WASHINGTON - The Republican-led Congress is straining to finish an agonizing job that President Bush says is key to his agenda: Pass a tight-fisted budget, Bush has demanded, and do it before his Jan. 28 State of the Union address.
Riding a wave of popularity, with his party in control of both chambers, Bush wants Congress to squeeze the budget into constraints that even his allies say are tight - and he is gambling that the slim Republican majority will back him.
Far from starting the 108th Congress with a clean slate, lawmakers began last week with 11 pieces of unfinished business from the previous session - the must-pass spending bills that fund everything from education to space research in the new fiscal year, which began Oct. 1. Together, the measures amount to nearly $400 billion in spending.
The bills are "hanging around like unwanted houseguests," said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the fiscally conservative Concord Coalition. "Everybody wants to get rid of them."
Those bills pay for the government's operations. Without them, parts of the government must shut down - as they did during the budget showdown of 1995 - or temporary measures must keep it running at current levels. Six such temporary bills have been passed since the fiscal year began.
To avoid a veto, Republican leaders must slash billions from their wish lists. Yet they must also make the bills generous enough to win passage in the closely divided Senate. Democrats want to add up to $10 billion for popular items such as housing, veterans and environmental programs.
'Some squeezing'
What's shaping up is a test of whether the Republican Congress can make the sacrifices needed to maintain spending restraint and to cast the Democrats as would-be spendthrifts who must be reined in.
"It is going to require some squeezing on the part of appropriators, especially on the Senate side," said G. William Hoagland, a budget adviser to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican. "It will be the first big test of the new Republican conservative House, Senate and White House."
This week, the Senate will begin to roll the 11 remaining spending bills into one catchall measure that cuts $10 billion from the versions that the Senate, then in Democratic hands, proposed last year. But the rules allow any senator to propose further spending.
Bush and his budget director, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., want Congress to spend no more than $385 billion in the bills. That equals growth of about 2 percent for the programs Congress controls, compared with increases of about 6 percent a year between 1998 and 2001, during the Clinton administration.
One day before proposing his $674 billion tax-cut package last week, Bush demanded that Congress curb budget deficits by showing spending restraint.
"Our administration's concerned about deficits, and the way they deal with deficits is you, one, control spending. And the second way to deal with deficits is to encourage revenue growth," Bush said. He says his tax-cut plan will boost the economy and eventually ensure a fiscally sound budget.
Democrats and some moderate Republicans complain that Bush wants Congress to short-change social programs in the name of restraining deficits while passing a tax-cut plan that could swell deficits for years to come.
"How can you justify spending $650 [billion], $700 billion on the tax code, but not enough to fund the education programs?" said Sen. John B. Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat and leading moderate. "You can't justify that."
The president has signed the only two fiscal 2003 spending bills that Congress finished last year: a $355 billion defense measure and a $10.5 billion military construction bill.
As for the remaining bills, "Can the Senate accomplish on the floor in a week what it has not been able to accomplish in eight months prior?" said a House Republican aide.
The answer depends in part on the new majority leader, Frist, who has no experience in guiding a budget to enactment.
"This first round for Senator Frist when this comes to the floor is going to be a real tough one," Hoagland said. "It's going to be a real challenge to hold people together on this package."
With just a two-vote margin of Republican control, Frist could cut deals with Democrats that would expand the cost of the bills and irritate Bush. Or, more likely, he could keep every one of his 51 Republicans in line so they could pass the bills without any Democratic support.
That might be difficult if Democrats offer popular and costly amendments to boost funding for such priorities as education, the Low Income Heating Assistance Program or homeland security. Republican moderates might be tempted to support such additions.
"There will clearly be amendments, and I'm not sure that the Republicans will be able to hold all their votes," Hoagland said.
Democrats relish the notion that Republicans would have to choose between passing what the Democrats call a grossly underfunded budget and backing a more generous measure that Bush would reject.
"The Republicans, if they go through with this, are in a terrible position, because either they pass something that is bad, and people will know that it's bad, or they pass something that's good, and Bush will veto it," said David J. Sirota, a spokesman for Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee.
"It's going to be tough," said Rep. Jim Kolbe, the Arizona Republican who heads the spending subcommittee for foreign operations and must trim $200 million from his measure.
"The reductions are going to be very painful for members," Kolbe said. "They're going to be very painful to them in their districts and on the projects and programs they care about."
Lawmakers in both parties have spoken out harshly against Bush's constraints for the bill that covers education, health and labor, which he has set at $131.4 billion. The House failed to muster enough votes to pass that bill at that level last year.
Education funding
Senate Democrats announced last week that they were working with Republicans to boost education funding. Moderate Republicans in both chambers are also uncomfortable with Bush's request for the education, labor and health measure.
"This is all very difficult," said Rep. Michael N. Castle, a Delaware Republican. "We're obviously going to have to swallow hard."
Castle, who called the education, labor and health bill at least $1 billion too small, raised concerns that such programs as Pell Grants for higher education and education research would be severely shortchanged. Yet for now, most Republicans seem willing to give Bush what he has demanded.
"I personally would like to see additional funding, but in the context of the deficit situation and the war on terrorism and other costs, I think [additions] would be defeated," said Sen. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who heads the spending subcommittee for labor, health and education.
Lawmakers are likely to resort to budget gimmicks to try to attract enough support for the remaining bills. They plan to include $2.2 billion in education funding, for instance, as "advance appropriations" - money that could be spent during this fiscal year but would count against next year's limits.
Beyond the budgetary tricks, Bush is expected to send Congress a supplemental spending request to fund some programs that fall victim to the spending crunch. Other programs could be taken care of through spending bills for the 2004 fiscal year, which Congress will begin drafting next month.
"That's our safety valve," Kolbe said, referring to both the supplemental and the fiscal 2004 bills.
For example, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, a Southern Maryland Democrat, said that Daniels and senior lawmakers agreed to fund an overhaul of election rules that he helped push through last year - and would try to do so outside of the regular 2003 budget.
Still, lawmakers worry that this month's spending bind is an omen of even worse budget problems to come.
Given the sluggish economy and the federal deficits, "the next budget is going to be even less friendly to domestic programs than this one," Castle said. "If anything, it gets worse - not better - next year."