Washington

By TOM LITTI.EWOOD

Broken promises on U.S. budget irk state and local officials

THE MOST IMPORTANT document the bookshelves of a state or local government fiscal officer is, beyond any doubt, the latest edition of the federal budget. Once a year the President is required to compress all his administration's political and economic judgments between the covers of a single, unified document. Unavoidably, the program decisions ripple on out to the furthest mosquito abatement and road maintenance districts. Nowadays, state governments are especially vulnerable to abrupt changes in the flow of federal funds.

For as long as there have been federal grants, governors and mayors have complained of their lack of access to the federal budget-making process until it is too late to influence the important decisions incorporated therein. There may be crucial implications for state and local governments, but by the time the budget has gone to the printer the administration is committed to a sequence of interlocked priority judgments that cannot be easily adjusted. Although congressional operations are more visible, the same lack of communication has been a problem there. Appropriations bills have been known to pass Congress without anyone knowing of some weighty practical complication that would be felt in every state capital as a consequence.

In 1973 Gov. Dan Evans of Washington took the lead in establishing the New Coalition of elected officials to facilitate the exchange of budgetary information with the federal government. Three governors, three mayors, three county officials, and three legislators were named to the organization. Evans, Gov. Calvin Rampton of Utah, Mayor Moon Landrieu of New Orleans, and Jack Walsh, county official in San Diego, were the early activists in the new alliance. From the beginning, their objective was a simple one: to open the doors of the President's Office of Management and Budget (0MB) soon enough so that the representatives of state and local governments could make their views known before decisions had been made. Typically, officials who hold the power at any level of government like to assemble their budgets with a minimum of outside "interference."

A delegation from the coalition met with representatives of 0MB and with the President's domestic cabinet before President Ford's first budget was submitted. But the conferences ceased months before the serious budget negotiations commenced inside the administration. As far as the federal bureaucracy was concerned, the conferences were pro forma. "We would meet with 0MB and feel that we were communicating," recalled one of the coalition leaders, "and then discover two or three weeks later that we weren't."

The final budget document gave no evidence that there had been any input at all from the state and local officials. Proposed changes in the matching terms for highway funds were particularly irksome to the recipients of federal money. Generally, since the inauguration of Richard Nixon in 1969, the Republican administrations have been trying to make it easier for state and local governments to spend their federal dollars as they wish (which the state and local officials applaud), while cutting back on the amount of federal aid (which they do not applaud).

When James Lynn took over almost a year ago as director of 0MB, he promised to pay attention to the New Coalition, and not merely in a token manner. During the last year there were regularly scheduled staff-to-staff meetings between 0MB and the federal departments, on one hand, and representatives of the affected state and local governments on the other. The discussions started with manpower training and public sector employment programs, moving on later to health issues. Whether this administration is ready to admit outsiders in any really meaningful way to the budget decision- making processes of the federal government won't be known until a few weeks from now when the President's next budget is published. "We are under no illusions that there is going to be an open door at the White House," Gov. Evans remarked recently. "But sometimes the critical reaction is less severe when the decisions don't come as a complete surprise."

Already it is apparent that much of the presidential election campaign of 1976 will be played around the federal budget. How large it should be; whether taxes should be reduced and by how much to whom; the allocation of funds for defense, foreign aid, social programs and the cities; whether to blame deficit spending for rising prices; how much federal stimulus was and is recommended to deal with unemployment; the specifications for federal revenue- sharing — all these are issues that strike the voter right in the bank book. Presidents have always been at something of a political disadvantage because the budget submission responsibility compels them to make choices between attractive (to somebody somewhere) spending programs, and to enunciate a reasonably coherent fiscal policy, whereas individual members of Congress are free to espouse their own personalized fiscal ideologies. But if the new congressional budget act works like it is supposed to, that will be changed. There is a mechanism now for Congress to arrive at a collective decision on the budget, which the state and local coalition also wants to influence. This will be the subject of a future column from Washington. �