Reprinted from The Washington Times , 5am -- April 24, 1998
House puts IMF funding on hold
By Lorraine Woellert
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
GOP leaders stripped $18 billion for the International Monetary Fund from an emergency spending bill Thursday as mounting misgivings about the agency's secrecy put its funding in doubt.
Emerging from a closed-door meeting, lawmakers said the IMF payment will be cut from a spending bill Congress will take up next week. The IMF provision had threatened to undo the entire measure, which includes emergency money for disaster relief and military spending in Bosnia and the Persian Gulf.
A few hours later, House leaders suppressed a last-minute attempt to reattach IMF money to the disaster relief bill. They also indefinitely postponed a vote on a stand-alone IMF bill.
Prospects for the funding "are very dim," said House Majority Leader Dick Armey, Texas Republican. "I can't tell you when the House will schedule, or even if the House will schedule, action."
The IMF funding plan is quickly going the way of several other international initiatives that in recent months have fallen victim to hostility in Congress.
The Clinton administration, led by Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, has asked for $3.5 billion in regular IMF dues and an additional $14.5 billion in new money to replenish fund coffers drained by the bailout of several Asian nations.
The money is crucial to the fund's ability to respond to future fiscal crises and keep Asia's fiscal chaos from infecting other economies, Clinton officials said.
IMF funding was making slow progress until earlier this week, when a House panel confronted the U.S. delegate to the fund with a barrage of questions she couldn't answer.
Karin Lissakers, the U.S. executive director to the IMF, gave inaccurate responses to some questions and was unable to answer others posed by a subcommittee of the House Banking and Financial Services Committee. Her testimony was a blow to White House credibility, observers said later.
In floor debate last night, House Republicans and Democrats said IMF funding could wait and should be kept separate from disaster funding.
"We have to ask whether this motion will speed up disaster assistance to the American people or slow that assistance down," said Majority Whip Tom DeLay, Texas Republican. "Keep the process as simple as possible. Let's make sure the American people are taken care of first."
An almost equal number of lawmakers urged quick action.
"If the United States fails to act on this, ... the markets will see it and the markets will be very efficient in how they treat it," said Ken Bentsen, Texas Democrat.
Lawmakers defeated, by a vote of 222-185, a measure to tie IMF funding to the disaster relief bill.
The Senate last month approved legislation to release $3.5 billion to the IMF immediately and withhold $14.5 billion until the Treasury reports on IMF efforts to make itself more accountable to the public. The measure was part of the Senate's disaster relief bill.
The House bill is far more strict because it withholds IMF payments until after the agency has made good on reforms. The White House won't support the House version. The United States has great influence over the 182-member IMF, but it cannot dictate or guarantee change.
The Clinton administration continued lobbying heavily Thursday. Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles paid a visit to Mr. Armey, and the White House warned that failure to fund the IMF could come back to haunt Americans.
"This is vitally important to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American families who are involved in one way or another in commerce with Asia," Clinton spokesman Michael McCurry said. "It is very short-sighted of Congress not to move forward."
Critics in Congress, however, laid the blame at the Clinton administration's feet.
"They have shown little or no concern that the IMF is asking for $18 billion for doing whatever they want with," Armey spokeswoman Michele Davis said. "You would think that would create some concerns in the White House. Obviously it doesn't."Copyright 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
Reprinted with permission of
The Washington Times.
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