NATION
The Contract: Half Done?
Celebrating their first 50 days in power, House Republicans circulated self-congratulatory buttons that read KEEPING PROMISES. Ten House subcommittees slashed some $17.5 billion from domestic and foreign programs. Among the victims: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which could lose $47 million from next year's $305 million budget, and the Energy Department, with $80 million trimmed from solar-energy and environmental-cleanup projects. The G.O.P. lawmakers also presented a plan, which outraged Democrats, to take $2 billion from day care, school lunches and other long-standing social-welfare initiatives and convert the money to block grants for states to set up...
