The Congress: No Blood from a Turnip

As far as the 90th Congress is concerned, time’s a-wastin’. With elections only a month off, its members are desperate to get their campaigns under way. Last week, for example, the 38 members of California’s House dele gation decided to adjourn, come what may, at the end of this week. One of them explained simply: “We’ve got to get home.”

For all that is getting done on Capitol Hill, the rest of Congress might as well do the same. When the Congress did act, all too often it was only to wield an indiscriminate axe. To win approval of his anti-inflationary 10% income tax surcharge, the President last spring agreed to a $180 billion budget ceiling. Last week the Senate refused to exempt Medicaid benefits for the poor from that ceiling, then went one step further and sliced $500 million from the $2.3 billion originally allocated to Medicaid.

Deep as those cuts were, they were superficial compared to gouges made in other programs. For foreign aid, the House irresponsibly appropriated only $1.6 billion, lowest sum in the program’s 21-year history and $1.3 billion less than President Johnson’s bare-bones request. Development loan funds were hacked from the $765 million asked for by the Administration to only $265 million. The Alliance for Progress got only $290 million of a requested $625 million, which touched off bitter complaints all over Latin America.

Deputy Alianza Coordinator James Fowler warned: “The kind of saving represented by the House cuts is the type that a prosperous shopkeeper in a riot zone might achieve by failing to renew his insurance policies.” Somewhat chastened, the Senate last week voted to restore $300 million of the cut foreign aid funds but the final figures must still be negotiated in a Senate-House conference.

Almost unnoticed, Congress quietly whacked $13.9 million from the Administration’s requested funds for educational and cultural exchanges in August, in the process virtually gutting the famed Fulbright scholar program established in 1946. Fulbright money was reduced 72%, plummeting from $680,000 to $136,000 for Britain alone.

The gloom of one White House aide over the outgoing Congress was understandable. “You can’t get blood out of a turnip,” he said, “and the 90th Congress is a turnip.” Not that the future is any more promising. “As things go,” he added, “the 91st may be a stone.”