No automatic increases in agency budgets, senators say

Following a Senate Republican Conference meeting on the budget, the Senate Budget Committee Wednesday took its turn questioning Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew about President Clinton's $1.84 trillion budget request for fiscal 2001-with the primary topic of debate in both cases how much money the federal government should be allowed to spend on discretionary programs next year.

Lew defended the administration's use of a baseline that assumes spending will increase at the rate of inflation over the next 10 years as realistic, and noted that since the GOP takeover of Congress, government spending has grown faster than inflation.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., told Lew, in referring to the more than hour-long GOP Conference session, "I am hearing from Republicans that we are not going to adopt a policy of automatically increasing every account in government by the rate of inflation." He also assured Lew that GOP senators are "fully aware" that Republican-controlled Congresses have allowed total spending to rise-and let him know Wednesday they do not want that trend to continue in fiscal 2001.

Although that appears to be the sentiment of the majority of GOP senators, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, said after the GOP Conference meeting he cautioned his colleagues to be pragmatic.

He also said the fiscal 2001 budget must have "enough money to meet the emergencies." At the hearing, Domenici and Budget member Rod Grams, R-Minn., both criticized the president's budget for not allotting nearly enough of the surplus to tax cuts, and pointed out that, in fiscal 2001, Clinton's budget actually contains a net tax increase of $9 billion, of which $4 billion would come from a 25 cent per pack increase in the cigarette tax; over 10 years, the Clinton budget proposes net tax cuts of $256 billion.