WASHINGTON — Lawmakers know that in Congress, the supplemental appropriations bill is often their last chance to get money for favorite causes.

        A financial bridge to handle emergencies or unexpected expenses between one fiscal year and the next, the package is a notorious vehicle for sneaky budget maneuvers. This year's bill topped out at $6.5 billion.

        Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, had another strategy.

        He proposed an amendment that would have prevented Social Security money from being used on anything except Social Security benefits or paying down the national debt.

        It would have required the president, if Congress ever spent more than the government received in revenue and tapped into Social Security, to make offsetting spending cuts in all but the most crucial federal programs.

        Mr. Voinovich knew it probably would fail — and it did, in a 54-43 vote — but he wanted to make the argument anyway.

        “It's incredible to me that they run this place the way they do,” the former Cleveland mayor and Ohio governor said. “If I'd run the city or the county or the state the way they do it here, people would throw me out of office.”

        A few years ago, when Mr. Voinovich arrived in Washington, he might have just made a speech on the Senate floor or sent out a news release about his concerns.

        But now he is growing more comfortable with what he described as the hand-to-hand combat of being a legislator. Reaching out to other senators who share his disdain for budget gimmicks, Mr. Voinovich plans to attack what he considers excess spending in the annual appropriations bills that keep the government running.

        He also organized a letter with 35 senators asking President Bush to veto any appropriations bill “containing imprudent increases in spending or bills that rely on gimmicks to mask their true cost to the American taxpayer.”

        Sen. Jim Bunning, a Ken tucky Republican who joined Mr. Voinovich on the letter, said they wanted to set a marker. “We thought the president needed to know that there was some backup if he decided to veto one of these fat spending bills,” he said.

Started in Ohio

        Mr. Voinovich earned his budget hawk reputationas a mayor and governor, angering interest groups over spending cuts and, at times, fellow Republicans over tax relief. He agreed to go along with Mr. Bush's tax cut this year only after promises from friends and colleagues in the administration that the president was committed to spending cuts and reducing the national debt.

        “I think they're going to do what they say they're doing to do,” Mr. Voinovich said. “But if the Democrats had been in control of the United States Senate, there would be no (tax) reduction.”

        Don Berno, the president of the Ohio Public Expenditure Council, which analyzes state tax and spending issues, said Mr. Voinovich was willing to cut spending as governor even when it hurt him politically.

        “It wasn't a coldblooded kind of approach,” he said. “He took these things seriously and personally.”

        Ohio Senate President Richard Finan, R-Evendale, who negotiated and sometimes disagreed with Mr. Voinovich, recalls how he withstood pressure from the education lobby to raise taxes for more money for Ohio public schools.

        “He was very, very vigilant,” Mr. Finan said. “They screamed and yelled, but in the end they did it George Voinovich's way.”
       In the Senate, Mr. Voinovich has had to learn to be more selective in his interests than he was as governor and, as he says, “earn his spurs” with other senators.

Kudos from peers

        In a compliment, Sen. Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican, recently praised Mr. Voinovich as the “one person in this Congress who has done anything to control spending.”

        David John, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public-policy research group, said Mr. Voinovich was among the lawmakers who have resisted the temptation to use the budget surplus to expand the federal government.

        “If people like Senator Voinovich didn't keep it in check,” he said, “we'd nickel and dime ourselves to death.”

        Although his image is of a fiscal conservative fascinated with good government, Mr. Voinovich is not averse to spending and knows part of his job as a senator is finding federal dollars for projects in Ohio.

        This year alone, he has requested more than $1.8 billion, mostly for state projects, even though he likely might vote against several of the appropriations bills that would contain the money.

        All senators have similar wish lists, which is one reason appropriations bills can become so bloated. But Mr. Voinovich argues that a distinction exists between debating the value of specific projects and using budget gimmicks to hide spending or elude budget caps.

        “We have to be very careful,” he said of government spending during an unpredictable economy. “Right now, it's more important than ever that we watch what we do.”

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