The Spirit of '96

ast April, responding to the first hundred days of the Republican-led 104th Congress, President Clinton told an audience of newspaper editors in Dallas that some of the goals of his Administration were not so different from those of the new GOP majority on Capitol Hill. "I have already cut 100,000 bureaucratic positions, and we are on the way under budgets already passed to reducing the government to its smallest size since President Kennedy occupied this office," Clinton said.

Seven months later, in remarks to the annual Washington meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a group of party centrists which Clinton once chaired, the President reported that "there are now 200,000 fewer people working for the United States government" than on the day he took the oath of office. "Today, federal employees are a smaller percentage of the civilian work force than at any time since 1933, before the New Deal," Clinton boasted.

Who knows, by the time voters cast their ballots next November, the President may be making rhetorical comparisons to the size of the executive branch under President Ulysses S. Grant.

With Republican leaders of the 104th Congress having spent many months in a concerted drive to cut the federal establishment down to size, and with GOP presidential hopefuls articulating the party's anti-Washington line, it would seem that the political spirit of '96 is hostile to government, its employees, programs and clienteles. Indeed, it would appear that leaders and foot soldiers of both great political armies, Democrat and Republican, are girding for one final assault on the federal monolith.

The election of 1996 will set the tone and govern the substance of what transpires in the 105th Congress-for it is certain that the role of government, its size, shape and scope, will be at the core of the country's political dialogue this year.

But it is by no means certain that the spirit of '96 will be as inhospitable to government as the spirit that animated the last round of national elections. Voters may well lack the enthusiasm for reining in government that they displayed in 1994.

Indeed, Republicans were dealt a rebuke in public opinion polls last year as voters thought they were moving too far too fast in pushing their balanced budget package through Congress. And having fought that battle in 1995, the GOP White House hopefuls are now faced with the task of advancing their arguments about the proper role of government beyond the balanced budget. That's now necessary in order to differentiate their candidacies, and to appeal to conservative voters who dominate their presidential primaries and caucuses.

The upcoming congressional elections are also likely to be part of a national referendum on the role of government, especially in the races for House seats. Instead of running traditional campaigns on safer parochial issues, most Republicans and Democrats, and certainly their respective leaders, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt, D-Mo., seem willing to fight out the 1996 election along battle lines drawn by sweeping budget votes of the 104th Congress. Those votes have called for the most significant reordering of government priorities since the days of the Great Society.

"The record of the Republican Congress is going to be the subject of considerable debate," says White House deputy chief of staff Harold M. Ickes, President Clinton's chief political strategist. "It's really a debate about what kind of country we are and what kind of country do we want to be."

The President's political strategy is more complicated than simply borrowing themes from the Republicans. Sometimes referred to as "triangulation," the strategy calls for Clinton to position himself somewhere in between the conservative views of the GOP congressional majority and the liberal traditions of the Democrats in Congress, especially those in the House.

Thus, during the debate over the budget reconciliation package, and just two days after his speech to the DLC, Clinton shifted from his shrink-the-bureaucracy stance and rose to the defense of government. "You have a group of people in the Congress now, the controlling element of the Congress, [that] believes that they should undermine and break the role of the federal government in America's life, except for national defense," President Clinton said in an interview with CBS News.

Cutting the Cabinet

Cutting government, of course, is a lot harder to do in practice than campaign rhetoric would suggest-as the Republicans found out after they took over Congress last year.

Hopes were especially high among GOP freshmen in the House that the federal government could be shorn of four Cabinet departments: Commerce, Education, Energy and Housing and Urban Development. The Clinton Administration opposed these proposals, but even before the first budget reconciliation bill was sent to the President last year, skeptical Senate Republicans forced the House to cut back its list of proposed terminations to just one, Commerce.

Even some Republicans who led the fight for budget reductions were leery of making the kind of sweeping changes the House Republicans wanted. For instance, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., the influential chairman of the Senate Budget Committee whose state is home to major nuclear research facilities, opposed moves to do away with the Energy Department.

"The Senate is not the House and it's responded differently to these pushes and pressures," says freshman Rep. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., one of the leaders of the House GOP's efforts to do away with Cabinet departments. Brownback says the Republican-led Senate has adopted a "wait-and-see-what-happens attitude" toward his drive to "just slow it down and kill it by inaction."

Even in the House, some veteran Republican Members warded off proposals to kill programs they had had a hand in funding over the years, even when they were in the minority. For example, some small business programs were protected by Rep. Jan Meyers, R-Kan., the new chairwoman of the House Small Business Committee. Rep. E.G. (Bud) Shuster, R-Pa., the new chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, tenaciously fought efforts to make large cuts in programs under his jurisdiction.

