The endorsement by senior Reagan Administration officials last week of a strategy for using the education issue in the upcoming Presidential campaign has apparently ended a long debate within the Administration over the size of its fiscal 1985 education budget.
According to sources, White House and Education Department officials agreed after a meeting last week that they would not initiate any major education programs or seek substantial increases in the federal education budget.
“It was resolved that it would be an unwise precedent to start new programs. The other side will always be able to argue that we should spend a couple of billion more on them; we can’t win that debate,” said a source familiar with the discussions at the meeting.
“Instead, there was a general feeling that we should argue [the education issue] on our own philosophical grounds,” the official said. “To the extent that we can draw attention to issues like parental choice, local control, merit pay, and discipline, the education debate moves to our territory. Our opponents have difficulty dealing with these issues because the polls show that the public overwhelmingly approves of our positions on them.”
President Reagan, the source said, “seems to show every indication of talking about the education issue a great deal” in the forthcoming campaign.
In addition to Secretary Bell and his top aides, David A. Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, Edwin Meese 3rd, counselor to the President, and James A. Baker 3rd, White House chief of staff, participated in the meeting.
The final size of the Administration’s fiscal 1985 education budget request will not be known until this week, when the Office of Management and Budget releases new “interest-rate assumptions.” The government’s estimate of the cost of the Education Department’s student-aid programs will likely be altered by the new interest estimates, according to the official.
Administration sources confirmed, however, that the education budget agreed to last week is close to $15.2 billion, the amount appropriated by the Congress this year. This marks the first budget in which the Administration has not proposed cutting education spending. For fiscal 1984, officials set an education budget of $13.2 billion.
Education Secretary Terrel H. Bell reportedly made an initial re-quest of $16 billion for his department, an increase of $800 million over the current appropriation.
The budget office demanded that the Education Secretary cut his budget request after President Reagan last month ordered Cabinet secretaries and agency administrators to rework their budgets, officials said. Secretary Bell’s appeal of the budget office’s demands resulted in the meeting last week with the three senior White House aides, who make up the Administration’s budget-review board.
Although Mr. Bell argued unsuccessfully at the meeting that there should be new federal education initiatives in the 1985 budget proposal, according to a source, he did win a substantial increase in the amount of so-called “discretionary funds” available to him.
“There are a variety of ways to give him more discretion so he can highlight and help programs around the country he feels are important,” the source said. The principal way, according to the source, would be to increase the Secretary’s Discretionary Fund, which, by law, amounts to 6 percent of the funds appropriated to the Chapter 2 block grant.
Last week’s meeting resulted in an agreement to seek a substantial increase in the appropriation for Chapter 2 for fiscal 1985.
