"Wasters & Spenders"

Democratic Congressman Otto Ernest Passman, wholesaler of restaurant equipment from Monroe, La., let his temper shoot up past the broiling point a while before dinner one day last week. The "wasters and spenders," he charged broadly, had leaked to reporters the news that his subcommittee was cutting even worse than usual upon this year's Administration proposals for foreign aid.

Louisiana's Passman was piqued at the leak because, he said, it would give "top-echelon people downtown more time to conduct their unprecedented pressure campaign for more money." Translation: he had hoped to sneak the cuts through the full Appropriations Committee next day, before the Eisenhower Administration got a chance to renew its all-out fight for an adequate aid program.

Passman showed who was boss next morning (his 58th birthday), when the full committee voted down two attempts to restore specific cuts. In a final nose-thumbing, the committee chopped the appropriation for the Administration's imaginative Development Loan Fund from a requested $625 million all the way down to $300 million. By the time the committee got through with its report for the House, the military and economic-aid appropriation had been cut to $3,078,000,000--a dangerous fall from the $3,950,092,000 in the original Administration plan and a serious slip below the $3,675,592,500 which the House itself, in an authorization bill that counts as a declaration of general intent, passed.

The Administration, which gets another chance to count votes when the appropriation goes on the House floor and again in the Senate's Passman-free and wiser committee, kept right on fighting. "Just as it takes ammunition to fight and win a war," said the President in a quick response to the committee's action, "it takes mutual resources and sacrifices to win peace."

In Congress last week:

P: Both houses passed and sent to the President a tax bill that extends corporate income taxes and excises at present levels, generally in line with the Administration's hold-the-line policy against tax cuts. Single exception: repeal of federal taxes on air, truck, railroad and other freight transportation, a compromise to head off the Senate's demand for a repeal of a broad range of transportation taxes (TIME, June 30).

P: The House passed (348-2) and sent to the Senate a bill to give sick railroaders another couple of pep pills by 1) providing Federal Government guarantees for private loans to rail companies for maintenance and improvement, and 2) letting the ICC, rather than state boards, pass on discontinuance of money-losing services, such as commuter trains that run nearly empty.

P: The House defeated by a resounding 214 (162 Republicans, 52 Democrats) to 171 (21 Republicans, 150 Democrats) the House Agriculture Committee's wild, catchall farm bill to expand subsidies by raising price props and tightening production controls on milk, corn and grain, sorghums. Cheered Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson: "A vote of confidence in ... those who are dedicated to returning American agriculture to a sound basis."

P: The Senate debated the House-cleared Alaska statehood bill with fitful, windy opposition by antistatehood Southern forces; two test votes, one calling for commonwealth status, the other based on a constitutional point of order, were soundly defeated (50-29, 53-28), thereby paving the way for a final vote--and Alaskan victory--this week.

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