But the House Republican freshmen haven't been deterred from their push to kill more Cabinet departments, which is likely to remain a focal point of their efforts to reduce the size and scope of the federal government. "We still have Education, Housing and Energy on the block for next year," said Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., a freshman Member of the House Budget Committee, in an interview last December.

"People have never thought Washington could ever limit itself on anything, but we're actually showing them that there is an end," says Brownback, assessing the GOP's efforts last year to cut the federal establishment. "This is just the beginning," said Myrick.

Still, some conservative thinkers remain skeptical about how successful this start has been. Stephen Moore, director of fiscal policy studies at the Cato Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, notes that the original budget resolution crafted by House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich, R-Ohio, proposed eliminating about 300 government programs and agencies. But by the time the first budget reconciliation measure was sent to the President, the number of terminations was down to about 30 or 40, Moore estimates.

Although he gives congressional Republicans fairly high marks for trying to balance the budget in seven years, "they have still refused to pull up programs by the roots," says Moore. "One of the lessons we learned after the Reagan era is that if you just use the lawn mower approach and trim everything on the top, programs can grow back, just as they did during the Bush and Clinton administrations," says Moore.

Looking toward the 1996 elections, Brownback says Republicans will need to point to actual agencies and Cabinet departments they have either killed or made serious proposals to eliminate if they are to make a convincing case that they are the party best able to rein in government. "I think the general point doesn't resonate unless you have the specifics to back it up," says Brownback.

What Dole Would Do

One way or another, all the major Republican presidential candidates have retained the enthusiasm for cutting government that was evident at the polls in 1994, and in the tentative work of the GOP Congress last year. Their plans generally include at least one of four objectives: less spending, dismantling Cabinet departments, shifting some responsibilities of the federal establishment to state and local governments and changing the culture of Washington.

Once called the "tax collector for the welfare state" by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole has moved determinedly to embrace the Republican revolution against government that Gingrich leads. Dole, front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, last year signed the "no new taxes" pledge that he spurned when he sought the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. He has also proposed to carry out the dismantlement of no fewer than four Cabinet departments-Commerce, Education, Energy and Housing and Urban Development. Dole has called these four departments "the most ineffective, burdensome, and meddlesome" in the executive branch.

"Americans are demanding a nation made more free by insisting on a government that is more limited and we will give it to them," said Dole in a speech last March on "re-limiting" government. "And as we do, our guide will be this basic question: Is this program, or agency, or even this department, a basic function of limited government?"

By Dole's count, the four departments he would eliminate employ 74,000 people and spend more than $70 billion a year. But, of course, he wouldn't deep-six all of this. For instance, Commerce's three largest functions-those carried out by the Bureau of the Census, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office-would continue. These, and other Commerce programs, would simply move out from under the Commerce umbrella to find homes elsewhere in the government.

Most of the jobs at Commerce that Dole would eliminate have to do with trade, tourism and technology promotion. In a Dec. 5 article in The Wall Street Journal, coauthored with Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., Dole wrote that savings from killing off the Commerce Department would amount to $6 billion over seven years.

Just how much Dole would save by eliminating other Cabinet departments is less clear. Like the rest of his rivals for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, Dole doesn't have a detailed blueprint when it comes to doing away with a Cabinet department like Energy. Dole proposed in his "re-limiting government" speech to send Energy's defense-related chores to the Pentagon and "farm out the few other necessary programs to other departments and offices." But by the end of the year, Dole's office couldn't provide the list of exactly which programs the Senator considered necessary and precisely where he would send them to be administered within the federal bureaucracy.

Dole has made a few more proposals. In the process of abolishing HUD, he would replace the federal role in public housing with a voucher program and privatize the Federal Housing Authority. He would shift HUD's homeless assistance programs to the Health and Human Services Department. Responsibility for monitoring enforcement of fair housing laws would go to Justice.

As for education, Dole would like to shift funds spent by the Education Department to local school districts. He would, however, transfer special education programs to HHS, and send civil rights enforcement matters to the Justice Department.

Dole takes a strong devolutionist line. A year ago, he vowed that "if I do nothing else in the next two years, I will dust off the 10th Amendment and restore it to its rightful place in the Constitution." The amendment grants to the states all powers not delegated to the federal government.

In line with this approach, last year's Republican welfare reform proposal eliminated nearly all welfare entitlements and replaced them with block grants administered by the states.

Rival Revolutionaries

Dole's rivals for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination haven't offered many details on how they would pick apart the federal bureaucracies if they were elected. But what they lack in detail, they make up for with their gusto for the task.

Texas Sen. Phil Gramm vows that as President, he would continue to judge the merits of a government program with a simple question: Are the benefits derived from government spending money on a program worth taking tax dollars from middle-class Americans to pay for it? And as Gramm is fond of saying, "There aren't a hell of a lot of programs that will stand up to that test."

