A Little More Aid

This week President Eisenhower was ready to send to Congress his foreign aid program for fiscal 1957 (beginning next July 1). Calling for a little more aid and a slightly different policy, the President planned to ask Congress to approve:

P: Appropriations totaling $4.9 billion, a substantial increase over the $2.7 billion appropriated for the current fiscal year.

P: Expenditures of $2.5 billion, about the same as this year. The difference between appropriations and expenditures would go into the pipeline for expenditure in future years.

P: A new policy of long-range commitments. At present, specific foreign aid commitments can be made for only one year at a time. The Administration wants authority to commit economic aid for periods up to ten years, at the total rate of no more than $100 million a year in long-range commitments. A key aim: to assure governments and investors that U.S. funds will not be cut off suddenly.

P: Greater flexibility to meet regional economic competition from the Communist bloc. In the current aid program, the President can spend $250 million a year in the place and manner he wishes, with few congressional restrictions. For the future, the Administration wants this authority expanded to $500 million a year. One proposed item in this fund: $100 million of nonmilitary aid for the troubled Middle East and Africa, so that the U.S. will "be in a position to act promptly to help governments in this area in their efforts to find solutions for economic and social problems."

P: A new fund of $530 million "to enable the Department of Defense to begin a program of aiding our allies in developing ... an improved and better-coordinated early warning and communications system . . . utilizing advanced weapons systems, including missiles."

While the new provisions have some strategic value, the aid program admittedly carries no new, broad-gauge policy to meet the Communist economic offensive. The President called the shift in Soviet policy from threats to offers of aid "significant testimony to the success of our Mutual Security program." But he added that the U.S., until it has further evidence, "must assume that Soviet expansionism has merely taken on a somewhat different guise and that its fundamental objective is still to disrupt and in the end to dominate the free nations . . .

Needless to say, we do not intend to permit specific Soviet moves to control our activities."

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