NIXON WIELDS THE HATCHET

...Once the states see they are not getting federal money, this theory runs, they will pressure Congress to pass the necessary legislation...

...There the challenge takes several forms: bills have been introduced to limit the President's impoundment powers...

...Congress is challenging the President in the courts, where a group of senators has brought suit against the impounding moves, and in the House and Senate...

...Federal aid to libraries—phased out...

...Four years have made us familiar with the Nixon style: first cuff and then soothe...

...There are other problems with revenue-sharing...

...Don't start off by say ing he's terrible...

...There is presidential precedent for impoundment, former Supreme Court Jus 242 tice Arthur Goldberg observes, "but never before has it been used to establish legislative priorities...

...The Administration points proudly to the fact that it is proposing a $629 million increase in funds for civil rights enforcement...

...There's a lack of commitment," she says...

...He has prohibited official travel outside of Wash ington and centralized all control within his office...

...then in Don Rumsfeld and Frank Carlucci appointing directors seemingly in sympathy with its programs, and now, finally, moving to shut it down...

...Robert Q. Marston, head of the National Institutes of Health...

...Civil Rights Commission...

...Supreme Court is followed by the offering of Blackmun and Powell, who shine so by contrast that they are quickly approved...

...I could get excited about working at the local level and setting up staff there," the young OEO official says...

...Most used them for capital improvements, official salaries, public safety, and tax relief...

...Washington This defense of the President's proposals cannot be entirely ignored...

...If Congress fails to stop the President, what then...

...Gone from the cabinet are the politicians like HUD's George Romney and Transportation's John Volpe, who had some sense of a constituency and its needs...

...A worthy goal, perhaps, but one based on a limited view of the government's responsibility in the area of civil rights...

...It is too early to predict who will win, but the proclivity of Congress to cave in before White House pressure is not reassuring...

...Go see the President, Lyndon Johnson advised the anguished civil rights constituency when he met with its leaders in Austin, Texas, shortly before he died...

...Can a $268.7 billion budget really be that bad...

...One example: for all its talk about getting local governments to deal with local problems, the 1974 budget would cut back on funds for state local departments of education, making it difficult for them to deal meaningfully with their school needs...

...Carl Perkins, the Kentucky Democrat who heads the House Education and Labor Committee, has already begun hearings on a bill to extend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, one of President Johnson's triumphs...

...but it also tends to insulate its members from con gressional approval and inquiry...

...More and more the agencies of the executive branch become the shadow of Richard Nixon...

...The matter of handling domestic programs through revenue-sharing comes before Congress when it is already locked in battle with the President over a grave constitutional issue, i.e., his right to impound funds Congress has appropriated for specific purposes...

...There will still be allocations for old-age benefits, education, and a range of social programs...

...Such suggestions matter little if the truth is that Nixon doesn't like the programs...

...Last year Congress approved a revenue-sharing plan that will make nearly $30 billion available to state and local governments over the next five years, and $5 billion have now been disbursed...

...The White House, too, seeks to cen tralize everything, even as it preaches decen tralization and the return of responsibility to the local level...

...Yet, the report notes, the budget explains the termination of grants for such things as OEO community-action programs, local open space, and libraries by saying the localities can pick up their cost if they like...

...The law is scheduled to expire June 30, though it can be extended automatically until next year...

...It is typical of this Administration to put forth proposals for startling, even alarming changes and then suggest they are not as drastic as they sound...

...These proposals met with bitter condemnation in Congress and the press...

...A young OEO official says, "I don't have a fever for change anymore, because there's no leadership for change...

...Nixon will be in a position of enormous power...

...The school milk program— sharply reduced...

...The Federal Fair Housing Law of 1968 has long suffered from lax administration...

...Conference of Mayors, in its own budget analysis, accused the Administration of breaching an agreement reached with mayors in August 1969 "that general revenue-sharing was not to be a substitute for ongoing federal categorical programs...

...Pragmatic" is the crucial word...

...According to an estimate by Rep...

...If revenuesharing for education prevails, the education groups fear little money will find its way to the inner-city schools...

...On a smaller scale he seems to be op erating the way his superiors in the White House do...

...They do need pruning and reevaluation —but not wholesale decimation...

