February 28, 1973
Page 5801
NEW FEDERALISM IN TROUBLE?
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, in the accumulating mass of literature about the President's philosophy of "New Federalism" and his methods to implement it, several recent articles stand out. They are: An excellent analysis, "Impoundment Relies on Weak Arguments," by Louis Fisher in the February 25, 1973, Washington Sunday Star; a perceptive commentary, "Nixon's ‘Federalism' in Trouble," by James Doyle in the February 23, 1973, Washington Star-News; two columns by David Broder in the Washington Post of February 25 and February 27, 1973; "Telling It Not Quite Like It Is," by Tom Wicker in the February 27, 1973, edition of the New York Times; and a timely editorial, "The Short Rope," in the February 27th New York Times.
I ask unanimous consent that these articles be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the articles were ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
IMPOUNDMENT RELIES ON WEAK ARGUMENTS
(By Louis Fisher)
Exhilarated by his 61 percent November mandate, with 49 states tucked away neatly in his corner, President Nixon has staged a bold confrontation with Congress. Thus far legislators have responded with angry and fiery denunciations about the impoundment of funds. The spectre of "one-man rule" has been raised. Invocations, if not incantations, are made to the constitution, the Founding Fathers, and the separation of powers doctrine. Amidst all the clamor and heavy rhetoric, the funds remain impounded.
Executive officials visiting Capitol Hill to defend the legality and political wisdom of impoundment, have little difficulty in marshaling a host of precedents, legislative histories and statutory fragments to support their cause.
The standard litany includes:
"No sense spending money on wasteful and ineffective programs."
"Spending must be curbed or we'll have a tax increase (or renewed inflation)."
"Other Presidents have done it."
"We have to impound to stay within the statutory debt limit and to carry out the Anti-deficiency Act."
To the uninitiated these arguments may sound reasonable, but are they?
The issue of whether impoundment is constitutional – whether it is legitimate or politically defensible – is beyond the scope of this article. Impoundment comes in many shapes and colors, legitimate in one case and highly questionable in another. A more manageable task is to question the current rationale offered by the administration. Is it as strong as it outwardly appears?
Consider the special section in the new budget on "Program Reductions and Terminations." A major criterion for identifying low-priority programs is this test: "Would they justify an increase in tax rates to pay for the anticipated expense of their continuation? The 1974 budget proposes reducing or eliminating programs that do not meet this criterion."
Is it too much to wonder if that same standard was applied to the space shuttle? To the B-1 bomber or the SST? To the ABM site in North Dakota or to merchant marine subsidies? Or are those, to borrow from the President's Jan. 28 radio address, "sacred cows"?
How does the Office of Management and Budget decide which projects to continue and which to shelve? Roy Ash, in a Feb. 1 appearance at the joint Ervin-Chiles impoundment hearings, assured the senators that "we are not choosing between good programs and bad programs. In many cases we are forced to choose between good ones and better ones."
Very nice, but is there a measuring rod somewhere that distinguishes between bad, good and better?
Apparently that is not the case. Some insight as to how things work can be gained from hearings held in June 1971. Caspar Weinberger appeared before the House Appropriations Committee to explain why the OMB had impounded, without exception, every public works project that Congress had added to the President's budget.
Choices were not made in terms of the merits of the projects, such as cost-benefit ratios or some other criteria. OMB simply decided that the President's budget should stand as is and that all congressional additions should be deferred.
Weinberger admitted that the OMB did not feel qualified to exercise independent judgment on the projects. It was merely a case of depending on the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation as to which projects had a lower priority – "by definition those projects that are not included in the budget ... "
The image of the President and his budget officials standing in front of a smorgasbord, delicately picking out good programs from better programs, is pure fantasy. The "good programs" are those added by Congress. The "better programs" are those initially requested by the President.
In his news conference of Jan. 31, Mr. Nixon said that he would respond to critics of impoundment in the "same way that Jefferson did, and Jackson did, and Truman did."
The Jefferson example has been something of a godsend, eagerly seized upon by administration spokesmen. Weinberger told the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare on Jan. 17 that "we are doing not only nothing different than any other President since Thomas Jefferson has done; we are doing it in no greater degree." Both points are shaky.
It is almost embarrassing to recall the details of the Jefferson incident. Congress had appropriated $50,000 for gunboats in anticipation of an emergency. When the emergency failed to materialize, Jefferson saw no reason to spend the money. Neither did Congress. He announced that the "favorable and peaceable turn of affairs on the Mississippi rendered an immediate execution of that law unnecessary."
