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report issued this month, they surveyed every corner of the battlefield and listed the reductions, officially known as "sequesterings." Not only will the Pentagon have to cut $543 million from Air Force missile procurement and $532,000 for such a minor specialty as a tank muzzle boresight device, but there will be $54,000 less for the modernization of dining facilities at Fort Knox, Ky. And so on. In the field of nonmilitary spending, the figures provide a kind of guided tour through all the sunny hillsides and dark thickets of federal benevolence: $2.4 million less for the National Endowment for the Arts; $15 million less for the Panama Canal Commission; $8,000 less for the National Afro-American History and Culture Commission; $28,000 less for the National Council on the Handicapped; $31,000 less for the Marine Mammal Commission. And so on. "It's going to be tough, tough, tough on everybody," says Co-Sponsor Hollings.
The most bizarre aspect of this arbitrary budget cutting is that few people in Washington think it will work very well. Almost nobody thinks it is the right way to run the Government. And quite a few people think it is illegal. No sooner had Gramm-Rudman passed than twelve Congressmen joined the Naderite Public Citizen Litigation Group in asking the Federal District Court in Washington to intervene. And though Reagan had just signed the bill and called it "an important step toward putting our fiscal house in order," his Justice Department filed a brief saying that it also thought parts of the measure probably unconstitutional.
In Congress, too, there were efforts to change course. A group of liberals led by Ted Weiss of Manhattan formally proposed last week to repeal Gramm- Rudman outright, an unlikely eventuality since it got through the House by a 271-to-154 vote and the Senate by 61 to 31. "Budget cuts of this size," said Weiss, "will force us to dismantle the Federal Government, step by step, until there is little left."
For the present, though, this act--which threatens to delegate Congress's most important function to unelected bureaucrats, which jeopardizes the most vital activities of the Government, which impoverishes good programs as ruthlessly as bad ones, if not more so--remains the law of the land. "It won't go away," says House Majority Leader Jim Wright. "We set out to create a straitjacket to force the President, and Congress too, to face unpleasant facts."
If Gramm-Rudman is a foolish piece of legislation, and it is, it did not come from nowhere. It came most immediately from the fact that the U.S. was going bankrupt at the end of last year. Specifically, at midnight on Dec. 12, the money would run out--no more cash for either the White House or the Marine Mammal Commission. The only way to avoid going into default, meaning an almost unthinkable inability to meet federal payrolls, was the all too familiar trick of raising the limit on the national debt.