The Budget's Hidden Horrors

Monday, Jan. 18, 1988 By MARGOT HORNBLOWER
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While Inouye's project was approved in committee, the anti-Murdoch provision that slipped into the catchall spending bill was an end run engineered by Senator Edward Kennedy and Senator Ernest Hollings, who had tried unsuccessfully to pass a similar measure last summer. On Dec. 15, Hollings and three other members of Congress met in a miniconference. "We were going through thousands of items," recalled Republican Congressman Harold Rogers of Kentucky. "The Murdoch thing was a real speck in the wind. Hollings said something to the effect that 'this is not a change of policy.' I did not understand that it took away the FCC's waiver powers. This took place over a ten-second period of time." Since there was no dispute, the matter was not even raised in the full conference.

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While there may be no more pork this year than in the past, what there is comes at a time when the nation can least afford it and efforts to reduce the deficit have faltered. "The American public now wants more spending on things like health and education, doesn't want to pay more taxes, and it wants a balanced budget," says Rudolph Penner, a former Congressional Budget Office director. But with recent pressures to clamp down on spending for popular new programs, members of Congress have little to boast about besides whatever bit of bacon they can bring home to their districts.

Still, qualms are growing. The howls that accompanied passage of the spending bills this year seemed more distressed than usual. Even a touch of humility crept in. "We are going to have one vote on a conference agreement of over 2,000 pages, which not a single member has read or understands," fumed Massachusetts Republican Silvio Conte during the House debate. "Who's responsible for this outrage?" Conte answered his own question. "In Pogo's immortal words," he concluded, "we have met the enemy, and it is us."

With reporting by Ted Gup/Washington