Across-the-board cut moves forward

As the White House and Capitol Hill celebrated the largest budget surplus in American history for fiscal 1999, congressional leaders moved forward Wednesday with a plan to pass a 1 percent across-the-board cut in federal agencies' fiscal 2000 budgets.

The 1 percent cut would affect most discretionary spending, including House members' and senators' pay, reducing a House member's $141,300 salary by $1,400.

"As a sign of how serious we are, we will ask more of ourselves than we are asking of any government employees," said House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas. "While we ask every government agency to root out waste from its budget, members of Congress will not only root out an equal percentage of waste from Congress' budget but we will also cut our own pay."

While the across-the-board cut will likely not affect civilian and military personnel's pay raises, members of the Senior Executive Service could see their raises lowered, since SES pay is tied to congressional pay.

The 1 percent cut is included in an appropriations bill that includes funding for the departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Labor as well as the District of Columbia. House leaders planned to take the combined bill to the floor Thursday.

GOP leaders said the 1 percent cut, along with $877 million in expected budget savings from collecting on student loan defaults and a $121 million cut in Labor-HHS administrative accounts, will help keep total fiscal 2000 spending from dipping into the Social Security surplus.

Meanwhile, President Clinton announced a budget surplus of $123 billion in fiscal 1999, more than any year before and the first time the government has recorded budget surpluses two years in a row since Dwight Eisenhower was president. The surplus figure includes Social Security revenues. If the Social Security surplus were factored out, the government would have recorded a $1 billion deficit.

Depending on when the House votes on the package including the across-the-board cut, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., said the Senate could act either later Thursday or Friday. Also Friday, when the current continuing resolution runs out, Congress is expected to pass another one-week stopgap funding measure, which President Clinton has promised to sign.

After the D.C./Labor-HHS package clears Congress, appropriators and White House officials may return to negotiations on the remaining fiscal 2000 spending bills: Foreign Operations, Commerce-Justice-State and Interior.

Some House Democrats are upset that the White House made politically charged public statements about a members' pay adjustment, pressuring Republican leaders to apply a proposed spending cut to members' salaries and scuttling a bipartisan congressional agreement not to politicize the issue.

"We are somewhat concerned that the White House chose to raise the ante on this," said one Democratic leadership aide. "There is concern within our caucus that the president raised this issue. ... You had nobody in our leadership coming out and talking about this thing."

White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart suggested Monday that it was inappropriate for Republicans to cut spending while increasing their own pay. President Clinton said this week he would "not allow Congress to raise its own pay and fund its own pork barrel projects."