...Nothing in the budget seems calculated to improve the situation, for while the Defense Department is ready to spend $5.5 million to see that off-base housing is made available to the military without discrimination, HUD itself seeks only $4.3 million to enforce the law for the (continued on page 241) NIXON WIELDS THE HATCHET (continued from page 134) rest of the country...

...The shifts on school desegregation are too many and complicated to be briefly chronicled, but it is fair to say that here, too, there has been an alternation between flagrant, infuriating indulgence of violators with some semblance of enforcement of the law...

...The man who cries, "It is time to get big government off your back and out of your pocket" shares the prejudices of those whose votes elected him, the suburbanites, the ethnics, the affluent...

...Although the budget proposes a $4.5 billion increase in defense spending, it would save between $8 billion to $10 billion in domestic expenditures by paring down or eliminating some 100 human welfare programs...

...One now finds in the agencies a climate of fear, almost of paranoia, a feeling that phone lines are being tapped and Nixon's spies are everywhere...

...Federal programs have often been duplicative and inefficient...

...As he seeks to concentrate the power of the executive branch, Nixon also moves to push responsibility for domestic welfare programs onto the states, largely through revenue-sharing...

...All these shifts have brought the government to where it is now: on the side, in court, of those fighting the constitutional requirements of the law and the Supreme Court school decisions...

...and in the forefront of the fight by either punitive legislation or constitutional amendment to stop school desegregation...

...almost uniform in the evidence that few of this year's revenue-sharing allocations are being spent on social services...

...Nixon would like to substitute a special education revenue-sharing bill for the ESEA, which contains, incidentally, a provision he dislikes, Title I: the celebrated program of aid to disadvantaged children...

...It is almost as if, another official says, the President has wakened to the realization that he has only four more years in which to turn the country around (in whatever direction he has in mind) and now means to do so...

...The special programs would distribute grants in four areas: urban community development, education, law enforcement and criminal justice, and manpower training...

...In HEW many of the bright young people who came with high expectations of service during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations are going back to school to take graduate degrees...

...One remembers how Nixon toyed with OEO, condemning it, threatening to abolish it during the 1968 presidential campaign...

...Supporters of the affected programs have suggested they could be saved if the President were to cut defense spending and close tax loopholes that the AFL–CIO and Senator Edward Muskie estimate would yield an additional $18 billion in federal revenue...

...The nomination of G. Harrold Carswell to the U.S...

...Since he is president, he both stimulates public prejudice and responds to it...

...House and Senate have repassed bills the President has previously vetoed, such as measures to increase grants to rivers and harbors and local airports and to restore funds to the Rural Environmental Assistance Program (REAP...

...It leaves social decisions up to localities without giving them money to develop staffs that could make such decisions intelligently...

...In many agencies the older bureaucrats, architects of the social welfare programs that are Nixon's targets, are taking advantage of early retirement provisions...

...The last Congress gave Nixon its approval for $1.5 billion in Emergency School Aid, to help school districts that were under court or federal order to desegregate...

...In their fear of the encroaching minorities we can discern his disapproval of scattersite housing for the poor and his opposition to school busing...

...By now the President's defenders are saying critics of the budget have overreacted...

...They would never do that now...

...These changes in priority, the swift succession of reorganizations and White House attacks on the integrity and motives of career government workers have had, of course, a demoralizing effect on federal employees...

...The harrowing days of the bombing of Hanoi, that final, terrible wrench of the American conscience, is followed by a ceasefire that comes more as a relief than joy...

...It may be enough to quote Ralph Nader and 22 other public-interest advocates: "In a society already marred by a maldistribution of wealth and income," they said, "it is unjust to make the poor, poorer and the rich, richer...

...Finally, Democratic chairmen of key appropriations subcommittees have warned they will take no action on the 1974 budget requests of the agencies subject to their jurisdiction until they reactivate programs for which money has already been allocated...

...The wholesale resignations he demanded immediately after his election, in letters brutal and peremptory, were perhaps the first signal...

...In his constituents' anti-intellectualism may be the motive for abolishing the White House Science Adviser and two advisory bodies of scientists (Cambridge elitists, probably, opposed to the Vietnam war) and his downgrading of science and technology research to where its concerns are to be with practical short-range projects, capable of yielding good public relations...

...If their supporters have sometimes ignored their faults, one is not to suppose that, in calling for their reduction and elimination, President Nixon and his aides have studied all 100 carefully...