It was a commonsense impoundment, in no way defying Congress. Can anyone seriously offer that as a precedent for cancelling the Rural Environmental Assistance Program (REAP), placing an 18-month moratorium on housing, or withholding $6 billion in contract authority from the water pollution control program? Would not Congress be subject to ridicule if it offered such strained analogies?
Budget officials like to point out that 1967 impoundments represented 6.7 percent of budgetary outlays, compared to only 4.6 percent for 1972 impoundments. To compare administrations with aggregate figures, either with dollar amounts or with percentages, is meaningless. You have to look at individual impoundment actions, separating the routine from the controversial.
Percentages are helpful in showing the impact of impoundment within an administration. OMB's Feb. 5 report lists $1.899 billion withheld from the Department of Defense (military functions), $1.497 billion from Agriculture, and $529 million from HUD. Convert that into a percentage of total available budget authority for fiscal 1973 and you get 2.4 percent Defense, 13.0 percent Agriculture, and 10.5 percent HUD. If Defense is under-represented, the main burden of impoundment obviously falls on the domestic programs. And so it does.
Two other calculations are needed to understand the full impact on domestic programs. The Feb. 5 report is restricted to impoundment of appropriated funds. It is also possible to "impound" by withholding contract authority, such as for home ownership or rental assistance programs. Total impoundments for HUD – in appropriated fund and in contract authority – come to $991 million, 19.8 percent of the Department's total available budget authority.
Also important is the amount of money that will lapse (be lost) at the end of the fiscal year. Of the defense impoundments, all of the funds will be available beyond fiscal 1973 except for $7.5 million in annual accounts. Thus, less than half of one percent will lapse. Compare that to $207 million of Agriculture money that will not be available beyond fiscal 1973 – 13.8 percent of Agriculture impoundments.
But in addition to the $207 million you have to add other funds that are technically or legally "available" after fiscal 1973, but which the administration has no intention of spending. This category includes $210 million for REAP, $11 million for the Water Bank Program, $458 million for rural electrification loans, and $120 million for rural water and waste disposal grants.
In a practical sense, then, 67 percent of the Agriculture impoundments will be lost after fiscal 1973. In the case of Defense, none of the funds that extend beyond fiscal 1973 face political impoundment.
Of the $529 million in appropriated funds withheld from HUD, all of the money is technically available after fiscal 1973. However, with the single exception of $6.6 million in housing production and mortgage credit, the administration does not intend to spend any of the funds. Moreover, the housing pipeline will be depleted during the 18-month moratorium, resulting in a loss both of funds and of momentum.
To pinpoint the specific kind of impoundment that disturbs Congress, Sen. Ervin reminded Roy Ash of a 1971 example. Urban funds were withheld at that time because, as George Romney explained, there was no sense in accelerating programs that were "scheduled for termination."
Note that the "scheduling" was by the executive branch, not by Congress. It was the administration's intention to convert urban programs into the President's revenue sharing proposal. Impounding funds in this prospective sense – holding on to money in anticipation that Congress would enact an administration bill – was a new departure for the impoundment technique.
Ash responded by saying that the Romney example "dealt not with this year but earlier ... This year the reasons are very compelling ones and different ones." Yet impoundment is still being used today as part of the administration's strategy to enact urban revenue sharing. The 1974 budget stops new project approvals under seven "outmoded and unduly restrictive" grant and loan programs. As these programs decline, they are to be phased (so the script reads) into the administration's $2.3 billion special revenue sharing plan.
This is confirmed by a Jan. 15, 1973 letter from Kenneth R. Cole Jr., Director of the President's Domestic Council. He informed Sen. Sparkman that "until the [community] development activities are folded into the revenue sharing proposal, there will be a temporary suspension of new commitments for water and sewer grants, open space and public facilities loans."
Was that an attempt to blackmail Congress into passing urban special revenue sharing?
During the hearings on James Lynn's nomination as the new HUD Secretary, Senator Packwood asked: "If Congress, in its lack of wisdom, refuses to pass the urban and special revenue sharing bill, is it your intention or recommendation to permanently freeze community development funds?" Lynn's reply was nearly incomprehensible: "I think we would have to face up then to what our position would be and would make our recommendations as to what happens to water and sewer quite separately. Yes, we would, but all we are talking about is the time sequence. This is an optimistic plan based on what we think is the right thing to do, and, as you said, Mr. Chairman, the right thing to do is to have revenue sharing. Mr. Cole is saying that we intend to have the revenue sharing substituted for it."
Housing programs are being suspended or terminated, according to the administration, because they are wasteful and ineffective. Does the President apply that same rigorous principle, on such a broad scale, to procurement programs for the military?
