Clinton Submits Plan To Balance Federal Budget In Seven Years Plan Could Meet Gop Demands For Reopening All Of Government

President Clinton submitted to Republican negotiators on Saturday night a proposal for a federal budget that would be balanced in seven years, clearing the way to reopen all the operations of the federal government for almost three weeks.

Clinton proposed a modified version of a budget that had been offered by Senate Democrats, a high-ranking White House aide said. His plan would offer tax cuts of $87 billion over seven years and would curb discretionary spending by $395 billion, Medicare by $102 billion, and Medicaid by $53 billion.

There was no immediate public reaction from Republican leaders, who called a recess in White House budget talks to consider their response.

But on Friday, they had passed legislation that would reopen all functions of government until Jan. 26 if the president put on the table a budget plan that would be in balance by 2002, as determined by the Congressional Budget Office. The aide said that the plan the president offered had been approved by the CBO.

Saturday night’s offer began a crucial three-day negotiating period, after Clinton signed legislation that would resume many shuttered government operations. In his weekly radio address, he said the time had come to “put aside partisanship and work to craft a balanced budget agreement that upholds our values.”

“It is not the financial numbers that are blocking our progress,” Clinton said in his address. “It is political ideology. It is time now to do what our parents have done before us: to put the national interests above narrow interests.”

In the Republicans’ reply, the Senate majority leader, Bob Dole of Kansas, said he, too, wanted to shelve partisanship. But he invited conservative Democrats in Congress to work with the Republicans, in case no deal could be struck with the president.

The first bill financing many of the services that had been either cut off or threatened by the partial shutdown of the government was signed by Clinton at 12:30 a.m. It was one of three that Congress passed on Friday as the Republicans, switching tactics, abandoned their insistence that the shutdown was their only lever to force the administration to negotiate a budget that would be brought into balance over seven years.

That first bill opened national parks and museums and will pay for services like passport and visa issuance, as well as veterans’ pensions and welfare benefits, through September.

It will also provide pay through Jan. 26 for the 760,000 federal workers whose agencies have had no money to spend since Dec. 15. Some 280,000 of those employees were furloughed last month. The rest, designated essential, have been working without pay.

A second bill, which Clinton signed at 5 o’clock Saturday evening, provides money for other operations, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the National Institutes of Health, through September.

The third bill, which would reopen the entire government through Jan. 26, will not be sent to Clinton for signing unless he puts a seven-year balanced-budget proposal of his own on the negotiating table.

The budget negotiations resumed on Saturday evening and are scheduled to continue at length on Sunday and Monday, which may be a deadline of sorts. Dole told the Senate on Friday that he expected to know by early in the week whether an agreement was possible, and the other chief Republican negotiator, the speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, has scheduled a cross-country fund-raising trip that is to begin on Tuesday and last through the following week.

While Republicans said the atmosphere improved markedly at a negotiating session on Friday night, they also said they had no idea whether that would translate into progress on details.

And a White House aide confirmed Republican assertions that the administration was unwilling to move at all from its proposal to curb Medicare spending by $125 billion over seven years, much less than the Republicans have demanded.

This suggests that real progress is still not at hand.