Senate Democrats are outlining a new $2 billion aid package for Eastern Europe - far more than President Bush wants to spend and several times what Democrats themselves proposed just two months ago.
The draft bill escalates a Democratic argument that Bush has been too timid in aiding the emerging democracies and establishing a foothold for U.S. companies in their newly free economies.The bill by Sens. Claiborne Pell, D-R.I., and Joseph R. Biden, D-Del., includes a $1.2 billion U.S. share in a European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, proposed by France to finance public works and new private enterprises in former communist economies.
A copy of the draft was obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.
The administration has conditioned U.S. participation in the bank on its refusal to lend for government projects or private ventures in the Soviet Union.
But Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady and other administration officials acknowledge that the bank, with commitments already from most Western European countries and Japan, is going forward with or without a U.S. role.
"Our economic competitors are racing to establish strong footings in Eastern Europe," Biden said Wednesday. "We took a stutter step in the wrong direction when (the bank) was being set up, and we lost our influence."
House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., said the administration's actions threaten to lock U.S. companies out of billions of dollars in new exports and technical aid that the bank will be financing.
"It's a brand new world, and unless we throw off old ways of thinking rooted in Cold War mentality, we risk being left behind," Gephardt told a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee Wednesday.