The administration had four years to study the housing programs and come up with legislative remedies. Nothing was proposed except for urban special revenue sharing and a consolidation and simplification bill. To wait four years and apply the draconian remedy of a moratorium smacks of bad faith.
The administration professes an open mind on the housing program, evaluating its objectively and impartially during the 18-month period. Some of the statements in the Cole letter ("The program structure we have now cannot possibly yield effective results even with the most professional management") indicate that the evaluation has already been made. That too suggests bad faith.
In their more modest moments, when not invoking the inherent powers of the President, administration officials claim that impoundment is necessary to satisfy statutory directives. This is the humble approach. On such occasions the public debt limit is trotted out to explain why funds are impounded. "Congress set the limit; we cannot go above it ...”
That is true, but there is nothing to prevent the administration from asking that the limit be raised. They do it all the time nowadays. Why is it we spend billions to meet our commitment in Southeast Asia, put a man on the moon, and extend revenue sharing to the states without feeling constrained by the debt limit?
OMB argues that it would be impossible to stay within the debt limit if outlays for fiscal 1973 exceed $250 billion. That is an administration spending target, not a statutory ceiling. Roy Ash tried to give it a quasi-statutory blessing by saying that both houses had supported a $250 billion limit, even if it was not enacted. Sen. Chiles offered this advice: "Mr. Ash, most things we do around here, if they do not come out to a law, we do not think they amount to much."
The Employment Act of 1946 and the Anti-deficiency Act are also used to defend impoundment. Weinberger told Senate Labor and Public Welfare on Jan. 17 that the 1946 Act "requires the President to maintain policies that guard against inflation." It does no such thing. It requires the President to present an Economic Report, but he has no special powers (discretionary spending powers were deleted from the 1945 Full Employment Bill).
The act declares it to be the responsibility of the Federal Government – i.e. Congress and the President – to use all practicable means "to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power." It is true that impoundment, as an anti-inflation weapon, can help promote purchasing power, but that begs the question: where does the act grant power to the President?
And second, the Employment Act was meant to promote purchasing power by stimulating employment and production. Impoundment does just the opposite.
As for the Anti-deficiency Act, that has become an all-purpose contraption to justify practically any kind of impoundment. Yet the act has but two narrow objectives. One is to apportion funds (usually by quarters) so that agencies do not exhaust their funds before the year is out. The second is to set aside reserves to provide for contingencies or to effect savings.
There is nothing in the legislative history to suggest that reserves can be established for the purpose of fighting inflation. Nowhere does the legislative history imply an authority to cancel or curtail a program because the administration doesn't like it. If an administrator can satisfy a statutory purpose by spending fewer dollars than Congress appropriated, all well and good, but the purpose itself is not to be denied.
To challenge these administration arguments is not to dispose of the impoundment issue. Far from it. It is merely to sweep away some of the cobwebs that now confuse us, prevent us from asking more fundamental questions.
The primary motivation behind the controversial impoundments is not obedience to statutory directives. What we are witnessing is an act of administrative policy-making and priority-setting.
It is the question of which branch shall decide how to allocate the public funds.
In a revealing interview published last November in The Star-News, President Nixon philosophized about the proper relationship between the Federal Government and the people.
The average American was "just like the child in the family. You give him some responsibility and he is going to amount to something." He argued government to "allow people to do more for themselves, to encourage them to do more for themselves, to encourage them to do more for themselves." Explicitly rejected was the doctrine that Papa knows best.
That is not exactly the way the President sees his relationship with Congress. The present lack of comity, he explained in a Jan. 31 news conference, is that Congress "represents special interests ... there is only one place in this government where somebody has got to speak not for the special interests which the Congress represents but for the general interest ... I am going to stand for that general interest."
Is Congress likely to stand for the proposition that, at the Federal level, Papa knows best?
[From the Washington Star-News, February 23, 1973]
NIXON "FEDERALISM" IN TROUBLE
(By James Doyle)
Despite his landslide reelection, his successes in Vietnam and the disarray of the Democratic opposition, President Nixon's New Federalism is in political trouble.
One month into his second term, Nixon is faced with rising opposition, not only from the Democratic Congress, but also in statehouses and city halls where he gained support last fall.
Of course presidents and their congresses always fight in February, when legislative conflicts seem at their worst, before the compromising starts.
But the early signs are especially bad this year, and at a time when they should be better because of the closing down of the Vietnam war, which has divided Americans for eight years.
