Scalpel & Thread

As the story goes on Capitol Hill, the Eisenhower budget has put the House in so fierce a cutting mood that if a Congressman offered a bill to cut the Ten Commandments to eight it would pass. Last week the House slashed away at the Labor and Health, Education and Welfare appropriations bill, and its mood had a scalpel's edge. In seven days of surgery on Labor and HEW, the Congressmen trimmed $69 million off the Appropriations Committee's $2.9 billion bill. Then, before the patient had regained consciousness, the surgeons stitched back nearly 80% of what they had cut off.

One big reason for the quick stitching was the old familiar roll call. A whole force of Republicans and Southern Democrats, mindful of heavy cut-that-budget mail, happily hacked away during voice votes, but switched in near panic when they were maneuvered into roll calls. Among the items restored by recorded vote: $50 million for grants to states for sewage-treatment plants. Any Congressman knows that a recorded vote against an important appropriation like that would raise an awful smell back home.

While the House was cutting and stitch ing, its Appropriations Committee cut $218 million, a whacking 25%, out of the Commerce Department's request for 1958. That brought the committee's total score so far to about $1 billion out of seven bills totaling $14.5 billion. But upwards of half the chips in that impressive $1 billion pile are phony, e.g., $207 million out of payments to veterans, $76 million out of old-age-assistance grants to states. Federal outlays of this sort are governed by laws, and as long as the laws remain on the books. Congress has no choice but to appropriate, sooner or later, whatever money is needed.

In "cutting" funds for such fixed obligations. Congress merely guesses that outlays will amount to less than the Administration expects. And at budget-cutting time, the members of Congress tend to make their guesses asleep in the deep.

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