Clinton, GOP Wrestle With Budget Finale

White House and Republican negotiators struggled to narrow their differences over environmental policy and government spending Sunday in an unusual weekend bargaining session to address the final obstacles to agreement on this year’s federal budget.

The weekend wrangling represents the stretch drive, not just of the annual budget battle, but of the entire tumultuous year of Congress, which began with the grand drama of Clinton’s impeachment trial and is ending in bitter jockeying over relatively small budget differences. Republican leaders are hoping to settle the handful of environmental, education and law enforcement disputes and pass the budget in time for Congress to adjourn for the year by midweek.

To that end, GOP negotiators were hoping to wrap up negotiations on the Interior Department budget as early as today. But that will require them to resolve such contentious issues as the funding Clinton is seeking to acquire environmentally sensitive land and policy changes the administration believes would weaken regulation of mining, oil and other industries.

“We’ve made some progress, but we’re not there yet,” said Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), the GOP’s lead negotiator on environmental issues, after a session in which Republicans offered to provide $335 million more for the Interior Department and related agencies than the $14.5 billion they had offered earlier.

But negotiations hit a new snag, sources close to the talks said, when Republicans rebuffed an administration proposal to dedicate $900 million a year to federal acquisition of land for environmental protection.

“I wouldn’t say we are at ground zero, but we are still a considerable distance from a done deal,” said Linda Ricci, spokeswoman for the administration’s Office of Management and Budget.

Settlement of environmental issues would be an important breakthrough, but administration officials warned that one issue Clinton will not compromise on is the money he wants to continue a multiyear initiative to reduce class size by hiring 100,000 more teachers nationwide.

“Realistically, we are not prepared to go home until we get more teachers and lower class size,” said White House Chief of Staff John Podesta in an interview on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press.”

That tone infuriated Republicans, who have nearly matched Clinton on funding for the program but want to give states more flexibility to spend it as they see fit.

“When we hear about the president’s nonnegotiable demands, it doesn’t sit too well,” said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) heading into Sunday’s talks on the issue.

Also unresolved are disputes over accumulated dues that the United States owes to the United Nations and providing funding Clinton wants for hiring more police officers. And the administration is continuing to oppose Republican plans to impose a 1% across-the-board spending cut so the government does not have to dip into Social Security surpluses.

“Rather than going after the pork they added or the waste that’s in programs . . . they threw up their hands,” Podesta said of the proposed across-the-board reduction.

Even many Republicans don’t like the 1% spending cut and say the last point of negotiation will be trying to figure out how to keep from offsetting or cutting spending to leave the Social Security trust fund intact.

“Our final Ouija board game is going to be the offsets,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who was unsure whether the budget talks could wrap up by midweek. “It’s not going to be easy.”

At issue are the final pieces of the budget for the 2000 fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Thirteen appropriations bills are needed to keep the government running, and five have yet to be signed into law.

One of the politically charged issues that remains is environmental funding and policy in the bill that finances the Interior Department and other agencies. Republicans have included several policy riders that the administration opposes, including one that would allow more dumping of mining waste and another that would delay proposed extraction fees for oil and gas companies that drill on public lands.

Clinton also objected to the GOP’s Interior bill because it would provide only $266 million for land acquisition, compared with the $550 million the White House wanted for acquiring environmentally sensitive land threatened by development. During Sunday’s talks, Democratic negotiators proposed a new mechanism that would dedicate a set amount of money for land acquisition each year, eventually rising to $900 million annually. The idea got a chilly reception from Republicans who viewed it as establishing a new entitlement program.

Republicans did, however, try to narrow their differences by indicating they would be willing to water down the environmental riders and to add $335 million to the Interior bill for land acquisition, Indian programs and other provisions. But that was still not enough money for the administration, according to a source close to the negotiations, and the language of the riders was still in flux.

In the education funding bill, Clinton has requested $1.4 billion for the second year of the multiyear class-size reduction initiative, which provides money for states to hire 100,000 more teachers. Republicans, in a bill vetoed by Clinton largely over that issue, would provide $1.2 billion but replace the program with a grant to states that gives them more flexibility to use the money for teacher training and other purposes if those are more pressing needs than hiring teachers. The current program allows states to use the money for other purposes only if they have reduced the student-to-teacher ration to 18-to-1.

“I think they ought to have the choice, instead of a straitjacket out of Washington,” said Specter.

Although he was angered by Podesta’s saying the administration would not budge on the education program, Specter said he would be willing to provide $1.4 billion for the program if the administration proposed spending cuts in other areas.