Cooling the Broth

Since they came into office last January, Dwight Eisenhower's Cabinet officers and agency chiefs have been struggling to cut the $78.6 billion budget which they inherited from Harry Truman. Last week the struggle over the budget grew sharper.

In the Defense Department, Secretary Charles E. Wilson put through a cut which will save the Government about $33 million during the present fiscal year. Setting a monthly shrinkage goal of about 1% of the department's 1,327,546 civilian employees, Wilson ordered the armed services to drop a total of 39,346 civilians from their payrolls by the end of May.

Not all of it was that easy. Budget Director Joseph Dodge ran into trouble when some of his fiscal surgeons decided to take $200 million out of the Interior Department's $235 million reclamation budget. To Easterners, "reclamation" is a fancy word for pork-barreling. To Westerners, who see federally-financed dams and canals as the only means of developing vast, arid stretches of their land, reclamation is what the Government exists to do. Last week this potent political fact was forcefully explained to Detroiter Dodge by his Western colleague, Interior Secretary Douglas McKay of Oregon. "Broth is never eaten as hot as it's cooked," philosophized McKay later. "I'm not really worried now. The Western Senators won't let them ruin the reclamation program."

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