Hot Issues on the Back Burner

After the election, Reagan and Congress mil have lots to confront

I n the final weeks of the '82 campaign, the Reagan Administration was something like a weatherman who forecasts sunny skies while it is raining outside. It appeared temporarily oblivious to a $155 billion deficit projected for fiscal 1983 and attempted to divert public concern from a 10.1 % unemployment rate with the promise of better days ahead. But elections and optimism go hand in hand, regardless of political party. What the White House must now confront is a panoply of politically charged issues it kept under wraps during the campaign season.

The Budget. Foremost in this clutch of problems is the fiscal 1984 budget. "We held up the discussions until after Election Day," confessed a White House aide, "so that reporters could not write horror stories about what the President planned to cut." Appropriately, the President's first round of budget discussions was scheduled for Election Day. Many of Reagan's closest advisers privately hope that the President will decide on his own to raise taxes or cut increases in defense spending rather than swallow a 1984 deficit that could top $175 billion. It is not lost on them that the President's budgetary decisions in the next few weeks may be his last chance to turn the economy around.

The MX. A decision on how to base the MX missile is due by Dec. 1. Congress last spring rejected Reagan's "interim" scheme to place the missile in existing Minuteman silos, and it refused to appropriate $1 billion for construction of the first MXs until the Administration could come up with a more suitable basing mode. The Pentagon is expected to recommend "Dense Pack," a controversial plan to deploy the missiles in superhardened new silos very close together. The aim is to protect the missiles through "fratricide": an attacking enemy missile would be able to knock out some U.S. missiles, but then the force of its blast would disable the other incoming ICBMs. Dense Pack, known to its detractors as "Dunce Pack," is expected to meet with lots of resistance on Capitol Hill, where many lawmakers think it is an extravagant plan of dubious merit.

Social Security. This issue always spells political peril, which is why Reagan tried to avoid it during the campaign by establishing a commission on Social Security reform, with a safe post-election deadline of Dec. 31 for announcing its recommendations. When he insisted further that Congress reconvene for a lameduck session that starts Nov. 29, his thinly veiled intention was to push through benefit reductions during the only politically neutral stretch on the congressional calendar in the next two years. With hardly three weeks in the special session, neither party is eager to tackle anything more daring than renewing Social Security's capacity to borrow from its disability insurance and Medicare funds. Even with that authority extended, Social Security is predicted to go broke in 1984. At week's end, concerned that Republicans were being hurt at the polls by the Social Security issue, Reagan denounced the Democrats for spreading the "falsehood" that he planned to cut benefits for retirees.

New Twists on Old Business. When Congress adjourned in October it left ten of its 1983 appropriations bills dangling, and a Government funded only by continuing resolution. The lameduck session probably will be asked to vote on Reagan-backed proposals to replace the public housing subsidy program with a voucher system, and to shave $1 billion from Title I, the main federal program for schoolchildren from poor families. The cut would mean that 2.5 million of the 5.4 million children currently served by the program would no longer be eligible.

How the White House fares on these sensitive issues depends in large part on the election results. If the Democrats make major gains, they will try to delay important votes until the new Congress convenes in January. If the Republicans hold their own in the voting, they will have considerable leverage in the special session. Thus the next two months promise to be a pivotal time for the Administration. The President will be asked to make hard choices about defense spending and revenue increases to cut the deficit in a realistic way and produce an economic recovery in 1983. How the Administration addresses these issues will affect both its own near-term political future and the nation's long-term welfare.

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