Sporting a stage-villain’s mustache, white patent-leather shoes, and rings on nearly every finger, Rep. Daniel J. Flood, the 74-year-old chairman of one the most powerful subcommittees on Capitol Hill, swooped into a Congressional hearing room last March and began his oration to the crowd of onlookers:
“Act II, Scene 1. This is the second act of a bad play. I feel I have already seen it.” Indeed, the former Shakespearean actor from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., not only had watched but had been a star in the same performance many times before in his 10 years as subcommittee chairman.
It was the Flood subcommittee’s opening day of hearing on a massive money bill for the Departments of Labor and Health, Education, and Welfare for fiscal 1978.
A few days later, a similar scene would take place on the other side of the Capitol — with an actor of a different style.
Puffing on a fat, black cigar and leaning on a cane, Sen. Warren G. Magnuson, a 72-year-old Democrat from Seattle, quietly entered his subcommittee’s ornate hearing room.
He paused just inside the door to see that the press was comfortably seated. Shuffling to his own seat, the Congressional veteran of over 40 years stopped at least once along the way to whisper something — perhaps a reminder of some forgotten favor — in a colleague’s ear.
“Dapper Dan” and “Maggie,” as these colorful characters are known on Capitol Hill, are two of Congress’s most powerful lawmakers.
As chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Labor, Health, Education, and Welfare, they have the job of leading their colleagues through the long and complex process of recommending to Congress how it should divide approximately $60 billion among the nation’s social endeavors, scientific-research projects, and educational programs.
The production of the Labor-H.E.W. appropriations bill for fiscal 1978 began pretty much on schedule last spring, when dozens of high Administration officials paraded from their executive offices to the Hill. There, before the appropriations subcommittees, they defended the President’s budget requests.
Mindful that the President has the power to veto whatever they do, Mr. Flood’s and Mr. Magnuson’s panels used the President’s proposals as a starting point and cautiously calculated where they could make additions. After Mr. Flood and the 10 other Congressmen on his subcommittee drafted their version of the spending bill, the House Committee on Appropriations and the full House of Representatives approved their decisions, with few changes. Then, having completed their hearings, Senator Magnuson and his 11 colleagues began to draft the Senate version of the money bill. It, too, had to be approved by that body’s full appropriations committee and then by the Senate itself.
Any differences between the two chambers would have to be hammered out in a House-Senate conference by Oct. 1, when the new fiscal year would begin. At least, that was the way the process was supposed to work.
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An innocent who came to The Hill for the first time to see how such weighty decisions were made might have expected high drama. He might have assumed that there would be important debates on why higher education should be allotted only 5 percent of the Labor-H.E.W. funds, while public-assistance programs would receive nearly 33 percent.
Despite the serious business going on and the impressive cast of characters, the process was often more like a circus, sometimes featuring personal buffoonery and comical disputes.
Take, for example, the day that officials from the National Institute of Education testified before Mr. Flood’s subcommittee.
Education research has never been particularly popular with Congress. Harold L. Hodgkinson, then director of the research institute, knew this well and carefully tried to defend his $109 million request. The figure the budget suggested was $39 million more than N.I.E. had received the year before, but $91 million less than Congress had authorized in a 1976 law extending the life of the agency and setting its spending ceilings.
Bored Congressmen squirmed in their seats or dozed as Mr. Hodgkinson explained the efforts his agency had made to upgrade education research, improve teaching, and eliminate crime in the public schools.
Suddenly an enormous, befuddled looking Congressman with a wild mop of white hair stood up. With a loud “harrumph,” Rep. Edward James Patten, Democrat of New Jersey, interrupted Mr. Hodgkinson’s testimony.
“There’s no end to what I hear about the public schools,” snorted the 72-year-old Congressman, who is known to add comic relief to formal hearings by wandering in late, peering over witnesses’ shoulders, and even tugging from their hands the written testimony that they were presenting to the subcommittee.
“I went out to Linden High School to talk. They have something to be proud of there,” he said, pounding his fist on the table. “I tried to make those kids proud that the largest oil company in the country is there. Jesus! They blew me out.
“I tried to make them proud that Cadillac, the best automobile company in the world, was right there in their town. I laid a fried egg. I was shocked. I was hurt. I don’t mind telling you that.”
