In a meeting at Camp David the weekend after his Inauguration, Clinton huddled with budget czar Leon Panetta and Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen. Sources close to Panetta say he told the president, “If you want to save real money real fast, you have to go after misplaced priorities like this.” But Bentsen defended the SSC–and not by waxing eloquent about how the project was going to crack the profoundest secrets of nature. Rather, the SSC, which requires a 54-mile tunnel to accelerate subatomic articles to near the speed of light, has turned into a jobs project: 8,000 workers will build it or its components. Equally important to Texas politicians, nearby Dallas expects an influx of white-collar scientists and engineers to work there. And with contracts in 48 states, the project epitomizes quark-barrel politics at its finest. Those arguments saved it last June, when the House voted to kill the project but the Senate spared it.
This time, backers like Bentsen, Texas Gov. Ann Richards and Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (whose state of Louisiana is home to a firm with a contract to manufacture magnets for the SSC) had an even better trump card. They warned Clinton that if he killed the SSC, the Democrats could kiss Bentsen’s Senate seat (the special election is in May) goodbye. Call it the $11 billion Senate seat. “Clinton’s impulse for budget savings ran directly into politics,” says former representative Dennis Eckart, a leading opponent of the SSC.
Sources say Clinton will ask Congress for $640 million for the SSC in 1994, 24 percent more than last year’s outlay. If that’s approved, the SSC will have cost taxpayers more than $2 billion so far-with the rest of the bill coming due by 2003.
Other sacred cows also escaped the abattoir. Among them:
The budget cuts in federal spending are:
9% too great 46% not enough 39% about right
NEWSWEEK Poll, Feb. 18-19, 1993
