The spending reductions that President Clinton wants to help finance his proposed middle-class tax cut are far too timid, the new Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee says.
Clinton and other top administration officials provided some details Monday of their plans for budget slashes, which range from auctioning off the Navy's petroleum reserves to replacing some housing programs for the poor with vouchers.The cuts outlined Monday, totaling $24 billion, are designed to help pay for $60 billion worth of tax reductions for families with children, education costs and other expenses that the president proposed last week.
But Republicans, who assume majority status in Congress next month, are busily crafting their own, much larger lists of spending cuts.
"This administration must do more, and be far more specific, if it expects Congress or the public to be convinced it is truly dedicated to reducing the size and scope of government," said Rep. John Kasich, R-Ohio, who takes over the House budget panel in January.
One proposal ran into flak from lawmakers of both parties: a plan to use some of the taxes collected from the airline industry to pay salaries of air traffic controllers, instead of continuing to use it for air system improvements. The controllers would then work for a quasi-government corporation.
"Those funds have dedicated purposes and should not be tampered with," declared Rep. Bud Shuster, R-Pa., who will chair the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
The transportation panel's outgoing chairman, Rep. Norman Mineta, D-Calif., said the idea would result in "ripping to shreds the basic transportation funding mechanisms that benefit every American . . . and cripple the larger economic investment opportunities that have been the historic spinoffs from this system."
Republicans are going to need hundreds of billions of dollars worth of reductions over the next five years because they are championing deeper tax cuts than Clinton wants, and because they want to eliminate the federal deficit by 2002. So far, they have not provided details about where the budget slashes would occur.
Clinton unveiled some of his specific proposals at a White House news conference Monday. And he ordered his budget team to scour the bureaucracy for more cuts.
That process has already created turmoil inside the administration. In a memo obtained by the Washington Post, the directors of the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency sharply criticized Clinton's budget planners, saying proposed spending cuts could undermine the president's anti-crime efforts.