Mr. Patten paused, peering through thick glasses at Mr. Hodgkinson. The Congressman grinned. “You’re not the guy who started this Hodgkin’s disease, are you?”
“You know the point I’m making. There is no respect for this country. I don’t feel like some great hero — I can’t — I’m exhausted.” He plopped down in his chair.
But then something else occurred to him and he leaned forward. "[President] Carter told us no one knew anything about the history of my country. … Congressmen don’t get any respect. I’m depressed.”
With that Mr. Patten folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. It was a hard act to follow, but Mr. Hodgkinson nodded sympathetically and tried to explain what N.I.E. had done to solve such problems.
Within weeks, however, the appropriations panel would cut the National Institute of Education’s request for funds by more than $20 million.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Capitol, Mr. Magnuson’s subcommittee grilled Marie D. Eldridge, Administrator of the National Center for Education Statistics, on why her $13 million agency should get an additional $3 million.
Ms. Eldridge methodically explained the importance of education statistics. But she, too, was interrupted when Senator Magnuson came in a half an hour or so late for his panel’s 2 o’clock hearing on the Labor-H.E.W. bill.
“As you know, I’ve been an opponent of N.I.E. for years,” Senator Magnuson said as he sat down. “I don’t know what they do with all this data when we get it.”
“Actually, sir,” Ms. Eldridge timidly interjected, “this is the National Center for Education Statistics.”
The Senator showed no embarrassment. “Yeah, well,” he said, “all you data-gathers look the same.”
By the time the appropriations bill had worked its way through Senator Magnuson’s subcommittee, the full Committee on Appropriations, and onto the Senate floor, the Administration’s budget requests — which some educators contended were inadequate to begin with — for the National Institute of Education, the Fund for the Improvement of Post-secondary Education, and the National Center for Education Statistics had been cut by millions of dollars.
Although the Labor-H.E.W. appropriations panels routinely, and often casually, agreed to spend billions of dollars for some programs, the same Congressmen and Senators found themselves caught in long and heated debates over the wisdom of allocating a million or even a few thousand dollars to others.
Not infrequently, some of the smallest programs were ones that affected colleges and universities the most.
“The problem,” said one education lobbyist “is that their minds are so boggled at the thought of how much money they are dealing with — over $60 billion — that they can’t begin to deal with the big issues. As a result, they have to talk about the little one.”
One of the little issues in which the lawmakers became embroiled during the hearings turned into one of the hottest political debates on many college campuses this year.
When the celebrated “reverse discrimination” case between Allan Bakke and the University of California’s medical school at Davis was heading toward the Supreme Court this past summer, Rep. Louis Stokes, Democrat of Ohio, was urging the House appropriations subcommittee to do something about the “chronic shortage of black doctors.”
One way alleviate the problem, argued the black Congressman, was to help a predominantly black medical college in Georgia build a basic medical-science building. The cost to the government would be $5 million.
Mr. Stokes’s colleagues on the appropriations panel were skeptical — apparently not about the legality of supporting such programs, but about the value of it. They spent many hours saying so — even though the cost of the program that Mr. Stokes proposed would amount to less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of the total bill.
Rep. Robert H. Michel, Republican of Illinois, said he didn’t “buy the theory that white doctors treat whites and blacks treat blacks.”
The dispute was finally settled — in a favor of the Georgia school.
However, there were other serious conflicts over spending for health. Some Congressmen, who might have been bored with the medical-school debate, proposed large increases in the multi-billion-dollar health-research programs of the National Institutes of Health.
“Don’t overplay a scene,” Mr. Flood advised the health-research advocates on his panel.
Mr. Flood knew as well as anyone that the more money that went to scientific research, the less there would be for other programs. For years, he has been one of The Hill’s staunchest supporters of education programs.
On the other hand, even Congressmen and Senators have to think about their health.
Just bringing up the subject caused the small, ornate committee rooms on both sides of the Capitol to fill with denser-than-usual clouds of cigar and cigarette smoke. Disease had hit close to home for many lawmakers.
One Congressman argued that, because his mother had died of cancer and his wife had suffered from it, the government should spend more money to find a cure for the disease. Another argued that more money should be channeled to the National Eye Institute: His father had died blind and he, the Congressman, didn’t want to do the same.