Next week the nation's governors will hold their annual Washington meeting. Usually these affairs are frothy and insubstantial, with some posturing for the cameras and a good deal of premature talk about incipient presidential candidates.
But this year the governors are in a sour mood. They plan to organize an effort to fight the President's budget cuts for a number of domestic programs.
The following week about 250 mayors will be in Washington, along with about 700 other municipal officials. They plan to spend much of their time lobbying on Capitol Hill against the budget and the President's "New Federalism," which most of the big mayors think will cut the heart out of some important urban programs and contribute to turning the cities into hopeless prisons for the old and the poor who cannot escape to the suburbs.
A dozen mayors from across the country appeared before a Senate subcommittee this week to renounce their earlier endorsement for the President's revenue-sharing program.
A year ago some of these men were hailing revenue sharing as a revolutionary breakthrough and the first real initiative by the federal government in decades. Now some were calling it a cruel hoax.
The reversal lies in a change of attitude. Most of those mayors still believe that revenue sharing is a good idea. But they are so upset with the President's new budget, and what they consider a broken promise of continued financial support, that they are inclined to do anything to register their opposition.
The same attitude prevails among many congressmen, and is a somewhat lesser extent among the governors, some of whom are happy with revenue sharing so far. Some were able to show surpluses in their state budgets for the first time.
What may be more important, the attitude does not appear to be just the usual political infighting and posturing. Some of the President's critics, at least, make it clear that they believe his New Federalism is going to be a domestic disaster comparable to the Vietnam war. They plan to fight it just as bitterly.
What has caused this bitterness is a combination of things. The President is committed to a complete restructuring of government, and he wants to give mayors, county executives and governors more local power and commensurate responsibility. That has caused grave doubts in Congress but, as a concept at least, it has been cheered in the states.
To carry out his New Federalism the President has planned a system of federal grants with fewer or no strings attached. But, at the same time, to control inflation and cut the federal deficit, the President has cut a number of nondefense programs to the bone, and announced that he plans to eliminate others completely.
If the mayors and the governors want to continue these programs, they can pick the ones they consider most important and fund them out of the revenue-sharing money, the President's budget says.
PRESIDENTIAL PLEDGES
The mayors can point to any number of pledges by the President and his aides, back when the revenue-sharing bill was being debated. Then the administration said that its first bill, calling for general revenue sharing, would provide new federal money, and would not rely on funds from existing programs.
A second proposal, for special revenue sharing, is still just a proposal. It would be a revised series of block grants in four areas – education, law enforcement, manpower training and urban community development – that would supplant many other programs in the same areas. The new grants could be used with more flexibility by local officials.
One of the reasons local officials supported these initiatives, which had been talked about for eight years, was that communities often found themselves building libraries when they needed playgrounds; that happened because federal funds were available for the libraries and they did not want to pass up the "free" money.
But, the mayors say, under the President's system there will be no money for either libraries or playgrounds. Furthermore, the municipal employees are likely to make a political power play for much of the general funds for a pay raise.
LEVERAGE SOUGHT
"If you sat down with the mayors over a beer, they will still be for revenue sharing," says an official of the United States Conference of Mayors. "But they are so mad at the President for gutting all these programs that they want to oppose him however they can.
"The pressure is on these guys directly, but they find they have no leverage. They can lobby Congress to keep all of the old programs, but they know the President will veto those bills, and they know there aren't enough votes to override the vetoes."
The result is that mayors, and congressmen and governors as well, are looking for any area where they can hurt the President politically, to "get leverage."
You can call that pettiness or revenge or whatever you want. The point is that in politics, it can be devastating. And sooner or later, the opportunity comes.
One plan that some of the mayors have already agreed upon is to tie the President's proposed aid to Hanoi to the fight over money for the cities.
There is an obvious dramatic appeal here "The mayors of Hanoi and Haiphong have got pledges for aid from the Nixon Adminis tration, " says San Francisco's Mayor Joseph Alioto. "What about the mayors of New York Chicago, Houston and San Francisco?"
Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary, Ind., told the Maine Sen. Edmund S. Muskie's subcommittee on intergovernmental relations, "When the country decided to get out of Vietnam, it sent Mr. Kissinger to negotiate the terms. When it decided to get out of the cities, it sent no one. It simply got out."
He added that Congress should repudiate the President and "prevent an urban Viet Nam before it becomes a reality."
But beyond the rhetoric, the mayors are willing to play any notes that will get a response. One responsible official said, in utter seriousness, "If we can block the aid to Indochina and the Vietnam agreement starts to fall apart because of it, then the President will respond to us. It's a way out chance, but it's leverage."
