RELIEF: Works as Well as Workers

As fiscal 1939 last week entered its final month, the necessity for carrying Relief on into fiscal 1940 loomed nearer and larger to an Appropriations subcommittee of the House. In his last message on the subject (TIME, May 8), Franklin Roosevelt asked for $1,477,000,000 to carry an average of 2,000,000 workers on WPA (mostly manual labor) through the coming year. For PWA (heavy construction works) he asked nothing this time. In the weeks that have passed since that message, Mr. Roosevelt’s hopes for an upturn in the capital goods industries have dwindled. Beside the picture of 11,000,000 idle workers has persisted a picture of billions of idle dollars. More & more public spending, in the absence of private investment, is known to be Mr. Roosevelt’s sorcery against this old nightmare, as always before. Last week, therefore, observers were not surprised to see his Secretary of the Interior, “Honest Harold” Ickes.- master of PWA, appear on Capitol Hill before the Relief bill subcommittee.

Alabama’s Representative Joe Starnes drafted a bill some months ago to give PWA another $500,000,000 in fiscal 1940. Since then PWA has been “reorganized,” along with WPA, USHA and several other agencies, into a new Federal Works Agency (effective July 1). Not the Starnes bill, but a PWA allotment of similar size out of the money it was going to vote for WPA, was what seemed to be in the subcommittee’s mind. Two reasons, besides Mr. Roosevelt’s renewed urge to “invest” in public works, guided the subcommittee in this direction: discovery of items in WPA’s proposed budget (the first ever submitted to Congress in itemized form) which could be shaved or excised; uneasiness about the efficiency of WPA’s handling of large projects and about its executive set-up (last week the committee, having found $21,000,000 could be knocked out of WPA’s $71,000,000 list of administrative costs & materials, talked of having the General Accounting Office audit all WPA expenditures in at least one sample past year). Another reason: when PWA builds something in his community a Congressman can point and say, “I got you that, folks.” You can’t point to a pile of WPA-raked leaves.

The Master of PWA made a fine witness in his own behalf. He could report that, after allotting before last January 1 all the $965,000,000 given him for fiscal 1939, he still had on hand 2,800 projects approved as feasible and suitable for PWA to undertake. He could report that of all the hundreds of millions loaned by PWA to States and municipalities, only $5,000,000 or 4/5% had been defaulted. Meantime, PWA had made $12,000,000 by selling at premium local bonds put up as loan collateral. Better than 80% of all bond issues proposed to local voters to pay their share (usually 55%) of PWA project costs, had been duly voted.

Applauded the committee’s chairman (Colorado’s Taylor): “A marvelous record!”

Lest advocates of WPA, most of whose money goes straight into workers’ pockets, think that PWA is gravy only for contractors and material supply men, Harold Ickes took occasion to mention, in a public letter to Franklin Roosevelt last week, that in six years the workmen employed on PWA projects pocketed $1,205,452,000 in wages.

* Who this week started a draft-Roosevelt-in-1940 movement by bluntly announcing (in Look, pictorial weekly): “I want Roosevelt for a third term.”