The Price of Pork

Through the Senate last week passed the most popular legislation of the year: the rivers and harbors appropriation. Senators got busy salting each others' pork to the extent of $1,565,000,000 dispensing dredges, canals, dams, and beach improvements, with glee.

One man did not join in the fun. Paul Douglas of Illinois spent two days arguing the wastefulness of the bill, and drew guffaws as he went. He proposed paring the appropriation down to $700,000,000, and even pointed out the uselessness of several projects in his own state. For his lone stand, Senator Douglas received the support of 19 of his colleagues and the opposition of 53.

All big dredging and flood control projects that the government undertakes are given over to the Army Engineers, responsible directly to Congress. The Engineers hire sub-contractors and bear the entire cost of projects from the tidy appropriation. Even if the improvement helps only one individual or company, the Government still has to pay the bill. This is the one way Congress has of letting the people back home know that the legislators are looking after their interests.

There are ways out of this mess. President Truman could veto the current bloated appropriation, but this is unlikely, since he has his constituents too. There must be a reorganization of the whole process of damming and dredging before the economy which Congress so cloquently embraces and so purposefully blocks will be possible. The first need is a system of "beneficiary repayments," under which the people who gain from water shifts will have to pay the cost. This is the system used by the Bureau of Reclamation, an executive agency, when it builds irrigation ditches for farmers. As the Hoover Commission has proposed, a Review and Coordination Board, independent of direct Congressional control, would determine who paid for projects, and how much.

Perhaps Congress will eventually take this potentially valuable work away from the Engineers and transfer it to a unified control board that can give the country its money's worth. That would be the one sure way to bring down the price of pork.