The Congress: Painful Cutting

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Economy, the 90th Congress is learning to its embarrassment, is easier to preach than to practice. For nearly a year the recalcitrant lawmakers refused to approve the Administration's income tax surcharge until the President agreed to a $6 billion reduction in spending. Last week, faced with the actual task of trimming that much, they encountered formidable resistance.

The June tax bill demanded that federal agencies hire only three new workers to replace every four who leave Government service until federal manpower is scaled down to the 2,366,000 level of June 30, 1966. The formula is only theoretically simple. The beleaguered postal service protested that it could not reduce its payroll of 710,000 without either 1) having to pay vastly increased overtime, thus virtually canceling its savings, or 2) seriously curtailing deliveries and service. Postmaster General Marvin Watson warned the Senate Post Office and Civil Service Committee that he would be forced to shut down 12,000 smaller post offices and restrict residential delivery to four days a week.

Lining Up. Other agencies are lining up for exemptions from the manpower-reduction proviso. The Federal Aviation Administration has won Senate permission to add several thousand more badly needed air-traffic controllers at the nation's airports. More offices, such as the Veterans Administration and the Social Security Administration, will also make the case that they cannot handle their expanding workload with a 1966-force level.

Some agency heads, of course, were merely playing Johnsonian politics to forestall or reduce curtailments. What ever the difficulties, few Government agencies can realistically argue that it is impossible to pare expenditures without loss of effectiveness.

For the long haul, however, some of the proposed economies may prove damaging. Last week the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a $1.9 billion foreign aid bill—a cut of more than $1 billion from the amount that the President requested and the smallest authorization in the 21-year history of the foreign aid program. The committee, whose leaders have repeatedly complained in the past that they have been denied a voice in foreign policy, thus voted to blunt one of its more effective instruments.

The prospect is that despite such amputations, Congress will eventually reduce the President's original $186.1 billion budget request by only about $3 billion. Then the Administration will presumably attempt to lop off more. But the war, along with interest on the national debt and other exigencies of the nation's housekeeping, will make further substantial reductions almost prohibitively difficult.