Senate Passes Funding Cuts for EPA, HUD

Disregarding a threatened presidential veto, Senate Republicans pushed through legislation Thursday that would make steep cuts in spending on the environment and public housing but largely spare veterans’ programs.

The 55-45 vote on the $81-billion measure covers appropriations for the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and several independent agencies in the fiscal year that begins Sunday.

With the exception of the veterans’ department, each agency will see its allocation for fiscal 1996 trimmed sharply. The House has made even deeper cuts in parallel legislation, and the differences will be worked out by negotiators from both houses before the measure is sent to President Clinton.

There were these developments in a day of swift maneuvering on several other high-profile issues:

* White House officials and congressional leaders agreed on a stopgap measure to avoid the temporary shutdown of the federal government. The measure would keep programs running until Nov. 13, six weeks after the fiscal year begins.

The stopgap agreement, which still must be approved by the full House and Senate, calls for reduced spending throughout the federal government but does not go as far as Republicans wanted in slashing programs favored by Clinton. The measure is needed because few if any of the 13 annual appropriations needed to finance the government, including the one approved by the Senate on Wednesday, are expected to be signed into law by Sunday.

* Senate Democrats escalated the battle over Medicare reform by moving to block consideration of the GOP proposal until public hearings are conducted. Democrats managed to delay for more than eight hours a meeting of the Senate Finance Committee, which was to have begun voting on the proposal Wednesday morning. The panel finally began meeting in the early evening and on its first vote defeated a Democratic attempt to scale back GOP plans for Medicare cuts.

The 11-9 vote, along party lines, was a prelude to the anticipated formal committee approval of the measure later this week. The GOP plan calls for $270 billion in savings over seven years.

Senate and House Democrats have begun offering their own Medicare reform packages, claiming that $90 billion in savings can provide several more years of solvency for the Medicare hospital trust fund, which is projected to go broke in 2002.

* Clinton Wednesday night called the Republican plan wrong. “Their proposal to double the premiums, double the deductibles, stop giving Medicare to anybody under 67 years old, to raise three times as much as it takes to bail out the trust fund has nothing to do with saving Medicare,” Clinton told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. “It has everything to do with their budget priorities.”

* First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, silent on health issues since the failure of the President’s health care reform plan last year, returned to the political wars, denouncing Republican plans to trim $182 billion from future spending for Medicaid, the health program for the poor.

“It is a lifeline, literally, for millions of children and families,” she said. “Ripping apart this lifeline is not the American way.”

Senate leaders are hoping to complete work either later this week or early next week on appropriation measures governing spending by the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Commerce, State and Justice--and such programs as Head Start and a White House-favored anti-crime initiative for which the Republican majority has proposed additional cuts.

The votes are bringing into focus--in plain dollars-and-cents terms--the changes that have taken root in Congress since the Republicans became the majority party in January. They also are making clear the differences between them and the Democratic President.

The measure passed by the Senate Wednesday would cut Clinton’s request for the EPA by 23%, for HUD by 16% and for the VA by 3%. But within the measure are even sharper cuts: 32%, or $360 million, for example, would be eliminated from a program that helps communities serve the homeless.

Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), chief author of the legislation, urged the President “to listen to the American people and join us in curbing federal spending by approving this appropriations bill.”

The Republicans were unanimous in their support for the bill and were joined by a single Democrat, Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska.

Other Democrats considered the reductions so drastic that they mounted no more than a halfhearted effort to modify them, preferring instead to let the measure slip through and face a veto.

The measure is “extreme in every way,” said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). “They devastate families. They devastate workers. They cripple the economy. The environment, clean air, the water . . . all are extraordinarily affected by this legislation.”

When the House passed a similar measure in July, it imposed tough restrictions on the environmental agency. Most of those strictures were kept out of the Senate measure. However, according to a report written by the Senate Appropriations Committee staff, the legislation does restrict the agency’s authority to limit levels of arsenic and radioactivity in drinking water and toxic emissions from oil refineries, echoing some of the House restrictions.

In addition to the cut in assistance for the homeless, the measure provides less than half the money Clinton requested for helping low-income people pay rent and, the Administration complained, it gives too much discretion to local public housing authorities.

However, the Senate restored legislation, eliminated by its Appropriations Committee, that prohibits the practice of withholding insurance from minority neighborhoods, a discriminatory activity known as “redlining.”

In addition, the Senate approved without opposition an EPA proposal to provide $10 million to communities over the next two years to restore commercial sites once thought to be contaminated with toxic chemicals.

But a larger measure, to restore $431 million that was cut from Clinton’s request of $1.4 billion for the Superfund toxic-site cleanup program, was easily knocked down by Republicans.

The hazardous-waste cleanup, said Sen. Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.), is “a well-intentioned program but a deeply troubled program.”

Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who proposed the additional spending, said that the cuts the legislation makes in the EPA budget “are indicative of a much broader attack on the environment in this Congress.”

Times staff writers Edwin Chen, Robert A. Rosenblatt and Janet Hook contributed to this story.

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NEXT STEP

In coming weeks, Congress is likely to look in depth at the Superfund program, which has spent billions of dollars on cleaning up hazardous waste sites; consider changes in the Endangered Species Act and vote on a budget measure that includes a proposal to set up a commission to study the future of national parks, which critics fear could lead to closing some of them or turning them over to states or private operators.