Bush's Ambitious Agenda
Makes for Hefty Government Spending
By DAVID ROGERS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON -- When President Bush Thursday night signed the giant budget bill setting appropriations levels for this year, he also gave up one of his party's worst-kept secrets: Republicans enjoy government -- and the spending that comes with it.
No more Bill Clinton or Democratic Senate to blame. The $397.4 billion omnibus spending bill is wholly owned by the new Republican Washington -- lock, stock and pork barrel. Total discretionary spending on domestic and defense programs for fiscal year 2003, which ends Sept. 30, will be nearly $100 billion above levels just two years ago. The bill's thousands of pages document a transformation among Republicans since the party swept to power in Congress behind Newt Gingrich's "revolution" in the mid-1990s.
Back then, the mostly Southern party leadership shared a deep antipathy toward the guns-and-butter, Great Society activism of another native son who dominated their youth: Texan Lyndon Johnson. Medicare and grants to schools with low-income pupils were early targets in the 1995 House Republican budget, which also called for dismantling the cabinet departments of Energy, Education and Commerce.
Today, another Texan -- with big ideas and his own war to pay for -- sets the tone from the White House. George W. Bush came of age in the '60s liberal climate as well, but his response is to counter with a conservative activism that seeks to shape government, not dismantle it.
"The funds appropriated by this bill will provide valuable resources for priorities such as homeland security, military operations and education," the president said from his ranch in Crawford, Texas. He chided lawmakers for exceeding some of his requests -- but also said he had failed to get all he wanted to help local police and fire departments to prepare for terrorist attacks.
In fact, Mr. Bush's new budget proposal for the coming fiscal year promises Medicare $400 billion more -- not less -- over the next 10 years, and the omnibus spending bill now makes a first $54 billion commitment by raising payments to physicians over the same period. Education spending this year will be at least $53 billion -- not enough for Democrats, but 145% more than the first year of Mr. Gingrich's reign. And the new bill provides an 18% increase for the U.S. Agency for International Development, including $403 million more than last year for child survival and health programs overseas.
As the nation edges toward a possible war with Iraq, Mr. Bush sometimes seems to have so many balls in the air that no one can be sure where they will land. But spending is one front where he is almost unchecked. In Senate floor debate on the omnibus bill last month, Democrats offered only amendments adding money without any offsetting subtractions. "We thought for the sake of simplicity we would just add," Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D., S.D.) says with a wry smile.
It has been almost a half-century since Republicans have so controlled the appropriations process that governs the nuts and bolts of government. After the carnage of the federal shutdown the party forced in late 1995 -- which strengthened Mr. Clinton -- some of this reflects a natural evolution as the Republican majority matures and consolidates power.
Personalities are also a big factor. Mr. Bush is naturally aggressive both as the son of a president and as someone shaped by the bigness and ideology of Texas. "He does think bigger, but he's also more ideological than his father," says Thomas O'Donnell, a Democratic consultant.
This activism is fortified by changes in the Republican congressional leadership. The new Senate Majority Leader, Tennessee Republican Bill Frist -- a fellow 50-something, Ivy League-educated Southerner -- has fostered the president's interest in the AIDS crisis in Africa. And Speaker Dennis Hastert (R., Ill.) gives Mr. Bush a partner with a strong sense of history -- and a hunger to play offense on issues such as health care.
"It's not a reaction against something, which is what conservatives typically do," says the conservative Weekly Standard's William Kristol of the Bush activism. "It is an attempt to shape something."
Yet doing so is immensely costly, and the burden could be shifted to states. Already, governors -- and low-income elderly dependent on Medicaid -- fear Mr. Bush's ambitions will force cuts in funding for the federal-state health program for the needy. And the president's activism is increasingly at odds with his aggressive pursuit of more tax cuts.
Messrs. Hastert and Frist predict some economic-stimulus package -- on the order of the president's $695 billion, 10-year proposal -- will be enacted. But even Ronald Reagan had to pivot on his tax cuts in the 1980s, and Lyndon Johnson eventually raised taxes after learning how hard it is to have guns and butter simultaneously.
The odyssey of the omnibus spending bill shows how the president's activism has whetted spending appetites of fellow Republicans in Congress.
The final appropriations package is substantially above what the White House first envisioned, even after Congress trimmed Mr. Bush's homeland-security requests, and it ratchets up the pressure to spend more again next year. When Mr. Bush unveiled his 2004 budget only weeks ago, the administration said it was seeking a $30 billion, or 4%, increase in discretionary spending from its 2003 request of about $750 billion. Congress approved $762.7 billion for 2003, meaning a 4% increase would mean spending $11 billion more than the White House budget envisions.
Appropriations for education and the National Science Foundation for 2003 already rival those levels in Mr. Bush's 2004 budget, and his proposed spending on a program for minority college students is less than what Congress appropriated for this year.
Democrats argue that these comparisons show Mr. Bush's activism to be a "Potemkin Village" ruse to hide a conservative antigovernment agenda. But after the years of heady budget surpluses, both political parties seem to have lost the capacity to choose between competing priorities.
At the height of the budget wars in the 1980s, lawmakers fought over where to spend money but stayed within the appropriations totals requested by the White House. This discipline collapsed when surpluses in the late '90s allowed both sides to have more, and the once proud Appropriations committees became patronage outlets for a growing number of spending earmarks for home-state projects.
As a result, the decision-making machinery in Congress has eroded even as the fiscal outlook has deteriorated. Most of the government had to manage without permanent appropriations for the first third of this fiscal year. Even now, the omnibus bill provoked remarkably few meaningful votes.
Like some great unfinished novel, the measure landed on Senate desks in mid-January, challenging lawmakers to write the last chapter in what promised to be the first budget debate in many years with real numbers and a real-time impact. The overwhelming response was to run for cover. No one in either party offered a single amendment moving money from one account to another.
Looking back, the administration lost leverage when it asked to add $10 billion for continuing military and intelligence operations in the war against terrorism. That weakened White House veto threats, as seen in the compromise the White House accepted that provides $3.1 billion in disaster aid for farmers.
The administration insisted that an equal sum be cut from last year's farm bill. But the agreement allows the savings to be spread over 10 years in an installment plan that really won't begin to bite until 2008.
That just happens to also be the last year of what would be Mr. Bush's second term, if he is re-elected in 2004.
Write to David Rogers at david.rogers@wsj.com |
