Clinton Playing Budget Shell Game

What is the reality behind the partisan rhetoric of the past week’s budget debate?

A recent exchange between Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., and Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jesse Brown casts a clear light.

Bond is chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that handles the VA budget. He was grilling Brown about President Clinton’s budget proposal for health care and hospitalization for veterans. For next year, Bond noted, Clinton is urging a spending level for this politically important constituency more than $1 billion higher than it was in 1995. But in the following two years - after the election - Clinton’s budget would cut that spending from $17 billion down to $14 billion and then slice it further.

How can you meet your obligations to veterans under that budget? Bond asked.

“Sen. Bond, we cannot,” Brown replied. If funding were to remain flat (as Republicans have proposed), “it would force us to deny care to about a million veterans and it would force us to close the equivalent of 41 hospitals. So, obviously, … we will not be able to live with the red line” showing the postelection cuts suggested by Clinton.

And then Brown made this eyebrow-raising statement: “The president understands that. I talked with him personally about it, and … he gave me his personal commitment that he was going to make sure that the nation honors its commitments to veterans and that he will negotiate the budget each and every year … with the veterans of the nation.”

Bond: “So you are saying that these out-years mean nothing? It is all going to be negotiated in the future, so we should not worry about the president’s budget plan? … You are not planning to live with that budget?”

Brown: “I am not planning to live with it. I am not planning to live with your budget, … nor am I planning to live with the president’s line.”

Bond: “You do not work for us. You work for the president. You are saying that you do not like our budget, but you know that his budget does not mean anything.”

After this remarkable exchange, Bond made similar inquiries of the director of another huge agency, Dan Goldin of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He, too, said White House budget officials have told him to make no plans based on the sharp cuts indicated for future years in Clinton’s budget. As Goldin put it, “The White House has instructed us to take no precipitous action on out-year budgets, and we are taking them at their word.”

To Bond and other Republicans, this looks suspiciously like a shell game. The president has told Congress and the country that he can achieve a balanced federal budget by 2002 without the serious savings in Medicare and Medicaid that Republicans have proposed. At the same time, he has said that he can keep on spending in five or six priority areas at least even with the inflation rate.

He can do all that, he has said, by cutting “less important” spending. Veterans and space budgets are not on his priority list. But the men running those programs say they have assurances that the numbers the White House has given Congress are just paper figures - not mandates to prepare for belt-tightening.

White House budget director Alice Rivlin has assured Bond and his colleagues - and then tried to convince me - that there is no contradiction.

“Simply put,” Rivlin wrote Bond, “the president is committed to the discretionary savings needed to help reach balance in 2002 … but will continue to revisit decisions about specific programs one year at a time.”

“Nobody is cheating,” Rivlin insisted in an interview with me.

“I don’t think it washes,” Bond said. “It’s not an honest budget.”

Two things are going on here.

Clinton, in his desire to dodge serious cuts in politically popular programs such as Medicare and Medicaid while promising more spending for education, the environment and law enforcement, is projecting cuts in other programs that are so severe they will be very hard to achieve. That is why people such as Brown and Goldin say the cuts are unimaginable.

And second, to postpone the pain, Clinton is telling not just the constituents of the endangered programs but also their managers that they will have plenty of opportunities in future years to stave off the cuts.

That may not be “cheating,” as Rivlin says, but it is playing a game that is too clever by half.

Balancing the budget means making tough choices. Clinton is postponing those choices and - by giving people the sense that the goal can be reached without giving up anything that is important - he is making it that much harder when the crunch comes.

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