Clinton should be ready fo face balanced budget amendment, Republican warns.

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton Administration should be preparing the fiscal 1996 budget assuming that a constitutional amendment requiting a balanced budget will probably be adopted next year, a congressional aide said yesterday.

The next several budgets prepared by both Congress and the administration should put the budget on "a glide path" to being balanced by fiscal 2002 because it is virtually certain the amendment will be approved, said H. Arthur Sauer, a senior analyst on the House Budget Committee Republican staff.

The incoming speaker of the House, Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., has vowed to vote on the constitutional amendment by Jan. 19, of next year, Sauer said here yesterday at the fall meeting of the American Association for Budget & Program Analysis.

Democratic staff members of the House and Senate budget committees agreed that the balanced budget amendment would pass, but didn't see it as step forward.

"The budget process will become a process of institutional lying," said Richard Kogan, senior analyst on the House Budget Committee's Democratic staff.

Basing his comments on Republican lawmakers' threats to "clean out" the Congressional Budget Office, the agency that analyzes the federal budget and the cost of legislation, Kogan said that turning the CBO into a Republican-ron agency would allow any piece of legislation to pass, no matter what the budget implications, because the real implications would be unknown.

A partisan CBO would allow the budget process to be circumvented, he said, with lawmakers saying "don't worry about these points of order ... CBO will simply tell us what we want to hear."

A balanced budget amendment won't balance the federal budget, but will promote bookkeeping gimmicks, said Allen Schick, a George Mason University economics professor. The whole budget reform debate next year will be more about who is in power in Washington than about the federal budget, Schick said, which is unfortunate because the federal budget should be used as a means of communication with the American people. "The American people don't even know the budget has been brought under control," Schick said.

Besides the balanced budget amendment, the Republican-led Congress is expected to pass a number of other budget reforms next year, including stronger rescission power for the president, a possible lowering of the discretionary spending budget caps, and protections against further defense budget cuts, said Bill Dauster, chief council to the Senate Budget Committee Democratic staff.

The version of rescission power most likely to pass is "expedited rescission," which would require Congress to vote on any line-item spending cut proposed to the final budget agreement by the executive branch, Sauer said. Current law allows the president to propose cuts to the final budget, but Congress is not required to act. In order to balance the federal budget by fiscal 2002, the target year, the American people should get ready for the federal government to "abandon whole enterprises and agencies," Dauster said.

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