JUNE CUTOFF
That suggests how serious the mayors take these budget cuts. And already, Mayor Rich and Daley of Chicago has started mobilizing his troops in Congress to defeat the President's plans.
The urgency is there for the mayors. If the President succeeds, the funds will start disappearing in June. Meanwhile local groups have heard that no-strings federal money is available, and they will want to know where it is.
Milwaukee's Mayor Henry Maier, a strong supporter of revenue sharing, told the Muskie subcommittee Tuesday that he could no longer be counted in favor. Afterwards, while he was having lunch in Washington, he got a telephone call from Milwaukee telling him that 30 Indians were holding a sitdown in his office, demanding to know where the federal money is.
Another mayor was asked if, with the number of summer job programs due to be canceled, there were likely to be riots in his city, a middle-sized East Coast city with a large population of poor blacks.
CRIME RISE FEARED
He guessed that there would not be. But he said street incidents would soar, teen-age gangs would be on the streets all summer, his police force would be taxed to the limits, and the incidence of both crime and youthful criminal records would start the upward spiral again just as things were beginning to get better.
In testimony he planned to give before Congress today, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Robert Wood, who is now President of the University of Massachusetts, quoted a phrase of Justice Benjamin Cardozo to describe Nixon's New Federalism.
"What the Nixon program does is make a promise to the ear and break it to the heart," he said. He called it "a new version of the old shell game – whichever shell you look under, the federal funds you thought were there have vanished."
Wood is one of those who agrees that federal aid programs in many specific categories can be frustrating and wasteful. But the federal government has a responsibility to establish national standards and national priorities, he argues.
He points out that money spent under the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act was meant to improve education for poor children. Some money was spent on band uniforms and unnecessary equipment.
"Illogically", he adds, the Nixon remedy is not to tighten up the program but to let localities spend education money without restriction or targeting.
"It is not only the poor and minorities who will suffer from special revenue sharing; the fact is that every constituency with special needs and no special political leverage will suffer," Wood said.
But more to the point of why Nixon, or at least his party, could be in political trouble, is Wood's prediction of what will happen in the area of federal aid to education in the next few years under Nixon's New Federalism.
"The administration's budget request asks for an impressive $959 million for the new program (special revenue sharing for education). The problem is that it totally eliminates two out of three programs which help lower income students," Wood noted, and in its other aspects it falls far below what Congress has mandated as a minimum amount before funding middle-income aid programs.
"What is clearly predictable is a period of confusion, argument and delay. Congress will not appropriate $959 million for a program which is contrary to its terms of authorization of the previous year.
"The administration will refuse to spend money appropriated according to the terms of the authorizing legislation.
"Students will suffer."
At the same hearings today before the Muskie subcommittee, Richard Nathan of the Brookings Institution was to make a presentation aimed at explaining just what it is the President is trying to do.
As a former budget officer in the White House during Nixon's first three years, he knows the rationale behind the figures.
Without defending the President's new budget, Nathan pointed out that there was in it a clear attempt to move government away from Washington to the states and the cities, and to remove the subgovernments that have grown up around specific federal programs, where a government bureaucrat in Boston may be more powerful than the mayor in a given area of control.
It goes beyond the budget, he said, and follows a trend started by the courts, notably the Supreme Court, that "changed the ground-rules of domestic government" by mandating equal voting rights for all groups and equal apportionment and distribution of tax funds.
Local officials, Nathan argued, need to be strengthened and are now in a position to accept more responsibility. Nixon himself has made this argument a foundation of his New Federalism.
Clearly, the basic argument here is one between philosophers of government who mean well, on both sides.
But the philosophy, as worked out in the fiscal 1974 budget, has made the fight appear to pit the Nixon administration against many other elected officials.
[From the Washington Post, Feb. 25, 1973]
LOSING WITH A LANDSLIDE
(By David S. Broder)
A longtime friend of the President was genuinely startled the other day to be asked by a White House reporter if he saw signs that Richard Nixon was succumbing to the same sense of inflated power that Lyndon Johnson exhibited in the wake of his 1964 landslide.
"I don't see that at all," he said and indeed, the surface manifestations of today's White House could hardly be more unlike those of Johnson's euphoric period. In the first months of 1965, LBJ flooded the Congress with legislative requests; each of which, he said, needed urgent action; Mr. Nixon, on the other hand, is proceeding at a ponderous pace, stretching the State of the Union address over a period of weeks, and cautioning Congress to do nothing without calculating the cost.
