A Technician as Budget Boss

Mclntyre, a quiet Georgian, is already slashing

In the office where James T. Mclntyre Jr. has been putting together the federal budget for fiscal 1979 hangs the toothy official portrait of Jimmy Carter. Standard decoration for thousands of Washington offices--but the budget boss's picture is different; on it the President has written: "To my good and early friend Jim Mclntyre." That inscription tells the secret of Mclntyre's success. A small-town Georgian like his boss and so many other now prominent Washingtonians, Mclntyre met Carter in 1970, when the President was a defeated Georgia politician trying again for state office. Last week Mclntyre, 37, a quiet lawyer turned figure technician, got the job most recently filled by a far more flamboyant Georgian, Bert Lance. Carter named Mclntyre Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The appointment was no surprise. Mclntyre has been doing the job as acting Director of OMB since Lance left in September. Indeed, he has been Carter's numbers man since long before that. He was Georgia's budget director when Carter was Governor, and even when Lance was head of OMB, Mclntyre as Assistant Director did most of the real work of budget preparation. (Lance told anyone who would listen that he did not like to get mixed up with figures, and some OMB staffers referred to him as an "absentee landlord.")

It was Mclntyre who, back in Georgia, first tested for Carter the idea of "zero-based budgeting"--that is, not simply comparing a department's spending requests with what it spent the previous year, but starting at zero and figuring out how much it really needs. Currently, as time grows short to ready the 1979 budget for presentation to Congress on Jan. 23, Mclntyre has been zealously applying the concept to the Federal Government. The Department of Defense asked for $130.5 billion in new spending authority for fiscal 1979, but will probably get $126 billion--and that is one of the smaller cuts. According to OMB gossip, Mclntyre whacked much harder at spending proposals by the departments of Labor and Housing and Urban Development.

For all the zero-based budget slashing, the final document will make it more difficult than ever for the President to fulfill his promise of balancing the budget by 1981--a pledge that the President has wisely been downplaying lately. Carter and Mclntyre are likely to hold proposed government spending to just slightly below the $500 billion mark that Administration officials consider psychologically discouraging. But the projected budget deficit will probably be no smaller than the $59 billion predicted this fiscal year, and half again as large as the $40 billion that Carter had set as a goal. The difference is accounted for mostly by the tax cut that the President will propose to Congress at the time he unveils the budget.

Though Mclntyre declines to use the term, he is, like Lance, a fiscal conservative. That and his Georgia background are about the only similarities to his OMB predecessor. Lance came across as a riverboat gambler turned politician; Mclntyre looks, thinks and talks like a philosopher-accountant. Though he insists on shaking hands with all those he meets and immediately calling them by their first name, he is no backslapper. He shuns the Washington party circuit to devote his increasingly rare free time to barn building. With the help of neighbors, he is putting up a barn on the five-acre Clifton, Va., property where he lives with his wife Maureen and three daughters. Maureen says it will be the third barn he has built as they have moved from home to home.

Born in Vidalia, Ga. ("Population 9,507," he likes to tell audiences), Mclntyre received a law degree from the University of Georgia in 1963 and stayed in the university town of Athens to practice. In 1966 he became general counsel to the Georgia Municipal Association, and in 1970 deputy state revenue commissioner; in that post he got to know Carter, who was running for Governor. After serving as Carter's state budget director, Mclntyre was kept on in that job by Carter's successor, George Busbee--a rare sign of confidence, as there was bad blood between the two Governors. Last November, Carter phoned Mclntyre personally to ask him to come to Washington.

Mclntyre today bridles slightly at any emphasis on his Georgia career, expressing hope that people will "use other than my place of birth to judge me." It is true that he is not a close friend of Carter's; he accurately describes their relationship as "professional, rather than personal or social." Nonetheless, Mclntyre has been seeing more of Carter lately than just about anybody except Rosalynn. The two have had about 40 hours of budget-review meetings, some lasting five to six hours. At those meetings, OMB staffers note, Mclntyre is very cool and self-confident. Says Mclntyre: "I don't mind telling him [Carter] what I think. That's what he has me around for."

Despite his experience in budgeting, Mclntyre at the moment is leaning heavily on the OMB staff for advice; for the first time in memory, he has taken some middle-level budget examiners to meetings with the President. He is beginning, but only beginning, to win the respect of that staff, some of whose members originally regarded him as a lightweight. Says one: "He's a nice guy who has learned a lot, but sometimes I wonder if he's really got it." Be that as it may, Mclntyre has what counts: Carter's respect. After the flashy Lance, the President now wants and has got a technician as budget boss.

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