January: The nation's first trillion-dollar budget is proposed by President Reagan.

Decisions on trillion-dollar budgets?

The issue driving the debate over the trillion-dollar budget President Reagan proposed today will be the enormous deficits that have set his economic policies apart from those of his predecessors.

Congressional Democrats said today that President Reagan's trillion-dollar 1988 budget underestimated the size of the deficit and the savings necessary to reach the deficit ceiling in the budget-balancing law.

In the current trillion-dollar budget, it would be a minor fraction of 1 percent.

Despite the telephone problem, officials are optimistic at the I.R.S., a 120,000-person bureaucracy that is responsible for collecting more than 90 percent of the revenues in the Government's trillion-dollar budget.

Unless changed, it would force Congress to whack almost $200 billion off next year's trillion-dollar budget.

But a few days later the House of Representatives and the Senate Budget Committee approved trillion-dollar budgets for the coming year, with estimated deficits over $132 billion.

Critics have been quick to tag President Reagan's 1988 budget as "the first trillion-dollar budget in history."

Judging by the first trillion-dollar budget ever sent to Congress, he's stepping on the gas.