WASHINGTON -- Reaching a major milestone in the Republican effort to roll back the power and reach of government, the U.S. House of Representatives has approved landmark legislation that would balance the budget by 2002, reduce taxes and make the biggest changes in federal social policy in the last half-century.


The bill was approved 227-203 Thursday -- a vote largely along party lines that will draw a distinct line between the parties as they head into the 1996 campaign. Only 10 Republicans voted against the bill and four Democrats voted for it.


The Senate was preparing to vote on a companion measure Friday.


The gargantuan measure is a monument to the breadth of Republican ambitions since the party took control of Congress in January. The bill is a field guide to GOP dreams about how to reshape and redirect scores of federal programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, that have been cornerstones of social policy since the War on Poverty was declared in the mid-1960s.


The bill, like that before the Senate, would end Americans' entitlement to federal assistance when they fall into poverty, while transferring enormous power to states to weave the social safety net as they see fit. It would make deep cuts in farm subsidies that have been politically sacrosanct since the Great Depression. It calls for eliminating a Cabinet agency -- the Commerce Department -- for the first time in the history of the federal bureaucracy. It would give $245 billion in federal revenues back to businesses and individuals in tax cuts over the next seven years.


Republicans hailed House approval of the bill as a turning point in an uphill struggle to reverse a decades-long trend toward bigger deficits and expanding government power.


"It was the most decisive vote on the direction of government since 1933,'' House Speaker Newt Gingrich said after the vote.


Democrats relentlessly accused Republicans of trying to destroy Medicare and give tax cuts to people who did not need them.


Still, the House's two-day debate on the bill was remarkably lacking in drama or suspense. That was a tribute, in part, to the exceptional party unity the GOP has displayed all year under Gingrich. But it also reflected a pervasive sense that significant changes will be wrought before the measure becomes law because President Bill Clinton has vowed to veto the bill as written.


But even if eventual negotiations between Congress and the White House produce changes in the bill, what remains will still likely be a sea change in federal fiscal policy because Clinton, for all his veto threats, has signaled a willingness to accept key elements of the Republican plan. He has endorsed the goal of balancing the budget and even indicated he could accept the GOP's seven-year time line; he has accepted the idea of ending poor Americans' entitlement to welfare; he has called for cuts in taxes and the growth of Medicare, although he disagrees with Republicans about the size of those reductions.


Negotiations with Clinton are not likely to begin in earnest until after House and Senate Republicans iron out the differences between their versions of the bill. In many areas, such as farm policy and welfare, the Senate's bill proposes less drastic changes in current policy than the House's.