Tying the Imperial Purse Strings
Roberts, Ben
Tying the Imperial Purse Strings by Ben Roberts Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon brought it to our attention, and Arthur Schlesinger graced it with an official label: the Imperial...
...The bill was written by the Ford Administration, working closely with Chairman David Henderson, a Southern conservative Democrat, and the Republican minority of the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee, which, for lack of a more appropriate forum, reviews legislation relating to the presidency...
...The White House Office itself now includes more than 500 people...
...In 1973, during the penultimate Watergate summer, the White House appropriation was briefly removed from the 1974 federal budget after Rep...
...The vast majority of tax dollars that support the imperial presidency are not authorized to be spent for that purpose...
...Rep...
...By contrast to the congressional opposition to FDR’s expansion plans, President Nixon’s 1970 executive reorganization-which added almost 100 people to the presidential staff-faced almost no resistance...
...This was money that paid the travel expenses of Hunt and Liddy in preparing for the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office...
...Just how these qualified as emergencies is not clear...
...Haldeman was guarding the money, it turns out, in order to save it for the escapades of Liddy and Hunt...
...Things are very different today...
...In 1933 he had six aides and a clerical staff of 40...
...The Senate still has an opportunity to tighten up this bill, but it is an opportunity that probably will be passed up...
...The normal process by which federal revenues turn into government activity involves two committees in each body of Congress: one to authorize some activity, and one to appropriate money for it...
...The unit in charge of reviewing the official White House budget for the House of Representatives is the Subcommittee on Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government, of the Committee on Appropriations...
...He claimed not to be concerned about it, adding with complacency, “I might say parenthetically that it is much more difficult to get by Mr...
...In 1974, three months before his resignation, President Nixon submitted an open-ended authorization bill providing for unlimited expansion of the White House staff and budget...
...The White House would have to request the money for such reimbursement from Congress at budget time...
...They are rarely used for emergencies and act primarily as sources of ready cash that don’t need to be accounted for...
...The best way to insure that money isn’t being spent on improper activities is to know how it is being spent...
...After this use of the special projects fund was revealed it was dropped as a separate budget item...
...This technical violation of the law would not be terribly important, except that it explains how little control-or even knowledgeCongress has of how much the White House is spending, and on what...
...This form of “blank check” funding is more effective than the invocation of “executive privilege” in keeping the courtiers of the imperial president beyond congressional supervision...
...7’he Senate will vote this month on an authorization bill passed by the House in July...
...The recent flurry of excitement about the possibility of CIA operatives inside the White House shows how ignorant people are of this widespread practice...
...But former Press Secretary George Reedy wrote after his White House service that many people working in the White House did not even know where the agencies that officially employed them were located...
...The Park Service is responsible for the $1.2 million annually appropriated for operation of the Executive Residence.( Recently Park Service administrators found themselves defending the use of money from this fund to pay for Richard Nixon’s personal valet and maid, detailed to his “Casa Pacifica” long after he had resigned as President...
...Morris Udall, Pat Schroeder, and Herb Harris, to provide for a congressional audit of the President’s entertainment and travel expenses...
...But a long-overdue hard-nosed look at the White House budget might indicate that there is money going for jobs that might better be done elsewhere-or not done at all...
...The bill was debated, amended, and ultimately forgotten...
...He guards it very jealously...
...He may request that people from other departments be assigned to the White House for temporary duty...
...Congress reviews presidential finances in what is known on Capitol Hill as a “spirit of comity...
...And that’s all...
...While congressional doves concentrated their efforts...
...itself on money that passes through Congress virtually unreviewed...
...About 70 people were detailed to the White House during 1974...
...In both cases there is no opportunity for Congress to examine what the money is being spent for...
...The 1975 White House budget passed through Congress without authorization...
...The last President to operate the White House as authorized by law was Franklin Roosevelt...
...The Mayaguez incident-when President Ford had low-level White House staff members read a brief statement to congressional leaders over the telephoneshowed how easily a president can negotiate such strictures...
...Tom Steed, a chairman of the u n r e constructed go-along-and-ge talong variety, runs it through the White House appropriation requests in what he describes as a “spirit of comity...
...Now, members of Congress huff and puff about the need to reassert control over foreign and domestic policy, and add provisions to bills demanding that they-Congress-be treated to something called “consultation” before the President exercises his imperial prerogatives...
...The National Park Service provides Camp Hoover, yet another rustic retreat, this one in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, reserved for the use of White House aides...
...A few simple changes could bring the imperial presidency under closer congressional con trol: * The White House should be required to reimburse other agencies for the cost of goods, services, or personnel which they supply to it...
...The White House supports Ben Roberts is a pseudonym...
...Where does the rest come from...
...More important, the other agencies’ expenses for the White House cannot be reviewed, because they cannot be found...
...In fact, the means of curbing the imperial presidency lie close at the congressional hand, just as those of ending the war did...
...In addition to the White House Office itself, there are the Executive Offices of the President, comprised of more than a dozen separate “offices” or departments employing 1,600 people...
...Every $100,000 spent by other agencies for White House expenses, however necessary, frees official White House funds intended to cover such expenses for unreviewed and potentially undesirable activity...
...The funds were soon quietly restored and approved...
...He is authorized $40,000 for travel...
