The Congress: Where Charity Begins

Faced with the possibility of a $25 billion federal deficit for the current fiscal year, Congress is in a cutting mood. The House has already axed the rent subsidy and rat-control programs, and last week the Senate Foreign Relations Committee lopped a whopping $736 million off the Administration's $3.4 billion foreign-aid request. But Congress also knows where charity begins. When a $276 million congressional housekeeping bill came to a vote recently, members hooted down proposals for a 5% reduction. And in a deficit-be-damned mood last week, the House passed, 375 to 26, a $4.6 billion public-works appropriations bill, $2 billion of which is pork.

There was little debate on the largest public-works bill since 1963, and less opposition. Small wonder. Every state will get a piece of the action—a dam, a federal office building, a harbor-improvement project or some other goody that a Congressman can mention to his constituents. "Somebody ought to oppose the pork barrel," cried New York Republican Theodore Kupferman. Aside from Kupferman, whose Manhattan silk-stocking district got nothing, few did.

Ohio Democrat Michael Kirwan, floor manager for the measure, declared that "every dollar in this bill represents an investment in America, and the benefits come back to us a hundredfold." Members who ordinarily bang the economy drum loudly, including Arizona Republican John Rhodes (whose state benefits from a Western power-development project that gets $21,600,000 this year) and Mississippi Democrat Jamie Whitten (who could claim $4,000,000 for his state), extolled Kirwan. "I have come to love him," said Whitten, "and to appreciate his great contributions to our nation."

The bill is not pure pork. Nearly $2.5 billion goes for Atomic Energy Commission construction and operations, another $294 million to control water pollution. There's the rub. Because the bill goes to the White House as a single package, the President, lacking an item veto, must reject the entire bill or accept it all. And no Congressman doubts that Lyndon Johnson will have to forget his deficit, gulp hard and swallow the bill whole—including such frills as the Delaware River-Tocks Island reservoir and recreational program at the New Jersey-New York-Pennsylvania border, which was originally supposed to cost $90.4 million but has since grown to a tidy little $198 million affair.