“We all have our notes and our dramatic speeches on how we ought to spend more money for this or that,” said Mr. Flood, reminding his colleagues that he had been operated on not many years before for cancer of the stomach.
“It sounds like the second scene of a bad first act,” he said of the debate over increasing allocations for the National Institutes of Health.
Mr. Flood later pointed out to his colleagues on the House floor that the Congressional actors were not quite so loquacious in the really tough scenes — the ones where decisions had to be made about how to finance their favorite programs and still keep the Labor-H.E.W. bill within the spending ceilings set by Congress and close enough to the Administration’s requests to avoid a Presidential veto.
Indeed, Mr. Michel, the appropriations subcommittee’s ranking minority member, introduced an amendment to cut $563 million from the final House version of the bill.
The effort made by the education lobbyists to stop that amendment was one of the best-executed scenes in the whole production of the 1978 Labor-H.E.W. bill.
The Washington lobbyists’ entrance onto the Congressional stage was impressive. They divided up lists of members; they deluged Senators and Representatives with letters; they organized state universities to exert pressure from home districts.
Said Mr. Michel, as his proposed spending cuts were being rejected: “If we would take all the money they are spending lobbying against my amendment, I would not be surprised but that we would have all the money we need for some of these programs they are interested in.”
The $61.3 billion measure that was approved by the House of Representatives in June would have cost nearly $700 million more than the version the Senate approved a few days later. Higher-education programs were to receive $3.38 billion — $201 million more than the Senate approved.
How the complicated tradeoffs would resolve themselves had to be worked out in perhaps the most colorful scene of all — the House-Senate conference.
Crowded into a Senate hearing room — with a mural depicting the Roman goddess of war over the door — 13 House members and 14 Senators began to settle their differences in July. By November, they still had not concluded the final act.
“One of the most frustrating experiences in the world is sitting down in an H.E.W. conference,” Sen. Magnuson told his colleagues. “It’s enough to give you cardiovascular disease.”
However, most of the process of deciding how much money should be spent — particularly on education — went as smoothly as an auction:
Senator Magnuson: “Take $35 million?”
Mr. Flood: “Make that 20 and we’ll take it.”
Senator Magnuson: “Make it 30 and we’ll split the difference on the next item.”
All told, the Labor-H.E.W. bill that the conferees settled on was a healthy $425 million less than the figure set by the Carter Administration. Yet both health and education programs came out considerably ahead of the President’s requests. Higher-education programs alone were to receive nearly $3.6 million — $311 million above the Administration’s budget and $385 million more than the year before.
To come up with such figures, Mr. Michel of Illinois told his colleagues when they voted on the compromise version of the bill, took some fancy “bookkeeping manipulation.” The final bill, he charged, contained “phony reductions” for welfare programs, and was a “substantial $2.3 billion over the President’s budget.”
Despite Mr. Michel’s opposition, by August the conferees had but one task left: to hammer out the final language of another controversial amendment attached to the bill. The provision would deny, totally or partially, H.E.W. funds to poor women for abortions.
Hundreds of anti-abortion lobbyists who could not find seats in the tiny conference room lined the halls of the Capitol, as the conference continued nearly every day throughout the fall.
Women and children stood impatiently in line, holding up artificial red roses to those who passed as a sign of their support for the unborn young’s right to life.
In the corner stood a priest, quietly praying. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil. … “
In October, other protesters marched outside the Capitol — mourning the death of a woman who had resorted to an illegal abortion.
Inside, the House-Senate conferees were deadlocked over how far the restrictions on such controversial operations should go. Senator Magnuson, speaking for his chamber, insisted that the language should not be as restrictive as that adamantly supported by Mr. Flood and his colleagues in the House.
After weeks of stalemate on the Labor-H.E.W. bill, Congress recessed early this month. The final words that stood between the two sides — the number in a “cheap telegram,” said Senator Magnuson — still remained to be settled.
Thus, months after decisions had been made on the real purpose of the bill — to determine what Congress wanted to spend on the hundreds of programs operated by the Labor and H.E.W. departments — the final act of the annual appropriations process had yet to be played.
After Anne C. Roark left The Chronicle, she became a freelance writer in Los Angeles and covered health care and higher education for the Los Angeles Times. Recently she was a contributor to The New Old Age, a New York Times blog.
