Whirr, Click, Buzz

"We are being subjected to a tyranny of numbers," complained Oregon Republican Mark Hatfield, head of the Senate Appropriations Committee. "Computers have overtaken the people, and the everlasting bottom line has supplanted good judgment." Hatfield's impassioned complaint, amid Senate debate on the budget, was partly right. In a sense, the contest turned on which computer to believe, and Ronald Reagan chose the figures printed out by an electronic brain under the care of his budget boss, David Stockman.

Three computers have been yapping and snarling at each other over the budget for fiscal 1982 since February. Like all other computers, the three respond faithfully to the human technicians who feed them programming assumptions, in this case about inflation, unemployment, interest rates, how many people are likely to qualify for various federal benefits, and other variables that help determine federal spending. The combatants:

> The Congressional Budget Office computer. Its handlers are supposedly nonpartisan technicians, but Republicans suspect them of programming the computer to spew out spending and deficit forecasts pleasing to the Democrats who head House committees. "CBO is politicized to a hopeless extent," said a congressional Republican staff aide last week. The CBO computer played no role in the pre-Thanksgiving brawl, but will be heard from again.

> The House Appropriations Committee computer. Although it is programmed by the staff of a committee run by Democrats, G.O.P. lawmakers trust it to print out objective analyses. The Appropriations computer insisted last week that the funding resolution approved by a Senate-House conference would hold the budget $764 million below the figure that Reagan had said he would tolerate, so both chambers passed a measure that the President vetoed.

> The Office of Management and Budget computer. Its master, Stockman, has admitted changing its programming early this year to avoid a forecast of embarrassingly huge deficits. Indeed OMB last summer hired four college students to supplement its work with calculations done by hand, because, says Spokesman Edwin Dale, "computers are awfully rigid." Nonetheless last week the computer in effect accused the House Appropriations computer of printing out phony figures that underestimated how much would be spent on food stamps and supplemental security income for the disabled. The resolution that came out of the Senate-House conference, said the OMB computer, would push spending $2 billion higher than Reagan would accept; the President agreed and cast his first veto. qed

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