But the surface differences are really explained by the differing goals of the two Presidents:
Johnson was intent on passing a passel of federal programs; Mr. Nixon's goal, almost directly opposite, is to slow the growth of the federal government, reorganize its structure and decentralize many of its functions to states, cities and individuals.
If you focus, not on their goals but on their methods, the parallels become more clear – and more alarming. Mr. Nixon today seems no more willing than Johnson was at the height of his power to go through the process of patient persuasion. Like his predecessor, he is clearly tempted by the size of his election victory to use plain muscle to get where he wants to go.
Looking at it from his point of view, you can understand the decision. Congress, state and local governments, controlled by the Democrats, are resistant to change. The bureaucracy clings to accustomed programs and procedures. The public is so apathetic barely half its eligible members even stirred themselves to vote.
Facing these forces of inertia, what is a President to do? Explain, argue, cajole, persuade, say "Kindly, please, step this way"? No. He has his mandate. He will act first, and let the explanations come later.
So, if he is Mr. Nixon, he abolishes some agencies, transfers others, impounds funds, freezes allocations, cuts authorizations, all by executive order – and lets the others in the political process react to his initiative. Better that, he figures, than waiting for them to pick up and move.
And it works – at least for a while, The Wall Street Journal's Norman C. Miller was right when he wrote last week that the news reports on the Battle of the Budget are deceptive, that "the barrage of speeches and legislative activity is misleading. The reality is that President Nixon has the congressional Democrats on the run" and will inevitably win most of his objectives.
The courts may – and likely will – eventually rule that Mr. Nixon has exceeded his authority in some instances, but for now, there's no way Congress can compel the President to administer a program he thinks wasteful; no way the bureaucrat can refuse an order to clear out his desk; no way the mayors or governors can hold Mr. Nixon to an agreement they say he has breached; no way the voters can tell the President, "You're misreading the mandate we gave you."
But it's still the wrong way to go. It's wrong, because our government was not intended to operate as a naked clash of wills, Congress imposing on the President or vice versa. This is one government with one set of shared responsibilities. If the government devotes its time to civil war, as is the case now, the victims will be the people it is supposed to serve.
Even if the President "wins" such a struggle, his real purposes lose. One-man government in this country is not just unconstitutional; it's impossible. The kind of policy shift the President is seeking literally cannot work without the understanding and cooperation of Congress, the bureaucracy, state and local officials and the public.
A "victory" obtained at the cost of their antagonism is really no victory at all. In 1965, Johnson may have thought himself justified in badgering the Democratic Congress – which his coattails had elected – in order to pass the legislation he wanted. But vast, ill-considered, unexplained programs cannot be sustained for long by a President's personal drive. Even before Vietnam overwhelmed him, Johnson's thrust was halted in 1966 by the accumulated resentments of the Democratic representatives, senators and governors he had not bothered to consult.
Mr. Nixon is risking the same kind of reaction now in his no less sweeping efforts to decentralize domestic programs. The warning signals were flying last week in the outcry from the big city mayors and such men as Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine). Vital allies in the passage last year of the revenue sharing program that is the keystone of Mr. Nixon's whole domestic strategy, they are now accusing the President of reneging on his commitments to them. What they are trying to tell Mr. Nixon is that he cannot impose his own version of New Federalism by fiat any more than his predecessor could create a Great Society by presidential command.
One can only hope that Mr. Nixon does not miss their message.
[From the Washington Post, Feb. 27, 1973]
SACRIFICING LEGALITY FOR EFFICIENCY
(By David S. Broder)
The man of the week in Washington is Howard Phillips, the 32-year-old acting director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. Phillips is obliterating OEO and the federal antipoverty program even faster than his fellow Harvard man, Henry Kissinger, is ending the Cold War – but to much less general applause.
Because he is going about his work with such enthusiasm that he seems likely to have demolished OEO even before his June 30 target date, Phillips is being attacked as a White House hatchet man. It's a bum rap. He is a 100 per cent true believer in what he's doing, and would take on the job for free if they didn't want to pay him.
His philosophy was summed up in an interview the other evening with Martin Agronsky, in which he said: "One of the things that has disturbed me is the view of many of the organizations that we have funded out of OEO, that poverty is a political and cultural fact of life, rather than an economic fact of life. I don't think poverty is a political question. I don't think it's proper for the government to be in a position of trying to solve the poverty problem through political means."
With that view, it was inevitable that the efficient Nixon personnel computer would identify Phillips as the ideal person to administer the poverty program. But it discredits young Mr. Phillips to think he is just an antipoverty program fanatic. He is a libertarian conservative, suspicious of all connections between government and the public. One of the 11 "general principles" he handed me when I went to see him last week says, "My political liberty is diminished when the government subsidizes political activities."