Like Dole, Gramm favors doing away with the departments of Education, Energy and HUD. He also wants to consolidate the Commerce and Labor departments. On top of that, Gramm would like to dispatch the Transportation Department, at least as a Cabinet-level agency.

Specifics for some of these plans, however, are in short supply. Gramm's advisers say that he would retain the Energy Department's nuclear weapons stockpile management program as a federal responsibility, but they don't know which other functions of the department he'd keep in Washington. For the Education Department, Gramm's formula is simple: Send half the department's funds to state and local school boards, and give half to parents in the form of an education tax credit.

Gramm has also indicated he'd support further across-the-board cuts in federal employment. "Have you missed the government?" he asked on ABC's This Week with David Brinkley during the partial government shutdown that started last December. "I mean, doesn't it strike you funny that 280,000 government employees are furloughed, large segments of the government are shut down? I think this proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that we need to go back and eliminate another 150,000 to 200,00 bureaucratic positions in the federal government."

As evidence of his commitment to cutting government, Gramm has said if he is elected President, he will not seek a second term if the federal budget is not balanced by the end of his first four years in office. "That forces you to make choices about government programs," says one Gramm adviser. "He is not going to lay out a budget that keeps everything going, but just at a lower rate."

Gramm's aides also cite his legislative track record as evidence of his sincerity about cutting government. On the spending side, they note his efforts on behalf of Ronald Reagan's first budget and the role he played in passing the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit reduction law. They also point out that as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State and the Judiciary this year, Gramm proposed defunding the Legal Services Corporation and the Death Penalty Resources Center, a program which helps craft appeals for death row inmates.

"Some people talk about less government and more freedom-that has embodied Phil Gramm's legislative career," says Gramm presidential campaign spokesman Gary Koops.

Well, not entirely. In 1979, Gramm voted to create the Education Department. In an interview last year, Gramm insisted that vote was not a mistake, but rather a move that "reduced duplication in the bureaucracy and actually saved a little money."

Of course, Gramm's not the only Republican candidate who now wants to dismantle a Cabinet department he helped to create. Dole, for instance, backed the establishment of the Energy Department.

Former Tennessee governor and Education Secretary Lamar Alexander offers up some of the same government cutbacks that Dole and Gramm do, including the Cabinet department he once headed. But his proposal to dismantle the Education Department may seem expedient to some conservatives-he favored eliminating the department when he was a governor, but never advocated the policy while he held his Cabinet post.

In Alexander's plan, nearly all the department's major spending for elementary and secondary education programs would be put into block grants and given to states. He would prefer that programs either be transferred to states along with a tax source to fund them, or as part of a swap in which a state picks up the tab for the programs in exchange for shifting some other fiscal burden to the federal government.

Alexander would transfer the administration of college student financial aid programs to the Treasury Department. Indian education programs would be transferred to the Interior Department. Special education and rehabilitation programs that were not turned over the states would go to HHS.

Although his list of education programs that could be eliminated is incomplete, Alexander estimates that at least one-fifth of the department's 250 programs could be abolished. Those include federal education technical assistance centers, library support programs, literacy programs for prisoners and "star school" programs. That accounts for $2 billion to $3 billion a year, Alexander figures.

Alexander also favors eliminating the Commerce and Education departments. He contrasts his stand on welfare with Dole's and Gramm's by saying he wants to return all administration of welfare programs to the states, while noting that the "Washington Senators" running for the White House (Dole, Gramm and Indiana Sen. Richard G. Lugar) voted for a welfare reform package that still contains a plethora of federal guidelines. "We should not replace Democratic arrogance with Republican arrogance," Alexander is fond of saying. And for effect, he likes to hold up a copy of the 800-page Senate Republican bill to campaign audiences.

Alexander is not only a strong supporter of congressional term limits; he would like to cut congressional salaries in half as well as the amount of time Congress is in session each year. Presumably that would reduce the time Members spend listening to lobbyists and increase the time they spend with their constituents. His battle cry, "cut their pay and send them home," lost some of its resonance among the party faithful after the Republicans won control of the House and Senate in the 1994 elections, but Alexander still touts his proposal for a part-time Congress as a way to change "the culture of Washington" that has helped to nourish the growth of government.

Magazine publisher Malcolm S. "Steve" Forbes Jr., who spent more than $8 million of his personal fortune last year to boost his candidacy, also has vague proposals to lop off big chunks of the federal bureaucracy. "Commerce, Energy, Education, and HUD will be stripped of all but their essential functions," says Forbes on the campaign trail. "A whole alphabet soup of agencies will be eliminated."

And Forbes has a specific solution, besides term limits, for the changing the culture of Washington-a flat tax. "You have to take away the politicians' power to manipulate the tax code, to trade loopholes for reelection, and you have to limit their terms," says Forbes in his stump speech. "Do that, and you'll change Washington forever. Do that and people will get their government back again."

