Nation: NIXON, THE NEGRO AND THE BUDGET

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Learning by Experience. About the same time, Deputy Defense Secretary David Packard met with representatives of three major textile producers, all of which had failed to meet fair-employment requirements expected of Government contractors. After his talk, Packard announced that the companies had agreed not to discriminate. But the agreement had not been spelled out in writing—violating the normal custom—and neither the Department of Labor nor the Justice Department had been consulted as they should have been. Packard, a former businessman himself, was probably only trying to cut through red tape, but the suspicion again was that the Republican Administration was currying favor with its rich friends.

The N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund is now charging in federal court that the Government violated its own law, and Packard—a far more experienced bureaucrat after 90 days—is requiring written anti-bias agreements from companies holding defense contracts. Actually, the issue goes far beyond technicalities. Millions of workers are employed by companies doing some business with the Government. If Washington can outlaw discriminatory labor practices among its own suppliers, it will have gone a long way toward eliminating the problem nationwide.

Litany of Error. The forced resignation of Clifford Alexander Jr. as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission continued the litany of error. Testifying before a Senate subcommittee last month, Alexander, a Negro, was brutally chivied by Everett Dirksen, the G.O.P. Senate leader, who charged that businessmen were being harassed by Alexander's agency. "Either this punitive harassment is going to stop or somebody is going to lose his job," thundered Dirksen. The very next day the White House announced that Alexander would be replaced as chairman (although he will serve out his fixed term as a commission member).

The timing may have been only coincidental—as a Democrat, Alexander would probably have gone anyway—but it could scarcely have looked worse. No one was much surprised when Alexander last week stepped down before he was officially fired. "The public conclusion," he said, "is inescapable. Vigorous efforts to enforce the laws on employment discrimination are not among the goals of this Administration.'" The treatment of Alexander, complained Roy Wilkins, executive director of the N.A.A.C.P., was evidence of "anti-Negro racial policy with a minimum amount of fuzziness."

There was, however, considerable fuzziness surrounding Nixon's poverty program, another matter of no small concern to the nation's blacks. Keenly concerned about inflation, the Administration has been striving for an even bigger budget surplus—and greater cuts in spending—than its predecessor had proposed. It appears to have made good its aim, and President Nixon last week announced that $4 billion more will be cut from the budget taking effect July 1 —about $1 billion from defense and about $3 billion from non-defense programs. The projected surplus will be $5.8 billion, compared with Lyndon Johnson's $3.4 billion. What areas will feel the cuts most will not be known until this week, but some social programs are bound to be hurt.