...Their successors are men who appear to share Nixon's view that many of their programs are boonNIXON WIELDS THE HATCHET doggles, best cut back or kept in check until they can be turned over to the states...

...Some say there's a White House agent in each department to report on employee disloyalty," the Wall Street Journal reported recently...

...But a large share of that money would go to provide grants, loans, and guarantees to minority businessmen...

...Then there is the enormous task of monitoring the way the money is spent in some 39,000 different jurisdictions...

...These prejudices crop up in the budget, too, not only in the rough treatment of major social programs but even in minor cuts...

...THE MOST IMPORTANT THING," says a former HEW official discussing the budget, "is the sense throughout the government that priorities have been changed...

...With a staff of only 25 assigned to such work, the Treasury Department can inspect only 300 units a year...

...The showdown in the approaching fight over revenue-sharing may well come in the area of education...

...It is their hatred of longhairs that he expresses when he speaks contemptuously of "two-year junkets" in the Peace Corps...

...he has already withheld, frozen, and impounded more than $12 billion appropriated for fiscal 1973...

...In the budget for fiscal 1974 we can see how policy translates into program...

...Money for manpower training and employment of the disadvantaged—cut almost in half...

...Expenditures for education, though increased somewhat at the higher levels, would be reduced overall by about 4 percent...

...Housing for low-, moderateincome, and rural families would be the principal casualties of an 18-month moratorium on new funds...

...He doesn't think he's terrible...

...one asks jocularly...

...Johnson may have been too kind...

...This year the budget asks for $500 million for these purposes...

...A good example of the new no-nonsense is what's happening at OEO, now that Director Howard Phillips is preparing its liquidation...

...Many are renewed reflexively by Congress because constituents have vested interest in them...

...In their contempt for "welfare chislers" we find his loss of interest in welfare reform...

...Medicare beneficiaries would have to pay a larger share of their hospital costs...

...NIXON WIELDS THE HATCHET 241 There are large misgivings about the revenuesharing program...

...Senator Muskie observes: a survey of city officials [questioned] by my Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations has brought some 750 responses...

...But some of Nixon's highly regarded administrators were forced to leave, too—people like Social Security Commissioner Robert M. Ball (who sinned, apparently, by mingling socially with liberal Republicans and members of the press) and Dr...

...Men Nixon considered antagonists were among the first to go, chief among them Father Theodore Hesburgh, the outspoken chairman of the U.S...

...And it is their distaste of government subsidies for black urban activists and for young hotshot lawyers fighting the battles of the poor that seems to move him to shut down OEO...

...It is instructive, too, to recall how this Administration has dealt with the poor, how Nixon appeared at first as an advocate of sensible welfare reforms, proposing to substitute a guaranteed annual income for patchwork changes in an antiquated welfare system, and how quickly he jettisoned a compromise worked out by HEW Secretary Elliot Richardson and Senator Abraham Ribicoff when there was no longer any political mileage to be had from it in the 1972 election...

...We shall have compassion, if it is practical...

...Joe L. Evins (D., Tenn...

...Some observers in Washington suggest that the budget cuts are part of a strategy to build support for the revenue-sharing proposals...

...Nixon is ter rible—in his anger, his vindictiveness, in his need for secrecy and control, in his narrow vision of the role government should and can play to alleviate the sufferings of people's lives...

...An old-time bureaucrat recalls that in 1962, anticipating Medicare, people in her department began on their own to develop the supportive data needed for the legislation...

...Listen to Richard Nixon describe his domestic policies: "They represent a pragmatic rededication to social compassion and national excellence...

...The Office of Economic Opportunity—to be shut down by June 30, its community-action program dropped and its other programs parceled out among the old-line agencies...

...Nixon has already won a significant victory on this score...

...Congress gave communities many choices of what to do with the general revenue-sharing funds...

...But he realizes he would most likely not have adequate resources to work with...

...The National League of Cities–U.S...

...q BEN HILLMAN...

...The President's reorganization of the executive branch, to create a super cabinet, may make for greater efficiency...

...Nixon wants Congress to approve four special revenue-sharing programs to "replace narrow categorical grant programs" (i.e., most of the major social welfare programs now extant...

...The attacks on the news media and the attempts to harass the press are probably Nixon's own idea, born of his conviction that reporters have tended to treat him badly...