Yet while Mr. Giuliani has cut its budget by $73 million, or 12 percent, and proposed trimming more than 2,000 of the department's 10,568 civilian and uniformed workers, the effect has been outwardly negligible.

She proposes trimming some fat from current programs.

At a White House appearance before a strategy session with his economic advisers, Mr. Clinton said his budget for the 1998 fiscal year would propose trimming the growth in Medicare spending by $138 billion over six years.

Yet the proposal is expensive, leading some in Congress to propose trimming the benefits.

In the first major Congressional response to President Bush's drug strategy, Senate Democrats today proposed trimming other Government programs to come up with $2.2 billion more for anti-drug efforts than the President has already proposed.

Indeed, Mr. Summers knows that a Congressionally appointed commission will soon propose trimming fund missions along the lines he suggests.

To do more, Mr. Clinton would have had to propose trimming retiree benefits, perhaps by proposing to raise the eligibility age for Medicare.

Aides said Mr. Dinkins would propose trimming more than 20,000 planned jobs from the city's work quarter-million-member work force, through a mix of layoffs, attrition and early retirements that was still being calculated last night.

Nevertheless, the lower tax cut allowed him to propose trimming Medicare, Medicaid and other programs for the needy by about half of what the Republican-led Congress passed.

Year after year, the Presidents proposed abolishing or trimming the same domestic programs, including mass transit subsidies, the Legal Services Agency and the Economic Development Administration; each year Congress continued the appropriations.