This suspicion of government and its works is no new thing for him. Years ago, when he was a junior staffer at the Republican National Committee, we used to lean against the wall and argue about the evils of the welfare state.
Little did either of us dream then that he would be chosen to preside over the death of OEO.
Indeed, Phillips expressed his own astonishment during our visit last week at discovering what power an acting director has to put his own agency out of business.
"My first reaction when they outlined it to me was that it couldn't be done," he said. The President, you see, had signed into law last fall legislation extending the life of OEO through mid-1974 and providing funds for its operations – not its abolition this year.
But by the time the White House lawyers had finished interpreting that legislation, Phillips began to savor the possibilities of striking a blow for libertarianism.
The lawyers' reasoning is a marvelous example of Orwellian Newspeak. When Sen. Abraham A. Ribicoff (D-Conn.) wrote Phillips asking him to identify his authority to abolish OEO and "terminate" or "transfer" its functions, it all turned out to be a phantom. "While the 1974 budget requests no funding for them," the letter of reply said, "the statutory basis for these activities will remain intact." Some programs may be "delegated" to other agencies, but none, Ribicoff was told, is being "transferred."
To translate those legalisms into the sports metaphor that Mr. Nixon likes, that's equivalent to saying that while the Washington Senators have "delegated" their players to the Texas Rangers, their franchise remains "intact." That's a comfort to know, but it doesn't mean you'll find any baseball in Washington this summer. Or any antipoverty program either.
One of the "general principles" Phillips had given me as a guide to his philosophy read, "The elitist notion that our traditional institutions and democratic processes must be bypassed to achieve 'socially desirable' objectives poses a fundamental threat to our system of government."
In light of that statement, I asked him what he thought of Mr. Nixon's end-run around Congress on the abolition of OEO. "That decision," he said, not batting an eye, "was made on the grounds of effectiveness."
For the same reason, it turns out, Mr. Nixon has decided not to submit Phillips' name to the Senate, despite a recent pointed reminder from Sen. Harrison A. Williams, Jr. (D-N.J.), the chairman of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, that the position of OEO director requires Senate confirmation.
"If my name went up," Phillips said with unassailable logic, "I'd have to spend all my time up there getting confirmed and I'd never get the place dismantled."
So there you have it. Having picked as the poverty program administrator a man who believes that poverty is not "a political question," Mr. Nixon has now authorized him to dismantle the agency, rapidly and totally, despite the fact that its life, under law, is supposed to extend at least until mid-1974. And he is doing it right now without the Senate even having a chance to exercise
its statutory and constitutional right to give or withhold its "advice and consent" to the nomination.
All this, mind you, in 1973. It makes you wonder what our government will be like by 1984.
[From the New York Times, Feb. 27, 1973]
TELLING IT NOT QUITE LIKE IT IS
(By Tom Wicker)
President Nixon is on reasonably firm ground in contending that many of the antipoverty and other social programs created by Democratic administrations in the 1960's failed in practice. But the way Mr. Nixon made the case was so partisan and selfserving that he probably was not too persuasive to those considerable number of people who still need convincing.
It was almost incredible to hear him refer in the same radio speech to "one of the most unselfish missions ever undertaken by one nation in defense of another" – the President's view of the war in Vietnam – and then to "paternalism, social exploitation and waste" – his view of Democratic social legislation of the same period. Those who saw the war absorbing funds vitally needed in many areas of American life, and who know that its deceptive financing was the main engine of the inflation with which Mr. Nixon still must wrestle, can only wonder at his sense of priorities.
Mr. Nixon repeated, moreover, his familiar formulation that the Johnson Administration believed it could solve a social problem "by throwing dollars at it." Thus, he took disapproving note of what he said was the "seemingly inexhaustible flood" of money leaving Washington in those years, only to be reduced to "a mere trickle" by the time it reached the supposed recipients.
It may well be that had there been any such "inexhaustible flood" the Johnson programs still would have failed. The fact is, however, that for all the Great Society rhetoric few if any of these programs ever were properly or fully funded – not least because of the cost of the unselfish mission of the American people to save our Vietnamese from the other Vietnamese.
If there is a general indictment of the Johnson programs to be made – any such judgment has to be hedged – it probably is that they were designed around the basic idea of providing services, rather than money, to the poor. Community action programs also generated bothersome political divisions when the "maximum feasible participation" of the poor became more than local political and social structures could tolerate.
