High on a Windy Hill

President Truman sent to Congress yesterday the annual budget message in which he called for governmental expenditures of $39,669,000,000 during the coming fiscal year. Republican leaders in Congress immediately went tearing into the budget with their 1948 campaign banners flying in a breeze of legislative effusiveness. The President's budget, it was claimed, could be cut by a considerable amount. There was no agreement on the size of the cut, but the figure of $5,500,000,000 was bruited about more than any other.

Perhaps if the Congressmen had remembered, or had thought the voters would remember, what happened last year they would not have been quite so garrulous. The President presented an executive budget of $37,500,000,000, which the Republican leaders set out to cut by $6,000,000,000. Acting under the legislative budget provisions of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946, the Finance and Appropriations Committees of the Senate, and the Ways and Means and Appropriations Committees of the House met in joint session, and, by chance, arrived at the same $6,000,000,000 figure as the feasible size of the cut. This decision was made by twenty members of the joint committee, meeting in secret, and imposed on the rest of the membership.

Subsequently the Senate hit upon a cut of $4,500,000,000. The House stuck by the original figure. A conference committee was appointed to adjust the difference; and that was the last ever to be heard from the legislative budget. One of the most valuable portions of the Legislative Reorganization Act had been emasculated by trying to use in as a political tool with which to discredit the President. Republican leaders had formulated the size of the cut before they even saw the budget.

At the end of the first regular session of the Eightieth Congress on July 27, Republican estimates of the amount of money saved by Congress ranged from $700,000,000 to $7,000,000,000. But by the end of the special session in December it was a hard and uncomfortable fact that Congress had appropriated $37,728,000,000 for the fiscal year 1948.

In the light of these facts, any talk about the size of the cut that can be made in the overall figure, before Congress has actually studied the amounts required for specific purposes, is non-sense. It may be that economics are possible, but it will require a lot of looking to find them. 81.2 percent of the President's budget is allocated to national defense, the Marshall plan, veterans' benefits, tax refunds, and interest on the national debt. Cuts here are both politically dangerous and detrimental to the security of the country. Social Security and welfare, highways, mail, radio regulation, atomic energy, flood control, reclamation, and the operation of Congress and the Courts, constitute another 16.1 percent. Cuts can be made here but only by sacrificing the long-run interest of the nation to the desire of the majority of Congress to carry a "good record" into the November elections. The remaining 2.7 percent provides for conservation and price supports for agricultural products, education, enforcement of the Taft-Hartley Act, strike mediation, and housing.

At every point in the budget Congress is confronted with the probability that any cuts will alienate a considerable section of voters or will endanger the security and welfare of the nation, or both. Everybody favors "economy in government"; but no one favors eliminating what is, or what is thought to be, a useful function of the government. When the time comes to make the actual appropriations, there will be a lot of high flown verbiage. The halls of Congress will resound with sonorous oratory. But the amount appropriated will be just about as much, or more, than the budget recommendations of the President.