Government services and the budget bill - 5 January 1996

Last Wednesday early in the morning, the Secretary of State Mr Warren Christopher brought together his secretaries and assistant secretaries of state. Wednesday is the day for their regular weekly meeting at which they put on the table and review, heaven help them, the endless range of foreign policy problems and choices that confront the United States, but last Wednesday's weekly meeting was unique in a very embarrassing way. The discussion was entirely about how does the world's single superpower conduct, its diplomatic business both here and in all its embassies and consulates abroad when the government has in a word, gone out of business. As I talk, the shutdown of government departments and offices and services and tourist attractions goes on and on. And even if it's over, it will help, I think, to fill in the background of a blunder that could damage many people running for election this November.

Well then, the president and the Republicans have been quarrelling for four months about a way to balance the budget. It has become the obsession of the new Republican majority in both houses. After interminable squabbles and backbiting the two parties eventually agreed that the budget must be balanced in seven years time, it involves they say drastic cuts in public spending, which is, today seems to be, the whole business of democratic government. Simply, the Democrats say the Republicans want to cut more money out of the going funds for free medical service for the old and the very poor, for protecting the environment, for most of all the welfare system. To be not so simple, but truthful, neither party proposes to cut these funds, but to restrain their rate of growth. Mr Clinton wants a looser reign on growth than the Republicans do, they do differ widely on the need to retain tough controls on industrial wastes, pollution of the atmosphere and so on, but mainly they are as close on the other big issues as makes little difference to the great massive body of the public, the middle class.

However, the Republicans in the House, which after all is the last word on money bills, don't want to compromise their budget balancing bill and they thought they'd bring the president to heel by refusing him a normal concession at the end of every year. If for any reason, the passing of a budget bill is being held up, then the Congress usually passes what's called a continuing resolution, which is a disbursement of monies to keep the daily routine, the workforce, the wheels of government turning. This normal continuing expense account has been refused eight times in the past, but the absurdity of a government shutdown lasted only a day or two.

As I talk now, the government has been shutdown for 20 days. At first the newspapers and the politicians stressed the ordeal of tourists everywhere not being able to go into the national parks or the National Gallery or up the Washington Monument or out to the Statue of Liberty. After a week or so, we began to interview secretaries, filing clerks, watchmen, computer operators, all the people who keep the government departments actually at work. Each party accused the other of obstinacy, lack of compassion and general pigheadedness, though the polls showed that most Americans blamed the Republicans for the shutdown.

What was not much noted was that a quarter of a million idle federal workers represented only 15 per cent of the entire government workforce, but during the past week we've been learning how the enforced idleness of those quarter million has affected several more millions of onlooking Americans. We've already used up all the sympathy we have for disappointed tourists. Now we hear there's no more money for unemployment insurance, that the excellent urgent program, meals on wheels for the house bound elderly would have no money left by the end of this week. We see more and more of people who live on some sort of subsidy, certainly welfare, but comfortable office workers in government departments who hadn't had their pay cheques and they weren't going to get them and went accordingly without any of the Christmas trimmings including presents for the children.

In cities with large numbers of federal employees or famous museums or whatnot, the hotels have lost millions of dollars. The state governments were taken a blow they'd never expected. The Federal Government matches a states own payments for, for instance, Medicaid, the medical program for the poor. This week they had from Washington only 40 per cent of the normal matching payments.

The cleaning up of toxic waste throughout the country has been suspended. The man who's responsible for the cost of running the federal courts says: "No money for judges or for prison guards." How about that! The way this man puts it, in a masterly understatement is, running out of money will imperil the judges ability to administer justice, it will also imperil the ability of the clerks of the court to buy a hamburger. So even knowing all these things, we couldn't have guessed at the humiliating way the secretary of state would spend last Wednesday morning. After an hour's discussion, which could only conclude that empty pockets at the State Department produced the same deprivation as anywhere else! Mr Christopher took off on a rare tour of the State Department's cafeteria asking people how the shutdown was affecting them. Affecting them that is who were there to be asked. He quickly learned the answer, plenty!

Mr Christopher was understandably embarrassed by the fact that next week he's off on a far ranging safari, at of course government expense, first to Paris then to Damascus and to Jerusalem to pursue what is being called the "Syrian Israeli Initiative." How will he fly? In a government jet of course. How will he pay for it? Government departments are billed at once for government planes they use. Well the State Department's spokesman hoped that the air force would provide the plane but would hold back the bill.

By the end of the day, Mr Christopher was alive to the worst consequences for his department. The computers and cable services that run the department's contacts with the rest of the world, they don't function automatically, they too thrive on the money paid to their operators. But by this weekend the operators' pay gave out, over those cables by Friday came the word, an embassy in the Middle East was cancelling a party. The Vietnamese government had threatened to cut off the power to the United States embassy there if it didn't come up with an overdue electricity bill. A final note from the embassy front, in what's called the more dangerous countries – and that can only mean where terrorism is rife – the pay for the security guards is running out. The more these consequences got known about, the angrier people got at the culprit and what keeps, what kept the stalemate going I do believe, was the fear of each party that in the end they would be identified as the one to blame.

Since, as I say, the polls, more and more picked on the Republicans, in the middle of last week, Senator Dole, the Republican leader in the Senate and a presidential candidate don't forget, proposed and got the Senate to pass a resolution that would release enough money to send those federal employees back to work. But the House, which these days has a charging cavalry in the 80 or so Republican freshman refuse to pass it.

I expect over the weekend, the shutdown will be lifted. I don't know why I say this I've been saying it for better part of a month. Obviously, this ludicrous but semi-tragic situation is what has been consuming most of the debating time in both Houses of Congress and the prime time on the television evening news.

However, the government shutdown has had one totally unpredicted effect on the 1996 presidential election: it has dropped the Speaker of the House Mr Newt Gingrich as the chief Republican in Congress into the doldrums of a 20 per cent approval rating in the polls. At the same time, Mr Clinton has gone up to a peak of popularity, well over 50 per cent approve of him and the way he does his job. Chiefly, I think because the shutdown helped Mr Clinton to make a short, sharp speech every day dramatising the unspeakable cruelty of the Republicans, melodramatising the dreadful effects their budget would have your children out on the streets, poor old grandma left to sicken with no doctor in site.

Mr Clinton is terribly good at keeping his chin up and solemnly and bravely regretting the character of his opponent, he looks and sounds as if he were running for president, which indeed he is in effect and nobody alive is better at running for the presidency. Being president is something else. But the sight and sound of his popularity has made people look at him anew as an off and running presidential candidate and looking very good up against the now seven Republicans who are slogging through the snows of New Hampshire and Iowa where soon the first presidential primaries will be held.

What this has done, has let loose all sorts of wizards and gurus trying to fathom the secret of Mr Clinton's new found popularity and his chances of holding it. From the tabloid end of the spectrum, comes the news that no left-handed president has ever succeeded himself. Mr Clinton is a lefty. From the lofty tower of the New York Times come elaborate graphs illustrating the effect of the economy on a president's chances of re-election and the word from them is: forget issues, in a rising economy, the president wins.

January is to journalists and politicians alike, the month when they're expected to don the cap and the robes of a prophet. I've collected a list of prophecies made by the wisest, the most prestigious public men, the weightiest magazines in the United States, prophecies made mostly on New Years Eve 1966. Maybe I'll re-tell these insights or foresights to you another time. Today, they are mostly hilariously cockeyed. For the moment, let me say I believe that from Nostradamus to Dr. Gallup, the gift of prophecy is not one given to man nor, to quote Shakespeare, nor to woman neither.

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