But while it is true that not much success can be claimed – obviously – in eliminating poverty and racial disadvantage, these programs may well have had more cumulative importance than Mr. Nixon allows. His former urban affairs counselor, Daniel P. Moynihan, makes the case against the Great Society strategy in his new book, "The Politics of a Guaranteed Income," but adds that in the troubled years of the sixties the publicity, excitement and limited impact of these programs may well have been vital in maintaining such stability as there was. At least, they created a brief impression of concern and may even have generated some hope among the intended beneficiaries, at a time when hope was vital.
Mr. Nixon's prime substitute, revenue sharing, is at least as much a gamble – as far as net results are concerned – as anything the Johnson Administration did. Much revenue sharing money, as was the case with Great Society grants, will go not to the poor but to middle-class workers – to firemen's and policemen's salaries, for instance. Capital projects and local tax reduction will absorb more of it.
And while Mr. Nixon is extolling local responsibility, he might consider expanding local resources. At a time when the Federal budget is under maximum strain, Representative John Anderson of Illinois, one of the most thoughtful Republican legislators, has pointed out that by the last quarter of 1971, state and local governments had a $6-billion surplus of revenues over expenditures, and that this excess was running at a $15-billion annual rate in mid-1972. By 1975, the American Enterprise Institute has estimated, this state and local surplus could be more than $23 billion.
So it may be that Mr. Nixon's revenue sharing program will turn out to be "throwing dollars" at a surplus. Governmental action on a large scale – such as revenue sharing – can take so long in the American system that it is not unusual for a program to be delayed until the conditions that called for it have been considerably changed.
Finally, Mr. Nixon made much of a big increase in Social Security benefits as a major way in which his Administration was "helping to provide a better life for the American people." Aside from his Administration's opposition to the benefit increase, which was fiscally defensible, the fact is that Social Security does not derive from general revenues but from an employee tax, which must be matched by employers. This is one of the most regressive taxes that Americans have to pay, and it had to be steeply increased to finance the latest round of benefits. The wage base on which the tax is levied also was expanded.
Whether most Americans are better or worse off, as a result, is considerably less certain that Mr. Nixon would have us believe.
[From the New York Times, Feb. 27, 19731
THE SHORT ROPE
Let us suppose that a man is drowning thirty feet from shore. A rescuer throws him ten feet of rope. He drowns. It would scarcely be logical to conclude: "Rope is of no use in the prevention of drowning."
Yet that is the kind of logic enshrined in President Nixon's budget and set forth over the weekend in his radio talk on "Human Resources." Once again, the President blandly asserts that the Federal programs enacted in the last decade were "based on the assumption that any human problem could be solved simply by throwing enough Federal dollars at it." Money flowed from Washington, according to Mr. Nixon, "in a seemingly inexhaustible flood."
There was no such assumption and no such flood. It is absurd to suggest that sophisticated public servants such as John Gardner and Wilbur Cohen, who served successively as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in the Johnson Administration, had the illusion that any human problem could be solved by simply spending money. More to the point, the money was not there to be spent. Every Great Society social problem was seriously underfunded – at levels below Congressional authorizations – because of spending on the Vietnam war between 1966 and 1969.
The nation has difficult and complex problems in educating children from slum families, in providing decent housing for the poor in big cities, in training the unemployed and the seeming unemployable, in delivering adequate health care to the elderly and the impoverished, in aiding rural poor on marginal and substandard farms, in rescuing idle youth and strengthening broken families.
In talking about these problems, President Johnson was sometimes guilty of excessive optimism, because some lives are so blighted that they cannot be turned around and some social circumstances are so adverse that progress can only be slow. But President Johnson was right to try to solve them. It does his successor no credit to distort the record.
Some of the social programs enacted in the 1960's need more money. Others need more time. Still others are not working well and can be improved or halted. When experiments are begun, it is in their nature that some will succeed, some fail, and some show mixed results.
These programs need patient, determined leadership, and they need careful evaluation, sympathetic as to goals and objective as to results. That leadership and that evaluation are what the programs of the 1960's have not received from today's indifferent caretakers.
Instead, all these social initiatives – Medicare, Medicaid, rent supplements, Title One help for children from low-income families, Head Start, Job Corps, community health centers, legal aid for the indigent, and many others – are lumped together and disparaged as ideas that were tried and shown to be a "dismal failure."
It is easy to abandon the difficult effort to help the approximately thirty million who live in poverty, to stigmatize them as drones and welfare cheats, to revert to the old sink-or-swim philosophy. It may even be temporarily popular. The nation has taken that easy way before and lived for a time with its uneasy conscience. But ultimately the struggle for social justice has to be renewed. It will be again.