Senate leader warns of across-the-board spending cut

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., noted that with the budget screws tightening on fiscal 2002, Congress and the White House may consider ideas such as an across-the-board spending cut to keep from tapping into the Social Security trust fund surplus. Should such action be necessary, Lott has said defense spending should not be exempted from cuts - nor would he definitely say Bush would get the entire $18.4 billion fiscal 2002 defense increase he wants. "I think it remains to be seen," Lott said, although adding, "I think it's possible." Lott said that among the steps Congress should take to boost the nation's sagging economy is to "exercise spending restraint - and we should do this without dipping into Social Security." Bipartisan appropriations staffers from both chambers discussed, but came to no final agreements, on the fiscal 2002 defense and education numbers - although one source said the group is closing in on an education number of $3 billion to $4 billion more than anticipated in the budget resolution. The source also said all parties are committed to keeping the budget resolution spending limits, plus the president's defense increase - which may be made to fit the budget by using OMB's outlay numbers, which are lower than CBO's. Progress was also made in resolving the differences that have kept the House and Senate from going to conference on the five fiscal 2002 bills that have passed both chambers, the source said. Also on Monday, meetings among Office of Management and Budget officials and House and Senate Appropriations Committee staffers and among House Budget Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, and Republican leaders were aimed at keeping the fiscal 2002 appropriations cycle on track while trying to prevent the $9 billion on-budget deficit that the Congressional Budget Office now projects for the current fiscal year. To that end, the House Budget Committee announced a markup for Tuesday morning of a bill, which at presstime was still being drafted, to be titled the "Social Security Protection Act" and intended to authorize some mechanism for cutting fiscal 2001 spending to ensure that the entire fiscal 2001 Social Security surplus is devoted to paying down the publicly held debt. House Republicans who, unlike many of their Senate colleagues and President Bush, are up for re-election next year, have made protecting themselves against Democratic charges they broke their pledge not to "raid" the Social Security surplus a top priority since returning from the August recess to face shrinking budget surplus estimates. But administration and Senate Republican sources said today they are more focused on containing spending in fiscal 2002, in part, because of the difficulty of passing effective legislation to limit spending in a fiscal year that ends in two weeks.