Leaders in Congress OK Cuts to Budget

On the second day of a rare weekend session, House and Senate leaders Sunday approved the first significant spending cuts to domestic social programs in nearly a decade and agreed to attach a proposal allowing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to a bill funding the U.S. military.

Rushing to complete its business before leaving town for the holidays, the House met past midnight and was expected early today to take up the military spending bill, which includes the drilling measure, and the budget cuts.

The Senate has in the past blocked efforts to open the Alaskan refuge to energy exploration. But because the proposal is now part of a bill funding troops in wartime, President Bush’s long-sought goal of allowing drilling in the refuge will be politically tougher for senators to oppose.

“Obviously, I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think I had the votes,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said Sunday as partisan tensions ran high over the maneuver to put one of the nation’s most contentious environmental issues in a defense bill. The Senate is expected to vote on the drilling measure this week.

House and Senate negotiators also agreed to cut $41.6 billion from Medicare, Medicaid, student loans and other domestic programs over the next five years -- a measure that Republicans describe as part of a new, more determined effort to reduce the federal budget deficit, which totaled $319 billion for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. Democrats contended that the savings would be wiped out by billions of dollars in tax cuts that Republicans hope to pass early next year.

The White House considered the budget cuts and Arctic drilling among its priorities for 2005. But some of Congress’ final actions this year are not squaring entirely with the White House’s wishes.

The military spending bill included $29 billion for the hurricane-stricken Gulf Coast -- more than Bush sought -- and $3.8 billion to prepare for a flu outbreak -- less than the White House wanted. The military spending bill also includes an across-the-board spending cut in most federal programs, designed to offset the new hurricane relief.

The decision to attach Arctic drilling to the $453-billion Pentagon spending bill led to a clash between Frist and his Democratic counterpart, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

A tired-looking Frist rejected Reid’s contention that Republicans were seeking to change Senate rules in attaching the drilling to the defense bill, and Frist defended the move by saying that Arctic drilling has had the support of a majority of the Senate.

Minutes after Frist spoke with reporters, Reid said that attaching the drilling provision to a military spending bill showed “the absolute cynicism of the leadership in playing with the rules” of the Senate.

Several former high-ranking military officers -- including former Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, a former chief of the U.S. Central Command, and retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, the former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East -- expressed concern in a letter to lawmakers that attaching the long-debated issue to a defense bill could jeopardize funding for the troops.

Although Arctic drilling has been blocked in the Senate by filibusters before, a number of anti-drilling senators have said they would find it difficult to vote during wartime against a defense spending bill that includes the drilling provision.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a drilling opponent, said in an interview at the Capitol on Sunday that she believed drilling proponents were still short of the 60 votes to block a Senate filibuster.

“This is not to home base by a long shot,” she said. “It’s at third base right now.”

Opening a portion of the Arctic refuge to energy exploration has been debated for decades. Drilling proponents seized on high gas prices to advance the initiative and have argued that the refuge offers the nation’s single greatest prospect for onshore domestic oil production of an estimated 10 billion barrels of oil. The U.S. consumes about 20 million barrels a day.

Environmentalists have argued that drilling would endanger one of the nation’s natural treasures -- a region so rich in wildlife that they call it America’s Serengeti -- and have a negligible effect on America’s energy needs or prices.

Because Arctic drilling had been blocked in the Senate by Democrat-led filibusters, Senate GOP leaders earlier this year had attached a measure that would authorize the energy exploration to a budget-cutting bill that cannot be filibustered. But the drilling provision threatened to bring down the budget-cutting bill, a GOP priority.

So Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who has long championed the drilling and heads the Senate defense appropriations subcommittee, attached the drilling provision to the military spending bill.

In the budget agreement, the $41.6 billion in cuts represents Congress’ first big effort since 1997 to slow the growth of federal benefit programs. It is less than the $50 billion in cuts approved earlier by the House, but House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) called the agreement “a good first step” toward reining in spending.

The threatened cuts to food stamps were dropped. And the cut to child support enforcement, a concern for Los Angeles County and California officials, is $1.5 billion, less than the $5 billion the House had proposed.

House and Senate negotiators also rejected an effort to include in the budget-cutting bill a measure to split the San Francisco-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals into two benches.

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Times staff writer Mary Curtius contributed to this report.