Adviser to the President

A plan to set up a new Council of Economic Advisers was sent to Congress last week by the President. The work of scholarly Economics Professor Arthur F. Burns, who will head the new council, the plan will re-establish CEA as the President's top economic advisory group. Like the old CEA, first set up under Harry Truman's Administration, the new three-man board will keep an eye on U.S. economic changes, advise the President on what to do about them, help him prepare his economic reports to the nation. But there the comparison ends.

The chairman of Eisenhower's council will outrank the other two members, and be the only council member to sit in on presidential conferences. An "Advisory Board on Economic Growth and Stability," composed of top members of Government departments (e.g., Commerce, Labor, Agriculture), will be set up to draw plans for combating any recession and to formulate long-range economic policy. To bridge the gap between the planners and the President, Ike's own economic adviser, Gabriel Hauge, an ex-McGraw-Hill editor, will sit in on Advisory Board meetings.

Eisenhower's beefed-up council will be operating within 60 days under Chairman Burns, but will need funds, probably $300,000 a year, to keep going. A former Columbia University economics professor, Arthur Frank Burns, 49, is a rumpled, pipe-smoking, registered Democrat, who voted for Eisenhower because "my thinking . . . ran pretty much like the thinking of the country." In economics, however, Burns's thoughts follow no particular school. He firmly believes that Government should stay out of the nation's economic affairs as much as possible, interfere only out of "hard necessity." Burns himself knows only one way to classify economists--good or bad. "And you'll have to decide for yourselves," he once told his Columbia classes, "where I belong."

Born in Stanislau, Austria, Burns graduated from Columbia in 1925, took his doctorate in economics nine years later. After teaching at Rutgers and Columbia, he was appointed research director of the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1945. When the old CEA ran out of operating funds three months ago, President Eisenhower picked Burns as his economic adviser, got a $50,000 appropriation for him to set up shop.

Congress parted with the money with great reluctance, mostly because Truman's councilmen had made few friends on Capitol Hill. Under Truman, the three CEA members all had equal standing. Thus the council was often split and public squabbles were common. It became less of an advisory board and more of an apologist for the Administration's economic policies. There seems to be little chance of similar trouble under Burns. Said he: "My inclination would be to stay out of the limelight, make my recommendations to the President, indicate the basis for [them], and then, having done that, to remain eternally quiet."

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