Budget Pact Nears Amid GOP Concessions

Congressional and White House negotiators are nearing agreement on a long-stalled bill to fund the government for the rest of this fiscal year, with Republicans making major concessions to President Clinton’s spending priorities in education, the environment and other domestic programs.

The compromise, which would end the impasse over the budget year that is already half over, is expected to give Clinton substantial sums for his treasured national service program, his promise to put 100,000 new police officers on the street and his Goals 2000 education initiative, all of which the Republican majority in Congress had once sworn to eliminate.

Negotiators are still struggling to settle disputes over GOP proposals to ease environmental protections--particularly thorny issues to resolve in the shadow of Earth Day--that are the last major barriers to enacting a final 1996 spending bill. But with all but a handful of decisions made, the basic outlines of the budget agreement are clear, and officials remain hopeful that a compromise will clear the House and Senate later this week.

“We’ve yielded a lot on a lot of things, but some things we’re not prepared to yield on,” said House Appropriations Chairman Bob Livingston (R-La.). “I am still hopeful.”

“There is a lot of give and take on all sides,” said a White House official. “Everyone is feeling good because it is obvious that we are circling around the contours of the deal.”

Overall, the agreement is expected to result in a government-wide budget that cuts about $23 billion from last year’s spending, salvaging for the Republicans a significant piece of deficit reduction from the wreckage of last winter’s failed effort to put the budget on a path toward balancing in seven years. It includes deep cuts in certain agencies--such as the Legal Services Corp. and the National Endowment for the Arts--that conservatives had in their cross hairs.

“This is a major victory for fiscal restraint,” said six House Republican freshmen, trying in advance to drum up support among their conservative colleagues for a bill that falls short of Republican aspirations. Last winter, Republicans agreed twice to shut down much of the government rather than give in to the White House. Now, bruised by the resulting political drubbing, Republicans are agreeing to trim rather than uproot what they had seen as the weeds of government.

“There will be those among our newer members who will not be happy with many elements of this package,” said Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands). “But anybody who will step back and look at our major objectives--to move toward a balanced budget--will recognize that indeed we are making real progress.”

Said an aide to House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.): “If our guys keep their eye on the big picture and recognize these details are necessary so long as Bill Clinton is in the White House, hopefully, we’ll be able to pass it.”

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At issue is a $160-billion bill that would provide funding for nine Cabinet departments and several other federal agencies that have not received their regular appropriations for the current fiscal year, which is half over.

Those agencies have been operating on a series of short-term funding measures, the latest of which expires Wednesday at midnight. Although negotiators are closing in on the deal, GOP officials say they will almost certainly need another one- or two-day extension of temporary funding to iron out final details.

The most serious of the remaining issues are GOP amendments that would ease Environmental Protection Agency regulation of wetlands, allow more logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest and other environmental riders that have prompted the White House to threaten a veto of the whole bill.

“No one’s figured out how to deal with this,” said a top Democratic aide. “These issues are not easy to split the difference on.”

Other disputes include antiabortion limits on an international family-planning program and a proposal to repeal a law to discharge military personnel infected with the virus that causes AIDS.

Although any element of the package is subject to tinkering, negotiators have essentially settled most of the budgetary disputes, and those decisions have included many concessions to Clinton to win his signature.

For example, House and Senate negotiators have agreed to provide $6.5 billion for the EPA. That is down from the $7.2 billion for the agency before Republicans took control of Congress, but a far cry from earlier GOP versions of the bill that would have whacked away one-third of the agency’s budget.

And although conservative Republicans were determined to pull the plug on Clinton’s Goals 2000 education-reform program and his national-service initiative, negotiators have agreed to provide $350 million for the education program and $400 million for national service. That is far less than the big increases Clinton sought, but relatively small cuts from their 1995 budgets--$371 million for the education program and $470 million for national service.

Negotiators are finalizing agreement on Clinton’s cornerstone anti-crime program to put 100,000 new police on the street by providing matching funds to localities as encouragement to hire new officers.

Clinton had asked for $1.9 billion, but Republicans wanted to replace it with a block grant to give localities more discretion. Negotiators have agreed to carve out up to $1.4 billion for the police initiative.