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UNITED STATES Another Nominee in Trouble The odds against Dr. Henry Foster's becoming the next U.S. Surgeon General seemed to grow steeper as his nomination bogged down in a controversy over the number of abortions he had performed during his career--a dispute that once again put the White House in the embarrassing position of having to explicate a sloppy vetting process. Appearing on the TV program Nightline, Foster said he had performed 39 abortions--an upward adjustment from the ``fewer than a dozen'' he said he had previously told the White House about. Many antiabortion Senators questioned Foster's candor, leaving many pro- abortion rights lawmakers fuming over the White House's failure to get Foster's record straight from the start--an oversight that let the debate devolve into a numbers game. For his part, the President vowed to fight for Foster's confirmation, as did Foster himself. The Battle of the Budget President Clinton formally sent his proposed $1.6 trillion 1996 budget to Congress where, as expected, it was promptly pronounced dead by Republicans, who said its $144 billion worth of cuts over the next five years were not enough; nor were its projected deficits ($200 billion yearly through the end of the century) deemed acceptable. As yet, however, the Republican Party leadership has proposed no official alternative.