And Indiana's Lugar has a tax proposal to go one step further than the Forbes plan. He favors replacing the income tax with a national sales tax. In congressional testimony last June, Lugar said that the income tax "represents the worst form of big government intrusion into the lives of all Americans." Lugar said that under his plan there would be no audits and that the Internal Revenue Service "would be substantially dismantled." He said that a flat tax simply gave the income tax a face lift and leaves the IRS essentially intact.

Conservative television commentator Patrick J. Buchanan probably has the longest list of offices that could be shuttered in Washington. "For openers," he says he would get rid of the departments of Commerce, Education, Energy and HUD. He would also cashier the Agency for International Development, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the Bureau of Land Management, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts-"We should padlock it and fumigate it," says Buchanan-and National Endowment for the Humanities. After that, Buchanan says he would downsize the United States Information Agency and the IRS, and "break apart" the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, moving it from the Treasury Department to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Many of Buchanan's proposals, like getting rid of Public Broadcasting and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, don't save that much money or dent the mountains of regulations that affect businesses and individuals. But these targets do appeal to conservative Christian voters in the Republican party, who object to some of the more liberal cultural values that a few of these programs have promoted in the past.

At the White House

The President's advisers haven't had to wait for the Republicans to nominate their candidate to define Clinton's message about the role of government for the 1996 elections. They believe the 1995 budget fight has gone a long way toward dampening the anti-government mood of the electorate that contributed to the GOP's success in 1994.

"I think that since 1994, the serious debate on the balanced budget has allowed voters to see with more clarity what they want to keep in the government," says Elaine Kamarck, senior policy adviser to Vice President Al Gore. Indeed, public opinion polls during the budget fight found that voters were very nervous about cutting Medicare, the government's largest entitlement program outside of Social Security.

Nevertheless, Kamarck is quick to claim that the bureaucracy is being cut back. By last August, the Administration estimated that between 1993 and 1995, some 162,979 full-time equivalent jobs had been cut from the government. The lion's share, 97,300 jobs, came from civilian positions in the Defense Department, the agency with the largest work force. On a percentage basis, Clinton officials point out that larger reductions have come from places like the Office of Personnel Management, down to 4,500 positions in 1995 from 6,200 slots in 1993, and the General Services Administration, down from 20,700 to 17,000.

Republicans say it is misleading for Clinton to take credit for shrinking the government work force to historic lows, because the end of the Cold War made reductions in the Defense Department a fait accompli. Also, they point out that civilian rolls are still larger than they were when John F. Kennedy was president.

But Kamarck disputes the promises of Republican rhetoric to downsize the government. "The basic difference between us and them is they pretend you can do without big parts of government," she says. "You have to make them work better and cost less, because they're not going any place."

To that end, Kamarck and others in the Administration tout innovations and efficiencies in government like the Social Security's toll-free telephone information line, which was judged in a widely publicized private survey to be superior to those of companies like L.L Bean and Federal Express. Changes that the Administration has made to conduct the census in 2000 will save roughly $1.2 billion, says Kamarck. And this year, the IRS has set up a program that could allow up to 20 million taxpayers to file their returns by telephone.

"The public is much more sophisticated about government these days," says Kamarck. "They are just as interested in having the government they have work better." The reinvention theme could play an important role in 1996 electioneering, the President told nearly half the Cabinet, many other government officials and the media who assembled at the White House Rose Garden in early September to hear Clinton and Gore tout the second anniversary of the National Performance Review. Clinton's speech in particular struck some observers as testing the waters with rhetoric that could be of use in his reelection campaign.

Even Republican critics of Washington give the Administration credit for its reinventing government initiatives. "I applaud their efforts, but I think they've asked the wrong question first," says Brownback. "They ask, 'How can we be doing it better?' instead of 'Should we be doing it at all?' "

At Clinton's campaign headquarters in Washington, strategists think they know what kinds of questions the voters are going to be asking about government in 1996.

Clinton campaign communications director Ann Lewis says, "For the public the debate is not about what the appropriate role of government is, but rather: 'Is my kid getting a good education? Is my drinking water clean? Are the streets safe?' "

"A debate about government [in the abstract] leaves out what is the most important part [of the debate] for most people, which is the real-life impact of these programs," says Lewis. "It is important for us to provide that context."

Thus, the decades-old battle over the role of government will once again be waged in 1996. President Clinton will argue that while he favors tightening up some parts of government, some domestic programs must be retained and he should be reelected to prevent Republicans in Congress from going too far in their efforts to dismantle them. Republicans will counter that a GOP President is needed to carry out the mandate of the 1994 elections when the electorate vented its frustration with big government on a massive scale.

Both Clinton and the Republican candidates talk about reining in government. In 1996, the voters will need to decide how much reining in they want.