National Affairs: Creature Comforts

The Senate, often in a pinchpenny mood when it comes to appropriations for other branches of Government, can feel quite the opposite when it comes to its own creature comforts. Last week Illinois’ Paul Douglas gently belabored his colleagues with some unanswerable facts about their own housekeeping extravagance. Piled in the corridors of the old Senate Office Building, Douglas reported, are 375 desks, 215 steel filing cabinets, 400 chairs, many other odd pieces of old but usable furniture, all destined for the junk heap. Yet the Senators were ordering $113,000 worth of new equipment. And that $150,000 for new carpeting, requested for no better reason than the fact that Government girls might slip and fall on the tile flooring, struck plain-living Senator Douglas as excessive. He offered to buy the girls rubber heels —from his own pocket.

On top of all this, the Senate was asking itself for $4,000,000 to complete the subway (total cost: $6,349,000) to the new Senate Office Building. The subway would save a mere 50-step walk for the Senators, said Douglas, who had paced it off—and the Senators needed the exercise. But as usual in such matters, the proposed economies were swept under the carpet, and the Douglas amendments were voted down.