White House Threatens Veto of Environmental Measure

The Clinton Administration, faced with legislation that Vice President Al Gore said takes “dead aim on this nation’s most cherished natural resources,” fired another veto threat Friday, this time at Congress’ plan to slash spending for Interior Department programs.

The measure, facing a final vote in the House and Senate, would limit the reach of the Endangered Species Act, close the Bureau of Mines, limit a moratorium on expanding mining claims and transfer responsibility for the Mojave National Preserve while sharply limiting spending on the park.

“If Congress sends the President the fiscal 1996 Interior appropriations bill as approved by the [House-Senate] conference committee, he will veto it,” Gore said at a news conference.

The vice president’s comments followed an angry denunciation by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who accused Congress of bowing to lobbyists.

“The lobbyists are really in control of this place,” Babbitt said Friday, a day after the conference committee completed work on the funding bill. “The money-changers are swarming through the temple of democracy in the nation’s capital.”

The angry attack by the Administration capped a weeklong campaign, likely to grow only hotter in coming days and weeks, to rebuff attempts by Congress to put strong reins on environmental programs established over the past two decades. The targets include efforts to protect wilderness areas, endangered species, national parks and sites such as California’s Ward Valley desert lands, sought for storage of nuclear wastes.

“For Americans who care about our environment, this was the week from hell,” said Gregory Wetstone, legislative director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This week’s actions amount to an unprecedented abuse of the budget process to give away our lands and our natural assets to the mining, timber, agribusiness, oil and other industries. Congress has authorized the looting of our natural heritage.”

The measure would cut the Interior Department’s funding 8% below the 1995 level, to $6 billion, and 13% below the amount requested by President Clinton.

Among the targets is the Mojave National Preserve. Gore said the bill “includes a sneak attack on [this] newest addition to the national park system . . . by transferring funding and responsibility for the preserve from the National Park Service to the Bureau of Land Management,” whose mission is very different from that of the Park Service.

Administration officials and representatives of environmental organizations also were upset over language in the legislation limiting the Interior Department’s operations.

Among other steps, the bill would:

* Allow logging in environmentally sensitive areas of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska.

* End a moratorium on selling mining rights on federal land, which have been sold for as little as $2.50 an acre, and are worth “billions of dollars,” Gore said.

* Cut by nearly one-fifth the President’s request for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and limit the revenue Native Americans can obtain from gaming operations.

The veto threat followed by one day the disclosure that the massive budget bill nearing completion in Congress was subject to a presidential veto unless Congress deletes provisions that would allow drilling for oil and gas in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a wilderness along the coastal plain of northeastern Alaska.

Earlier in the week, the House defeated a plan to establish a commission that would study the future of the nation’s park system, with an eye toward closing some facilities. But hours after that vote, the Republican leadership kept the plan alive by inserting it into the pending budget legislation.