Politics

Clinton, GOP Keep Store Open

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

October 25, 1999 / 3:41 PM EDT / CBS

The House has passed a continuing resolution to keep the government open for another week, reports CBS News Capitol Hill Correspondent Bob Fuss. The Senate will follow suit shortly and President Clinton says he'll sign it.

This is the third time in less than a month Congress has had to pass a temporary spending bill to avoid a government shutdown.

The bill will keep agencies open through Nov. 5, and is the third temporary measure since fiscal 2000 began on Oct. 1. The current one expires Friday night.

As Republicans and Democrats continued to accuse each other of trying to spend the Social Security trust fund, Wisconsin Democrat David Obey complained no one was negotiating.

"If we could get the political bull-gravy out of this debate we could solve all the remaining dollar problems in about three days," he said. "We're not that far apart."

But there's no effort right now to get the two sides closer together. Republicans are working on a 1 percent across-the-board spending cut that President Clinton says he'll veto.

The cuts - 0.97 percent for all federal agencies - were attached to a huge spending package that contains $314 billion for health, education and labor programs plus $429 million more for the District of Columbia's budget.

"If we bring it to the floor, we're going to have it," predicted House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas.

Even so, Republicans were eager to get the bill to the White House. Doing so would let them claim they had finished all 13 spending bills for the new fiscal year without touching Social Security's surpluses - a boast they hope will help them in the 2000 elections.

Clinton and congressional Democrats say budget gimmicks shield the fact that the Republicans' plans would violate their own pledge, dipping into Social Security this year for $17 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

"That is wrong and it doesn't have to be," Clinton said.

In addition to the across-the-board cut, Republicans claimed savings from a computerized effort to crack down on unpaid federal student loans, and by trimming $120 million in administrative costs at the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education.

The GOP designed the labor-health bill so Clinton would have little opportunity to attack them for cutting programs. The measure would provide about $600 million more than Clinton requested for the annually approved programs the bill controls, including $300 million more for education than he proposed.

Instead, their biggest disagreements are over who controls the money. Instead of the $1.4 billion Clinton wants for hiring teachers, the bill would provide $1.2 billion that states could use to improve schools in many ways.

In their struggle to find votes, GOP leaders promised lawmakers reluctant to cut highway projects that they would get a chance to restore the reductions next year.

Despite some internal grumbling, awmakers also included their own salaries in the spending reductions. Their pay, currently set to rise 3.4 percent to $141,300 in January, would grow instead to $139,900.

Republicans say the across-the-board savings could come from federal waste. Democrats challenged that, and criticized other GOP savings proposals as well.

The National Institutes of Health's budget for fiscal 2000 would be $17.9 billion, $2.3 billion more than this year. But Republicans would require that $7.5 billion of it not be spent until next Sept. 27, just four days from the end of the fiscal year, preventing most of it from being charged to fiscal 2000's books.

Democrats said that would disrupt research, while Republicans said it would not.

Republicans also were claiming $877 million in savings by using a computer database of newly hired workers to track down people who defaulted on student loans. The Congressional Budget Office says the idea would only save $130 million, but Republicans are using a more generous estimate used by Clinton's White House budget office.

Both parties have pledged to leave Social Security surpluses alone to position themselves as defenders of the pension system, even though both have routinely spent the money for decades without weakening the program.