Everyone's Wild Over Alice

Will Congress ever get comfortable with economics? Despite their constitutional power over the nation's purse strings, the moguls on Capitol Hill have rarely been able to joust on an even footing with the White House when it came to arguing about the cost of specific programs or shaping the federal budget. When they tried--so they bitterly complained--they were almost always zapped by a barrage of expert-sounding figures prepared by professionals in the President's Office of Management and Budget. All that changed, or was supposed to, three years ago, when the legislators created their own Congressional Budget Office and staffed it with their own economic wizards. But a good many Congressmen are still complaining irritably--this time about their own experts.

Influence Policy. The focus of their ire is the CBO's boss, Alice M. Rivlin, 46. When she came to the Hill as the first head of Congress's budget bureau in 1975, she had been a highly regarded working economist at that liberal Democratic enclave, the Brookings Institution. Maine's Senator Edmund Muskie, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, personally steered her into the job. Now some of his--and her--colleagues in both parties wish her four-year term could be cut short.

The main complaint against Rivlin is that she is too publicity-conscious and sometimes goes beyond her $52,500-a-year job as staff technician and seeks to influence policy. The CBO, with its staff of 208 economists and other specialists, was set up to analyze tax and spending options in all areas, from defense to welfare, and assess costs and probable impact on the economy. As a result, Congress can now set spending ceilings and sometimes even cut appropriations to stay under them. At the same time, the legislators can keep a close watch on individual spending programs. Before, Congress groped blindly, passing hundreds of appropriation bills each session without ever being able to determine their cost or how much revenue would be needed to pay for them.

Rivlin started out by annoying conservatives. In one report she pointed out that President Ford's spending budget was inadequate to the needs of the economy. Lately the CBO has been digging into Carter proposals--and the reaction of Democrats has been equally pained. After assessing the President's energy plan, Rivlin announced that the Administration's estimates of what the program would accomplish were "overly optimistic." For example, the CBO found that savings on oil imports would be closer to 3.5 million bbl. daily by 1985 than the 4.5 million bbl. projected by the President. Said Rivlin: "There's been a lot of talk of sacrifice, but one just doesn't see it here."

House Speaker Tip O'Neill and other Democratic congressional leaders were stung. In a stormy confrontation. Connecticut Democrat Robert Giaimo. chairman of the House Budget Committee, warned Rivlin during a committee meeting to shut up in public.

"Who do you think you're working for anyway?" stammered Giaimo. "Congress or the general public?"

"Both," shot back Rivlin.

Giaimo now talks about creating specific guidelines to govern the way the CBO releases its reports--meaning a muzzle for its chief.

A Bit Sensitive. Rivlin, who holds a doctorate in economics from Radcliffe. is unflustered. She knows Washington's power game, having served as Assistant Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Lyndon Johnson. She is also argumentative by training--she wrote editorials for the Washington Post for a while--as well as a veteran budget watcher. At Brookings she wrote (with Charles Schultze, now Carter's chief economic adviser) studies of the 1972, 1973 and 1974 Republican budgets.

Rivlin denies that she has overstepped the bounds of her job. Says she: "We're operating in an intensely political atmosphere. There's bound to be some hostility to our findings. Before this year, it was Republican programs we were analyzing and it was Republicans who didn't like it. Now it's the Democrats. They're still a bit sensitive."

The skirmishing has tended to obscure the effective work being done by the CBO. Says Karen Williams, the Senate Budget Committee's chief counsel: "Before the CBO, we just did not have the figures to work with. Now CBO studies on defense issues have allowed us to take a really good look at costs. The same goes for proposed food-stamp and Social Security reform." In short, the information supplied by the CBO holds down spending because it forces ordinarily open-wallet Congressmen to face up to deficits. Majority Leader James Wright of Texas was particularly incensed a few months ago when Rivlin said her office estimated that the Government could not possibly spend as much on public works projects in the current year as the House leadership estimated. Wright sputtered, but could not refute the CBO conclusions.

Bureaucratic Wallflower. Part of the animosity directed at Rivlin stems from the restraints placed on the old-boy network of committee chairmen by the creation of the CBO. In addition, politicians, in or out of Congress, do not take kindly to criticism, no matter how justified.

Yet for all the bombast on both sides, few of Rivlin's critics really believe she will ever become the bureaucratic wallflower some would dearly like her to be. This week she is scheduled to appear again before Bob Giaimo's House Budget Committee and give her colleagues' views on the economy's course for the rest of 1977. Her outlook will probably be much less radiant than the official Administration forecast--and thus cause for yet another round of muttering by agitated politicians.

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