White House Blunders On Environment Bills Past Mistakes Could Toughen Stands By Clinton In Budget Negotiations

At the end of negotiations with the White House on timber sales last summer, a legislative aide to Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., chuckled: “These people just fell off the turnip truck.”

The Clinton administration’s senior environmental managers, even Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, privately concur. They admit that unprepared White House negotiators gave away the store when they agreed to a so-called salvage rider. While supposedly directed at dead trees, what it really did was direct some federal timber sales to go ahead regardless of environmental cost.

The debacle has a bearing on a bigger upcoming battle - namely, how hard President Clinton will resist environmental rollbacks included in budget bills set for final approval by Congress.

The president’s performance will determine whether Democrats harness the environment as an issue in 1996.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich, once a Sierra Club member, worries about that and recently admitted that he and fellow Republicans have “messed up on the environment.”

Babbitt rattled sabers in Seattle last week. “They (Republicans) are following a radical agenda,” he said. “The president has, on both (budget) bills, taken a clear position. He will use his veto.”

At a private breakfast, however, Babbitt heard about 40 environmental activists vent anger at Clinton.

The mood of those in the audience ranged “from deep disappointment to a sense of complete betrayal,” said Denis Hayes, president of the Bullitt Foundation, who introduced the interior secretary.

They weren’t angry with Babbitt, who has fought, and often lost, on many fronts. The frustration went over his head - to the top. Its foundation was what environmentalists see as Clinton’s habit of dealing away the environment when it comes time to make a deal.

In 1993, rounding up votes needed to pass his budget, Clinton undercut Babbitt’s plans for mining and grazing reform. As recently as last week, he signed a transportation bill that rolled back the Highway Beautification Act, which encouraged states not to allow billboards adjacent to interstate highways.

The salvage rider was part of a budget reconciliation bill that rolled back spending by federal agencies during the 1995 fiscal year. Clinton vetoed the legislation. Subsequently, however, he struck a deal with Republicans that restored cuts in education and job training programs.

Led by aides to chief of staff Leon Panetta, White House negotiators let the timber language stand with minor modifications.

The rider has become the timber industry’s legal battering ram in overriding holdups on timber sales from Washington’s Olympic Peninsula to Oregon’s Umpqua River.

U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan has ruled that the administration cannot withhold once-auctioned timber sales that were canceled after fisheries and wildlife biologists raised objections.

“The judge’s decision goes way beyond language of the reconciliation bill,” Babbitt complained last week.

But a senior federal official in the Northwest privately observed: “The salvage rider was carefully crafted to do exactly what it is doing.”