The Budget's Hidden Horrors

By Margot Hornblower

Congressman Charles Wilson, a tall Texas Democrat with a signature swagger, carried a grudge against the Defense Intelligence Agency. In Pakistan in 1986, the agency had refused to fly Wilson's companion, a former Miss U.S.A.-World, to a town near the Afghan border where the Congressman was to inspect the progress of the guerrilla war. Just before Christmas, Wilson took revenge. An influential member of a Defense Appropriations subcommittee, he tucked a provision into a spending bill that stripped DIA of two planes, and he eliminated the agency's exemption from Pentagon staff cuts.

Wilson's sleight of hand escaped the notice of most members of Congress, as well as of President Reagan, who signed it into law. And no wonder: the legislation that included the provision was 2,100 pages long, and it lumped together 13 appropriations bills that should have been passed individually. In one gargantuan gulp, the omnibus bill amounted to $603.9 billion, or nearly two-thirds of the total funding for Federal Government operations in fiscal 1988.

Patched together in a furious week of back-room conferences between House and Senate subcommittees, the bill passed both chambers in the wee hours of Dec. 22. Few members even saw a copy of the legislation. "This blind voting is a sad commentary on the world's greatest deliberative body," lamented Republican Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming. In the weeks since, as reporters, lobbyists and more than 200 budget analysts in the executive branch have dug into the budget pie, a number of surprises have come popping out. Complained Budget Director James Miller: "Some are the kinds of things you'd be ashamed to tell your mama about." Among the more questionable items:

-- A cleverly crafted provision requiring the Government to buy $10 million worth of sunflower oil, courtesy of Democratic Senator Quentin Burdick of North Dakota. Budget cutters had defeated an earlier measure, but a new version of the sunflower subsidy program lay hidden in the bill's fertile soil.

-- An award of $16.5 million to New Orleans' Tulane University and Xavier University, a 2,200-student black school, to advise the Defense Department on how to dispose of hazardous waste. The Pentagon had never asked for the advice, but Senator J. Bennett Johnston, a Louisiana Democrat, found time to stuff the chestnuts into the pork roast for his own constituents. Xavier's share of the grant, about $7 million over two years, is its largest contract ever.

-- An antitrust clause that forbids the Federal Communications Commission from allowing Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch to keep the New York Post and Boston Herald as well as television stations in each city.

-- An increase in the speed limit to 65 m.p.h. on many local highways, bypassing concerns about safety.

-- An $8 million grant to North African Jews in France to build a parochial school promoted by a campaign contributor of Democratic Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii.

Congress is notorious for tacking riders onto funding legislation, thus avoiding public hearings and committee debate. But 1986 and 1987 were the first years since 1950 in which not a single appropriations measure reached the President's desk. The result this time was the behemoth bill, passed helter-skelter nearly three months into the new fiscal year, that offered keen-eyed Congressmen irresistible opportunities for skulduggery.

Budget experts attribute the mess partly to the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law, which set up a system of automatic cuts if total spending rises above deficit targets. "Gramm-Rudman now assures that everything will take place at the last second on the last day," says Democratic Congressman David Obey of Wisconsin. In fact, ten of the 13 appropriations bills had been ready to go to conference before Dec. 22. But congressional leaders delayed forwarding them to President Reagan for fear they would have no control over cuts once the bills were signed into law, should Gramm-Rudman take effect. They waited until a compromise over taxes and spending was hammered out between the Administration and Congress during four weeks of "budget summit" talks. The result, a $76 billion tax hike and spending-cut measure, whittled the deficit down to legal levels and passed both houses along with the huge funding bill.

In the final week, as members pressed to get home before Christmas, a feverish panic gripped Capitol Hill. It was a scene no civics textbook would dare describe. In back rooms, miniconferences worked nearly around the clock to reconcile differences between House and Senate versions of the budget. Millions of dollars were traded back and forth, sometimes with only two influential legislators in attendance. Hardly anyone knew what colleagues across the hall were doing. Exhaustion set in. "The typical day was 17 or 18 hours, while I was trying to make decisions on multi-hundred-million-dollar projects," said Senator Johnston, who presided at four conferences underway in different parts of the Capitol. "I have never wanted a recess so much in my life."

Congressman Obey held sway over two simultaneous conferences: one on foreign aid, where some 150 differences remained to be settled between Senate and House versions of the bill, and a second on labor and health that dealt with up to 400 matters in dispute. One of the items he agreed to was Inouye's pet project for the Sephardic Jews. "It was a lousy $8 million," explained Obey, who at the same time was negotiating with the Hawaiian over an $8 billion credit-refinancing item. Inouye said last week that he pushed for the money because the French government refused to fully fund the religious school.

While Inouye's project was approved in committee, the anti-Murdoch provision that slipped into the catchall spending bill was an end run engineered by Senator Edward Kennedy and Senator Ernest Hollings, who had tried unsuccessfully to pass a similar measure last summer. On Dec. 15, Hollings and three other members of Congress met in a miniconference. "We were going through thousands of items," recalled Republican Congressman Harold Rogers of Kentucky. "The Murdoch thing was a real speck in the wind. Hollings said something to the effect that 'this is not a change of policy.' I did not understand that it took away the FCC's waiver powers. This took place over a ten-second period of time." Since there was no dispute, the matter was not even raised in the full conference.

While there may be no more pork this year than in the past, what there is comes at a time when the nation can least afford it and efforts to reduce the deficit have faltered. "The American public now wants more spending on things like health and education, doesn't want to pay more taxes, and it wants a balanced budget," says Rudolph Penner, a former Congressional Budget Office director. But with recent pressures to clamp down on spending for popular new programs, members of Congress have little to boast about besides whatever bit of bacon they can bring home to their districts.

Still, qualms are growing. The howls that accompanied passage of the spending bills this year seemed more distressed than usual. Even a touch of humility crept in. "We are going to have one vote on a conference agreement of over 2,000 pages, which not a single member has read or understands," fumed Massachusetts Republican Silvio Conte during the House debate. "Who's responsible for this outrage?" Conte answered his own question. "In Pogo's immortal words," he concluded, "we have met the enemy, and it is us."

With reporting by Ted Gup/Washington