...The presidential staff is swollen, in a way that does not appear in its budget and cannot be reviewed by Congress, by the practice of getting other government units to “detail” staff members both to the White House Office and to the Executive Office of the President...
...Members of Congress, and the public, would be able to know for the first time how much money the presidency costs and what exactly it is being spent on...
...These appropriations are accounted for solely on the President’s word...
...The official White House budget represents only a tiny fraction of what it costs to maintain the presidency...
...Yet this division of the Department of the Interior spends millions annually on the presidency...
...An analogy may be drawn to congressional activity in opposition to the war in Vietnam...
...But it would not be exceptional to find that anyone working in the White House really was employed by the CIA, the Air Force, or the Department of Health, Education and Welfare...
...Unauthorized money gets to the White House in two ways...
...Gale McGee, chairman of the Senate Post Office and Civil Service Committee, reportedly has agreed not to oppose the White House’s version of the authorization bill, in exchange for President Ford’s agreement not to veto the recent cost-of-living pay raises for congressmen and high-ranking civil servants...
...They are too small to be useful in a real emergency, when Congress would, of course, be available to appropriate the needed funds...
...Tying the Imperial Purse Strings by Ben Roberts Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon brought it to our attention, and Arthur Schlesinger graced it with an official label: the Imperial Presidency...
...Eventually it agreed to give him six more personal assistants and to create the Executive Office of the President by moving the Bureau of the Budget from the Treasury Department...
...No one can find out how he and his staff choose to spend the money...
...As deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, “Cap the Knife” was called upon in April 1972 to justify the White House special projects fund...
...The bill limits White House staff members in the highest pay bracket to 95, which is 41 more than there are even now...
...The annual appropriations bills for the White House staff provide that the money can be spent “without regard to the provisions of law regulating the employment and compensation of persons in the Government Service...
...The appropriate congressional subcommittee should conduct a consolidated annual review of all spending on the presidency, in a spirit of reasonable curiosity rather than No thoughtful person wants to deny the President the money and staff necessary to do his job...
...The authors are two federal budget analysts...
...In practice, it has come to mean that the subcommittee gives the White House all the money it wants, no questions asked...
...Beyond staff salaries, the President has almost complete control of a $1-million fund to be used “for emergencies affecting the national interest, security, or defense which may arise at home or abroad...
...and from what is probably needed-30 military chauffeurs for White House limousines-to what is probably not-150 Navy men stationed at Camp David...
...John Dingell pointed out that it had not been properly authorized...
...But an amendment to limit the top-level White House staff to its present level of 54 was defeated, 234 to 157...
...Indeed the imperial presidency operates technically in violation of the law...
...When Roosevelt proposed legislation in 1937 to increase the size and power of the White House, Congress voted it down...
...The Park Service has spent over $3 million of its own funds since 1969 to repair the electrical and air conditioning systems in the White House...
...The Low Road to Reform In each of the past three years, Congress has attempted halfheartedly, and failed, to reform the White House budgeting procedure...
...Yet unrestricted power in the White House poses an equal threat to that beloved separation...
...Such a reform would, in fact, eliminate most of the incentive for borrowing people and money from other agencies...
...Even a cost-cutter as legendary as Caspar Weinberger shies away from chopping into White House money...
...It was amended on the floor of the House, after a fight led by Reps...
...There is no way even to determine how much money is spent on the President and his staff every year...
...Here, Congress’ abandonment of its most effective technique of supervision is even more complete...
...For example, what budget analyst attempting to review the White House’s bankroll would think to examine the books of the National Park Service...
...With this alteration, the White House prosecuted World War 11...
...The kind of “reform” embodied in the White House authorization bill, although it puts the presidency back on a proper legal footing, is trivial...
...Haldeman than it is even to get by me on approval of this fund...
...either it is appropriated to the White House and spent by it without ever having been authorized for any particular purpose, or it is authorized for and appropriated to a wide variety of other government agencies which provide goods, services and personnel to the White House without charge...
...The fiction is maintained that these assignments are temporary...
...Comity means in theory that the Congress won’t use the budget mechanism to destroy the separation of powers...
...Most of the White House expenses are buried in the budgets of other wings of the government...
...According to the laws of the United States, in 1975 the President receives a salary of $200,000 plus $50,000 for expenses...
...I think that is the reason for its quite low usage...
...He is authorized 16 aides, whose individual salaries cannot exceed $42,500...
...on troop withdrawal deadlines, the Pentagon budget slipped right through Congress and into the war machine...
...and, in fact, no serious examination has ever been attempted...
...This was sufficient to get him through the Depression...
...The “special projects” and “emergency” funds should be eliminated...
...As it developed, Alexander Butterfield was not employed by the CIA or connected with it in any way...
...This was two months before the Watergate break-in...
...But the $1.5 million merely was added to the general appropriation for the White House Office, where it is even more effectively buried...
...These expenses range from large-the $35 million that the Pentagon spends annually on the White House communication systemto trivial-White House tour guides employed by the Treasury Depaftment...
...Congressional rules forbid appropriations for activities that have not been authorized...
...The White House shares with the CIA the distinction of having circumvented these rules...
...In 1974, this money was used for the Federal Property Council, the Energy Policy Council, and the United StatesPuerto Rico Ad Hoc Advisory Group...
...Until recently, the President also was given a $1.5-million Special Projects fund every year...
Vol. 7 • September 1975 • No. 7
