Doubled Budget Cuts Seen by Democrats

In the most critical congressional analysis yet of President Bush’s week-old budget, the House Democratic Study Group said Thursday that the plan would require cuts in most domestic programs twice as large as Ronald Reagan proposed in his final spending blueprint.

At the same time, however, Bush voiced satisfaction that budget talks with Congress are proceeding “slowly and very carefully” and he denied that he wants to dump on Congress the “dirty work” of cutting popular programs. Spending levels are open to negotiation, he told reporters.

“This is a two-way street,” he said. “It’s going better than I thought it would. I didn’t think everyone would jump up and down and say: ‘This is the greatest thing since sliced bread.’ ”

Bush also denied that there is a split between the White House and the Federal Reserve, which has been nudging interest rates upward.

“People . . . like to . . . drive a wedge between the President and the chairman of the Fed,” Bush said. “It’s one of the best fights in town. . . . But I want to avoid that, because we aren’t far apart.”

“The best thing to do about interest rates is to get a budget agreement,” he said.

The Democratic Study Group, a coalition of more than 200 moderate and liberal House Democrats, said that Bush’s budget would reduce total outlays for domestic programs by about $22 billion below the amounts needed to keep up with inflation and continue to provide the same level of federal services.

It said that the President’s proposal would slash outlays for categories including environmental protection, transportation and housing by almost twice as much as automatic spending cuts that would be triggered by the Gramm-Rudman budget-balancing law if the deficit projected for fiscal year 1990 is above $110 billion.

“Despite all of President Bush’s rhetoric about a ‘kinder, gentler nation,’ his budget would require very substantial cuts in federal domestic programs,” the DSG reported.

Because the President gave only “fragmentary” information on his spending priorities, the report said, his preferred funding levels for many programs could only be guessed.

White House budget Director Richard G. Darman, who conducted preliminary meetings with congressional budget leaders this week, assured them that he will provide more detailed figures next week.

Darman has acknowledged that Bush did not specify $9.6 billion in cuts that he seeks from Congress in a wide variety of federal programs. Bush specified another approximately $11 billion in cuts from Medicare and other programs.