TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW HELD OCTOBER 21, 1975 ON THE AGRONSKY EVENING EDITION FEATURING REP. BROCK ADAMS (D-WASH . ) CHAIRMAN OF THE HOUSE BUDGET COMMITTEE AND SEN. EDMUND S. MUSKIE. (D-MAINE) CHAIRMAN OF THE SENATE BUDGET COMMITTEE INTRODUCTION: From Washington this is Evening Edition. Now here is Martin Agronsky. AGRONSKY: Good evening. The United States Congress has set up two new budget committees to try to bring some order out of chaos in its handling of Federal money. Its still too early really to tell whether Congress has set itself a politically impossible task let alone a fiscally impossible task. The head of the new Senate Budget Committe Edmund Muskie says 'hobody promised us a rose garden when we undertook budget reform. We knew the task of addressing our national fiscal priorities and beginning the long road back to a balanced budget would be a thankless one. And now President Ford has cast a few more thorns on ttie budget committee's path with his combination tax-cut spending ceiling proposal." Well, tonight on Evening Edition a discussion of how the new congressional budget procedure is working, what is the outlook for Mr. Ford's plan in Congress and at the state of the economy with democratic Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, Chairman of the new Senate Budget Committee and democratic Congressman Brock Adams of Washington, Chairman of the new House Budget Committee. Gentlemen, there 1 s been a lot written about the Budget Committee and how it functions; but I wonder if you could just simply say what was the idea behind bringing it into being tn both houses. Would you like to start Congressman Adams? ADAMS: Yes, what basically happened was that we had a conservative president, Nixon, elected after we balanced the budget in '69 and yet for four years spending went up every year without any particular control. At the same time the President was either deferring money or impounding money which meant that the priorities that the liberals wanted were not being achieved so both the liberals and the conservatives arrived at the conclusion that first they wanted. control over·overall spending and second they wanted control of where the money was spent within an overall target and that's the budget act. AGRONSKY: Yes.· Well, you put it in a context of Republican president; Democratic Congress in effect. You don't meant that do you? ADAMS: No. Not with Repulican/Democratic, but fiscal conservatism versus liberal spending habits by that I mean a person that comes in and you expect to have the budget balanced or very close to it and instead you run a large number of deficits that were really unplanned. In other words they didn't have fiscal stimulus and so you weren't balancing the budget and yet the people who wanted particular programs, and new initiative~weren't getting those. In fact programs were being cut back; so it showed that the whole budget process between the Administration -2- and t he Congress,whether you were a fiscal liberal or a fiscal conservative or some place in between,wasn't working and so they wanted an act that brought some order out of chaos. MUSKIE: There's another point, Martin, and that was the process of handling appropriations, or the budget within the Congress, was fragmented. It was such a big thing that it was handled through thirteen or fourteen different appropriations bills. ADAMS: So, it was done piecemeal. MUSKIE: It was done piecemeal and those pieces were stretched out over a time frame that usually began about the first of June, I think, and then continued until well into the budget year. Sometimes December and I think I remember one year that the last appropriations bill was enacted in January following the July which represented the beginning of the year. So that as members of the Congress voted on appropriations bills, they did not have the benefit of the overall picture in order to set their own priorities. AGRONSKY: (A) How much they are going to spend, how much revenues were, how much deficit would result; you began with that still way down the road,and what you are trying to do this time around is to know all of those factors before you begin. MUSKIE: That is right and there is one other thing we try to crank into it without making it too complicated. We try to crank into it a rational economic policy. Of course the President has one in :niind, with the advice of his economic advisors when he presents the budget, but the Congress also does so now so that the two ate tted ,together--the budget and economic considerations. AGRONSKY: Yes. Well, the question is--how was it working? MUSKIE: Well, I think that for the first year,and this is a trial year, its been called that,--Its trial only in the sense that it's the first time and it's not complete but it's the real thing in terms of being binding. I think for this first year its worked very well. Both Houses I think faced up to the need for discipline. Both Houses' members have shown a willingness to vote to restrain spending and even to cut back spending. Perhaps the most visible one in terms of its politics is the Federal Government's Employees pay increase. Both Houses voted to hold that at 5 percent which was below the 8 percent cost of living increase which the Comparibility Board recommended and so this and other votes I think indicate that the Congress is willing to accept this discipline. Now how long that will 1ast • . -3- AGRONSKY: The President by the way proposed that too. ADAMS: That is right. MUSKIE: That is correct. AGRONSKY : And you ha ve to give him credit for that parti cular ... ADAMS: Absol utely. MUSKIE: Precisely. ADAMS: And you get to a point when the process shows,when you begin in the spring ,what the deficit is going to be and people begin to look at that bottom line as their voting in new bills, and then one other part of it,and it is a complex puzzle, Martin, but another part was that we , found that bills were avoiding the Appropriations Committee. Other committees would make automatic spending bills which meant that the Appropriations Committee didn't ever see them and very often the Members didn't know what the total effect of that spending bill would be. It might only be ten or twenty million dollars in the first year; but it might end up over a period of 30 or 40 years, each year building into the base of the budget. That ' s why the budget total spending has gone up over the years. We don't vo te so much for each individual appropriation bill; but when we build in a bottom and then build on top of it each year, pretty soon you're at a very hig h figure. AGRONSKY: Well, let me raise what.seems to me a rather conspicuous success that you had persona lly, apparently. That was when the Committee on Post Offi ce and Civil Serv ice · approved q bill that would have increased Federal pension benefi ts $3.4 billioD, Now as I understand it, when you told the Chairman of that committee that the Budget Committee wo u·td fight it, he withdrew it. Did it work that way? ADAMS: Yes and you see there is a difference in the way that technically the House and the Senate work as institutions. In the House most of the work is very detailed a_nd specialized within committees _on spe!lding bills, and so we've been tracking. We have an early warning system in the Budget committee that indicates when they' re going to come to the floor, what amount those bills will involve over not just one year but over four to five years. The Chairman of that committee is a very fine man and when we begin to track for hi m the bills he was bringing out, especially this bill ne said, "I am not going to do that. I don't want to add that amount of spending." And the week before that we defeated an additional subsidy for the Post Office of $1.7 billion so we knew -4- that if we got into a floor fight that there was a very good chance that he would loose it. So, the system is working at that level. I don't mean it's perfect, Martin. We miss some. Spending in a lot of areas are still going up, but there's a defintte new qtti tude in the committee chairmen on saying, "Wait a minute. We'll check out what's going to happen." AGRONSKY: Well, in that sense a kind of a miracle has occur~ed~ It -always used to be,as you both know from long e~perience in the Congress of the United States,that the technique was always a logrolling technique. You know, 'you do it for me and I 1 11 do H for you~· and then by the time that you would get done with that everybody would have some special thing · that they were doing~ One Congressman would support another one because he wanted support on his own special thing. Now are you stopping that too? Is the logrolling affected by this? MUSKIE: Well, I think what is happening is a ~ort of logtolli~g in reverse; and everybody now is alert to the fa ct that the Budget Committees are following this spending.