THE CONGRESS: Billions & Billions

As Congress neared the end of the long push on the nation’s spending program for fiscal 1951, a level Southern voice echoed through the House’s chamber. It was an echo which would haunt every home, farm and business in the nation. Lean,, black-browed Congressman George Mahon of Colorado City, Texas, was telling his colleagues last week that they had only begun to spend the people’s money.

The military, which was already getting a pre-Korea $13.5 billion in the omnibus appropriations bill, had to have another $11.6 billion immediately for more planes, ships and men, said Congressman Mahon. The House Appropriations Committee, for which he spoke, had already approved the outlay. In addition, the committee had approved another $4 billion for the Mutual Defense Assistance Program to Europe, plus other million-dollar odds & ends for such things as the Voice of America ($77 million). The whole bill in prospect totaled another $16.7 billion.

Nor was that all. It was necessary to advise the House, “in keeping with my policy of frankness,” said Mahon, that the military leaders were getting ready to ask for still another $10 billion for National Guard, Reserves, radar, electronics.

The price of national defense for this year (including EGA, AEC, MAP), estimated last January at about $19 billion, had leaped to $44 billion since Korea.

And even this tremendous sum was based on a gamble that total war was still some distance off. “If we propose to prepare for a major war which might possibly develop within two years,” said Texas’ sober, veteran Congressman Mahon, then the U.S. would have to take on, “at the very minimum, a $100 billion annual business.”

The sense of Congress was that the nation had to take the lesser gamble in order to keep its economy from being convulsed. But in its present mood, Congress was prepared to vote the whole $44 billion with scarcely an important voice raised in protest. Before the week was out, the House, by 311 to 1,* had voted Mahon’s extra $16.7 billion. The $10 billion would come next.

For Consciences’ Sake. The great omnibus appropriation bill, with its burden of pork, meanwhile had consumed the full time of a sweating, shirt-sleeved joint committee which was trying to reconcile the House’s version of the bill with the Senate’s. The committee finally voted it out. Embracing most of the funds (with the exception of fixed charges) which Congressmen had originally thought the Government would need next year, the bill ran to 500 pages, defied exact analysis even by experts. They guessed it amounted to “about $34 billion.”

It contained a directive to the White House to do what Congress refused to do itself—cut non-defense items by $550 million. It provided a small sop to congressional consciences by carving $77 million off the $763 million pork items (rivers, harbors, flood control) and directing that none of these projects should be undertaken unless they were ready for completion, or contributed to the war effort.

Other cuts were made where it would hurt Congressmen least: EGA, cut from $2.6 billion to $2.4 billion; the $12.5 million International Children’s Fund, eliminated entirely; $26.9 million for the President’s Point Four program, cut to $15 million—but later restored by a House vote after Harry Truman warned, “I can conceive of no more tragic blunder than to throw away this opportunity of doing so much to strengthen the cause of freedom at such little cost.”

“A Guy Like That.” The bill added one item denounced by the President and the State Department: Nevada Senator Pat McCarran’s $62.5 million loan, with no strings attached, to Franco’s Spain. The House argued over that one. Supporters saw it as buying the cooperation of Spain in event of war in Europe, and at least as morally justified as a loan to Tito. Not only New York’s pinko Vito Marcantonio was disturbed by the loan; Virginia’s conservative Howard Smith demanded to know what guarantee anybody had that Franco would help the West in case of war. What was Franco’s “note” worth—”a guy like that?” he demanded. But the loan went through.

With the final approval of the House and the Senate, the omnibus bill goes to Harry Truman, who will have the choice of gagging over details and signing, or vetoing and jeopardizing the whole program. Altogether, the nation faced a bill for 1951 of close to $69 billion.

As old Congressman Rich grumped that the House ought to have its head examined, his weary colleagues still faced a mountain of work before they could go home and see to their political fences. On the agenda and still to be voted: the new defense appropriations, wage, price and production control bill, being written and rewritten by another little group of perspiring Senators and Representatives in joint committee; a tax bill, which will fall far short of meeting the new expenditures; a universal military-training bill; a bill to clamp down on free-running Communists in the once free & easy U.S.

*The dissenter (New York’s Marcantonio being absent): Pennsylvania’s Republican Robert Rich, who for 13 years has been rising regularly in the House to demand after each appropriation, “Where are we going to get the money?”