White House, Congress Reach Deal on Budget

Breaking a months-long deadlock, White House and congressional negotiators on Wednesday reached agreement on a wide-ranging spending bill after Republicans bowed to heavy Clinton administration pressure and retreated from several controversial environmental provisions.

If approved by the House and Senate and signed by President Clinton, the bill would end what may rank as the most bitter and protracted budget battle in U.S. history.

The compromise, which provides about $160 billion to fund nine Cabinet departments and other agencies that have gone without regular spending authority for nearly seven months, backs away from previous Republican ceilings on a variety of social programs.

Clinton won nearly $5 billion more for education, environmental protection and other administration priorities than he had been allowed in a Senate-passed version of the spending bill.

The breakthrough came Wednesday when Republicans, pummeled by bad publicity for their efforts to ease environmental regulations and facing a promised veto from the White House, agreed to water down or drop a slew of environmental initiatives--including proposals to allow more logging in Alaska and less regulation of wetlands and California’s Mojave Desert than Clinton wanted.

Clearing another obstacle, negotiators also rebuffed conservative Republicans and agreed to repeal a new law requiring the discharge of military personnel infected with the virus that causes AIDS.

The bipartisan group of top-level negotiators said the full details of the agreement would not be officially released until after they had been discussed with Clinton and House and Senate leaders of both parties. But all expressed confidence that the compromise would pass muster.

“Overall, we’re pleased with the result that the conferees have arrived at,” said White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta, who led the administration negotiators. “It does go a very long way toward protecting the president’s priorities.”

“I think what we have is a consensus in the House,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob Livingston (R-La.). “Most members in the House will vote for passage.”

Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.) had a simpler expression of relief to mark the end of the seemingly interminable budget battle: “Yippee!”

At issue is a sprawling bill to provide funds for the nine Cabinet departments and dozens of smaller agencies that have not received their regular appropriations for the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1 and is more than half over.

The dispute forced two partial government shutdowns last winter when Congress and the president failed to come to terms on stopgap-funding bills. The latest emergency funding measure was due to expire Wednesday at midnight EDT; a few hours before that deadline, the House and Senate approved legislation extending that spending authority by another 24 hours. Clinton signed the measure Wednesday night.

After months of trying to maintain strict party unity, Republicans are likely to split ranks over the agreement because many conservatives object to concessions made to win Clinton’s signature.

Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, a leader of the GOP’s right wing, said that conservatives were especially concerned about negotiators’ decisions to provide money for Clinton’s Goals 2000 education initiative, to drop a key antiabortion provision and to repeal the discharge requirement for military personnel infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS.

“We got rolled,” said Rep. Mark Edward Souder (R-Ind.), a freshman opposed to the bill. “But I assume they will have plenty of votes to pass the bill.”

Indeed, many other Republicans say they will support the compromise because they believe that it is long past time for ideological rigidity in a budget dispute that has put their party on the political defensive for months. “At this stage, we’ve got to get it settled,” said Rep. C. W. Bill Young (R-Fla.).

And GOP leaders are expecting to draw support from enough Democrats to offset Republican defections.

The compromise would provide about $160 billion for the departments of Commerce, Health and Human Services, Labor and other agencies whose spending bills had been stuck between the Republican Congress and Democratic White House. The spending authority is good through Sept. 30.

Despite their concessions to Clinton, Republicans hailed the compromise as a monument to their determination to reduce the federal budget deficit. They said it would put the finishing touches on a 1996 budget that spends about $23 billion less than the 1995 budget.

They boasted that the bill would eliminate dozens of federal programs and make deep cuts in others, including such perennial conservative targets as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Legal Services Corp.

“Our children will look back on the passage of the bill as a significant step toward balancing the budget and bringing real change to this city,” said House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich (R-Ohio).

“The bottom line is . . . we will save $23 billion,” said Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.). “That’s an indication the appropriations process has worked.”

The $23 billion in savings is a shadow of Republicans’ ambitious promise to balance the budget in seven years. And the programs eliminated are mostly small and noncontroversial, while fat targets of conservative ire, such as the Commerce Department, remain intact.

The agreement would also provide funding for key presidential priorities that Republicans had tried to eliminate, including the national service program and Clinton’s promise to put 100,000 new police officers on the nation’s streets.

All the money added to accommodate Clinton was offset with spending cuts in other areas, including a $1.1-billion cut in future outlays for disaster assistance.

Republicans tried to draw a line in the sand on environmental policy. At issue were GOP proposals to allow more logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest than the administration wants, to limit the National Park Service’s power to manage a new park in the Mojave Desert, and to rein in the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of wetlands.

In the final agreement, negotiators dropped the wetlands proposal. They kept the restrictions on the Park Service in the Mojave Desert but gave the president the power to waive enforcement of the provision. The compromise on the Tongass National Forest would allow the president to waive the GOP provision and thus scale back logging, but it would provide economic assistance to affected logging workers.

Another major obstacle to final agreement was a rider to repeal the military-discharge requirement for people with HIV. The decision to include the repeal was a political setback for Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), author of the discharge-requirement law.

In a speech on the House floor, Dornan criticized the “weak Republican leadership” for giving in on this issue, accusing “lame-duck Republicans in the other chamber and Democrats” of catering to the “homosexual lobby.” The Senate Republican he had in mind was presumably Appropriations Committee Chairman Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon, who is retiring after this year.

Times staff writer Gebe Martinez contributed to this story.