Zero to forever - economic policy - Editorial

National Review, July 31, 1995

EARLIER this year Republicans talked boldly of ``zeroing out'' programs. The House Appropriations Committee would simply allocate zero funds for certain noxious government agencies. Since there's no way for the Senate or the White House to spend money without House assent, this would be an easy, effectively veto-proof way to eliminate programs on the conservative hit list. But as it turns out, the dreaded zero-out is getting elbowed aside by the more elusive ``three-year phase-out,'' which is a nice way of saying, ``Sorry, not enough political will to get rid of this program now, if ever.''

The Legal Services Corporation is typical. As Rael Jean Isaac demonstrated in NR (``War on the Poor,'' May 15), the LSC doles out federal money to state-level Legal Services organizations, which wage war on welfare reform, fight to expand prisoner rights, and otherwise assail social norms. (USA Today, January 10, 1994, dateline Springfield, Massachusetts: ``A lawsuit has been filed on behalf of Arthur Cooney, 47, who spent the $75,000 he won in a '92 lottery and wants to get back on welfare, by Western Massachusetts Legal Services Lawyers. He said most of the money went to drugs and gambling. Welfare officials are refusing his request.'') So the $400-million LSC should be as fat a target as there is.

But in a pattern much in evidence on Capitol Hill lately, it has found three powerful allies: a soft Republican subcommittee chairman; a powerful interest with the ear of the GOP; and a Republican reformer still stuck in the long era of GOP minority status. The chairman in this case is Harold Rogers, head of the Commerce, Justice, State, and Judiciary subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee. Rogers, who represents a dirt-poor district in Kentucky, won't abide attempts to eliminate the LSC. He has produced a bill cutting it from $400 million to $278 million but won't go further. He has an ally in the American Bar Association -- which has pledged an all-out effort to save the LSC -- and, perhaps more importantly, in the local bar associations, which get Legal Services sub-grants, dues from local Legal Services lawyers, and a variety of other indirect benefits. And thanks to reforms pushed by Representative Bill McCollum (R., Fla.), Rogers can claim he is not funding LSC excesses. The McCollum plan is meant to prevent the LSC from engaging in politics, but with an organization soaked in ideology any number of fingers in the dike aren't going to plug the leaks (one of the first acts of the Clinton-appointed board was to scrap the LSC's monitoring program). Unless a last-ditch attempt to zero out the LSC or block-grant its funding to the states wins either on the House floor, or in the Senate through the exertions of Phil Gramm (both unlikely), the LSC can breathe the same words of relief it did after Senator Warren Rudman (R., N.H.) intervened on its behalf in the 1980s: Saved by Republicans.

In the case of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the plot lines are essentially the same. The NEA has weak-link Interior subcommittee chairman Ralph Regula as its protector, and wannabe SoHo art connoisseurs living west of the Hudson as its influential interest group. (A planned attempt to deepen the NEA cut just from 40 per cent to 50 per cent this year may fail on the House floor). The CPB, meanwhile, gets a sympathetic ear from John Porter, chairman of the Labor and Health and Human Services subcommittee of Appropriations.

To be sure, all these outfits are sustaining deep cuts this year. But they will live on into the 105th Congress, when the impetus to kill them may well have faded -- and the forces that saved them in 1995 may be stronger. Their survival signals a Republican reluctance to make the deeper conservative case about the function of government. What it portends for the GOP revolution is: phase-out.