Defeat of budget cuts raises hopes

WASHINGTON -- The unexpected defeat in Congress of a package of healthcare and education cuts last week has given New England lawmakers a glimmer of hope that they will be able to salvage more federal funding for teacher training, drug research, and special-education programs. The region had been scheduled for a number of cutbacks or elimination next year.

Democrats and a handful of moderate Republicans rejected the proposed cuts Thursday in a 224-to-209 vote.

The reversal amounted to a surprising rebuke to the House Republican leadership that had not lost a budget vote since shortly after the GOP came to power in 1995.

The vote now will force a congressional panel to reconsider the cuts to dozens of social programs.

Two New England Republicans, Representatives Rob Simmons and Nancy L. Johnson, both from Connecticut, joined the unanimous Democrats in voting against the cost-cutting measure.

Representative Michael H. Michaud, a Maine Democrat, said the rejected budget proposal would have ''delivered really painful cuts," singling out the $784 million cut to President Bush's No Child Left Behind program for particular criticism. Overall federal education spending would have declined for the first time in 10 years under the legislation, according to Democrats.

The budget, the product of a Senate-House conference committee that sought to reconcile different versions of the budget passed by the two chambers, also would have cut healthcare spending and left funding for heating assistance programs unchanged, despite requests by New England lawmakers for more money to help the region cope with the expected steep increase in the cost of home heating this winter. The budget total was $1.5 billion less than last year's.

''It was the worst bill we've seen in more than a decade, probably two decades," said Representative John Tierney of Massachusetts, a member of the education committee in the House.

In a twist, even a leading Republican negotiator on the labor and education budget, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said the funding was insufficient, and he welcomed the House rejection of the bill.

Under pressure to trim spending and limit ''pork," the House and Senate negotiators who drafted the budget eliminated the individual projects that senators and representatives usually request for their districts. Last year, New England lawmakers secured millions of dollars for community health centers, museums, and job training programs in the region through such allocations.

It remains unclear how the Republican leadership will proceed, and whether Democratic efforts to restore funding will succeed. Republican budget hawks stressed that legislators had to rein in spending to keep the federal budget deficit from growing, but Democrats hope the squabbling would lead to a reversal of some cuts.

''Hopefully the conferees will look at restoring some of the cuts to make the budget more palatable," Michaud said.

In the votes before Congress left Washington for recess, Republicans passed a separate budget-cutting plan early Friday morning. That budget plan cuts spending by $50 billion, including $14.5 billion from student loan funding, but will be spread out over five years.

Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, said the tax cuts approved by Bush in 2001 had made it impossible to avoid such spending cuts.

''This is the price of the tax cuts," he said of the lean budgets.

While the labor and education budget that was defeated contained no earmarks that might have made the bill more attractive for some representatives, a transportation spending plan introduced on Friday showed no such restraint.

In addition to funding the Transportation Department, the budget allocates millions for a variety of transportation projects across the country and in New England, including $2 million for the Boston-to-Fitchburg MBTA commuter-rail corridor, $6 million for a busway in Connecticut, $2 million for the extension of the Blue Line northward, $6 million for commuter rail in Rhode Island, $4 million for the Silver Line phase III, and $10 million for transit in Stamford, Conn. It also provides more than $60 million for improvements to Maine border crossings.

The transportation budget passed on Friday, 392 to 31.