powers.

“I would be interested in the rationale for such an impoundment of funds . . . and how such an action is considered permissible,” he wrote.

OMB spokesman Haas said that the White House has the power to freeze federal outlays for a short period when congressional approval of a spending-cut bill is expected. If the Senate does not pass the bill quickly, he said, the President still can halt funding for at least 45 days by proposing another spending-cut bill.

However, both courses apparently would leave the earthquake and bombing relief funds in limbo, he said.

A key question in ending the standoff is who will blink first. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) has said that he will not bring the bill back for floor action unless Democrats accept it without amendment and insisted that it is Clinton’s job to get his party’s troops in line.