Shelving a Flop

Watt sets aside land sales

It was a scheme at once grandiose and controversial: shrinking the national debt by selling off excess federal buildings and land. Announced with some fanfare by the Reagan Administration last year, the plan had the goal of raising $17 billion over five years. But the stuffily named asset-management program has been a conspicuous flop from the beginning. By the middle of this year, it had succeeded in peddling only $150 million worth of buildings and a scanty 4,600 acres of land worth $4.8 million. Even worse, it has proved a disaster politically, antagonizing conservationists and even some of the Administration's staunchest supporters. In a move to cut the plan's political cost, Department of the Interior Secretary James Watt said last week that land under Interior's control will no longer be sold as part of an asset-management program.

While Watt was backpedaling, another official was also making readjustments for the Administration. Speaking at a breakfast meeting with reporters, William Ruckelshaus, appointed four months ago to head the scandal-rocked Environmental Protection Agency, admitted that former agency officials had "confused ends and means" in setting environmental policy. Without naming Predecessor Anne Burford, Ruckelshaus said that the previous regime had misunderstood the difference between economic and social regulation. The Government's decision to drop its controls of the trucking and airline industries had wide support, he said, "but the situation is much different when you're talking about health and safety." The current debate over environmental quality, said Ruckelshaus, should be over "the means to get there, not the end."

While Ruckelshaus' words seemed aimed at environmentalists, Watt's action was clearly directed at political allies. The asset-management plan has been heavily criticized in the Western states, where many of the federal holdings are situated and where Ronald Reagan enjoys his greatest grass-roots strength. Under the asset-management process, the Administration had put up FOR SALE signs on 2.5 million acres ruled by Interior's Bureau of Land Management. Though none of the acreage is national park land, a number of tracts were used extensively by vacationers, hunters, fishermen, timber and mineral companies and cattle ranchers. "The program scared everybody into thinking vast amounts of the public domain were going to be sold," says an Interior Department official. "It created a fire storm you wouldn't believe."

Though Watt vigorously promoted the plan when it was first introduced, his aides insist that he never had much faith in it. "It was a creation of the White House staff," says Watt's chief spokesman, Douglas Baldwin, who also fixed some of the blame on members of the Office of Management and Budget. "They thought you could get rid of the deficit like Mary Poppins, by just wiggling your nose." But the Secretary went along until recently, when, according to Baldwin, he became convinced that the program had become "a political liability to the President. And once he got to the right people in the White House, there was a great acceptance of that position." G.O.P. Senator James McClure of Idaho, chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and National Resources and one of the Administration's strongest allies on Capitol Hill, also helped turn the Administration around. McClure, a New Right apostle who is up for re-election next year, said he was appalled at the impact that Idaho Democrats' criticism of the Administration's asset-management program had on voters during the 1982 campaign.

Some conservationists remain suspicious of the Administration's assets policy, and Interior Spokesman Harmon Kallman acknowledges that the new plan "does not mean that we're not going to sell any land. All we are saying is that we are out from under any dollar goals set by the asset-management program." Or as one Interior official bluntly put it, "This way we can assure everyone we're not under the policy thumb of some green kids. Our program will just piddle along in low gear." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.