House Continues Budget-Slashing Spree Gop Cuts Targeting Social Programs Called `Vicious’
House subcommittees approved $10.5 billion more in cuts in housing, environmental and other programs Thursday despite Democratic accusations that Republicans were demolishing vital social initiatives with “vicious” reductions.
A day after five House panels approved $7 billion worth of cuts in summer programs for youngsters, food aid to poor women and children and other programs, four more subcommittees found new targets. That brought to $17.5 billion the amount the House would chop from the budget, which would be one of the biggest slashes ever in funding already enacted into law.
The focus of the day’s labors was a subcommittee that adopted a massive $9.4 billion reduction. Included were $7.3 billion in reductions for public housing modernization, rent assistance for the poor and other housing programs - equivalent to onequarter of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 1995 budget. Other cuts hit clean-water projects, President Clinton’s national service program, veterans’ hospitals and medical equipment.
Another panel approved $272 million in cuts to law enforcement, commerce and diplomatic programs - including a $30 million cut in high technology grants, an initiative of Vice President Al Gore. The panel also rejected the Clinton administration’s request for $672 million to pay for international peacekeeping activities.
Still another subcommittee voted to erase $159 million in proposed spending, mostly by killing 13 proposed new federal office buildings and courthouses across the country. And a fourth panel sliced $700 million in transportation programs, including money for highways and mass transit.
“I think it’s just unconscionable, it’s reprehensible,” Rep. Louis Stokes, D-Ohio, said of the housing reductions.
“The fact is the money isn’t getting there,” responded Chairman Bob Livingston, R-La., whose House Appropriations Committee is searching for the cuts. “We have greater poverty than before the War on Poverty began” in the 1960s.
Having promised deep reductions in their “Contract With America” campaign manifesto, Republicans are intent on showing voters that they mean business - and in effect daring Clinton to oppose them.
With the GOP swinging its budget scythe at programs that have served Democrats’ low-income constituents for years, the minority party’s leaders tried to paint Republicans as heartless.
“These guys are pursuing an extremist agenda that savages those living near the poverty line,” said Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. “They just let their ideological zealots have free rein … and the results are vicious.”
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros predicted the cuts would push 32,000 families into homelessness and called them “illogical and unfair.”
Republicans countered that they were merely responding to public demands that the government be made smaller and more efficient.
“If you believe the government should control everything and you believe only bureaucrats know what they’re doing, any cuts are extremist,” House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., said in an interview.
“It’s crazy to say you can’t touch these programs because they sound good when they don’t work, most of them,” said Rep. Bill Young of Florida, a senior Republican on the Appropriations panel.
The cuts would help pay for promised GOP tax cuts and help 40 states recover from recent natural disasters and storms. But even those costs weren’t safe from GOP budgetcutters: They pared Clinton’s $6.7 billion request for disaster assistance to $5.4 billion, and said they would consider the rest later. Most of the money is destined for Southern California, still saddled with the costs of the January 1994 earthquake.
Democrats seem unable to halt the GOP cuts in the House, where passage is expected next month. But the drive will probably be slowed somewhat in the more moderate Senate, where many Republicans view the “Contract” as excessive.
Whatever the result, the GOP search for spending cuts is just a prelude to a far tougher job Republicans have set for themselves. They say they will find more than $1 trillion in reductions over the next seven years to balance the federal budget and lower taxes.
For now, though, House Republicans have already pushed cuts through subcommittees that past Democratic-dominated Congress would never have tolerated.
On Wednesday, one subcommittee alone voted to erase 84 programs and reduce 58 others. Panels voted to eliminate all $1.7 billion from summer youth programs; reduce AIDS care and prevention by $36 million and phase out the $1.3 billion program that helps the poor pay utility bills.
Programs for the middle class were not immune. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps finance public radio and television stations, would see its budget cut by nearly one-third in two years. And the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities each saw their $170 million budgets trimmed by $5 million.
xxxx Cutting the budget Highlights of the $10.5 billion that Republican-dominated House subcommittees voted Thursday to cut from money already in the budget: Rental assistance for the poor: $2.7 billion. Water projects, Environmental Protection Agency: $1.3 billion. Modernization of public housing units: $1.2 billion. Public housing development: $690 million. Subsidies to local public housing authorities: $404 million. Federal aid to highways, $351 million. President Clinton’s national service program: $210 million. Medical equipment and construction of facilities for veterans: $206 million. National Science Foundation, academic construction: $132 million. Grants to local mass transit systems: $76 million. High-technology grants: $30 million. NASA’s Earth-observing systems: $25 million. National Institute of Standards and Technology research: $20 million. Eliminate Small Business Administration’s tree-planting program: $15 million. Reduce contributions to international peacekeeping: $15 million. Associated Press