THE BUDGET: Who Cut What?

With Congress gone home for the year, the great Battle of the Budget was over, the last ax blow struck, the last oratorical volley fired. But a postbattle skirmish broke out last week as President Eisenhower disputed congressional estimates of how much Capitol Hill really cut from his hacked-at 1958 budget.

According to Virginia’s never-say-buy Senator Harry Byrd, Congress whacked $6.5 billion off Ike’s original spending-authority request of $73.3 billion. Texas’ Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson put the total at $5.9 billion. By the House Appropriations Committee’s reckoning, it came to $4.9 billion. At his press conference, the President dismissed all these claims as “political.” Congress’ cuts, he said, “really” amounted to something “on the order of 900 million to a billion.” The President’s source for this surprising figure was his own Budget Bureau, which arrived at it through one of the deftest juggling performances since the late W. C. Fields laid aside his Indian clubs. Congress appropriated $67.3 billion, or $6 billion less than Ike’s original $73.3 billion total. But, argued the Budget Bureau, Ike himself cut roughly $2 billion from that $73.3 billion, partly by trimming spending estimates, partly by scrapping or postponing some of the listed programs (e.g., military payment adjustments). So Congress cut only $4 billion, then? No, according to the Budget Bureaucrats. They easily brought the $4 billion down to $1 billion by subtracting 1) cuts of $1.9 billion that the bureau considered phony (example: Congress “saved” $211 million by assuming that veterans’ benefits in fiscal 1958 would add up to $211 million less than the Administration’s estimate, but at least part of this cut will probably be restored next session with a deficiency appropriation) and 2) the $1.1 billion that Congress voted but the Administration did not ask for, e.g., pay raises for postal workers.

The final score on the Battle of the Budget was still beyond calculation. It remained to be seen, for example, how much or little of Congress’ cuts would in fact have to be made up with deficiency appropriations. In 1960, say, after the last tremor of the 1957 budget battle has died away, a university professor may wangle a Ford Foundation grant to figure out the score. If, with the help of half a dozen accountants and an electronic brain, he comes up with a fair and accurate estimate, it will be a lot smaller than Harry Byrd’s $6.5 billion—and a lot bigger than Dwight Eisenhower’s $1 billion.