A Cut-Down Bill

FOREIGN AID

Mauled and mutilated, slashed and sneered at, halt and hamstrung, the foreign aid authorization bill finally passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 63 to 17. Missing was some $800 million from the Administration's request of $4.5 billion. Added was a spate of specified restrictions as to how, and for what reasons, the Administration could expend foreign aid funds.

A Bitter Protest. Facing the prospect of that slash, President Kennedy bitterly protested to his press conference: "If there are failures in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, and South Viet Nam and Laos, it is usually not a Senator who is selected to bear the blame, but it is the Administration--the President of the U.S. . . . I am just trying to make it very clear that I cannot fulfill my responsibility in the field of foreign policy without this program."

In the Senate, Oregon's Wayne Morse, a liberal Democrat and the foreign aid program's most vitriolic critic, retorted: "The President ought to be much less concerned about who is going to be blamed and much more concerned about proceeding to bring about the necessary reforms in the foreign aid program." With that, Morse and his colleagues went back to sawing off more pieces of the bill.

During the final hours of debate, South Dakota's Republican Senator Karl Mundt introduced an amendment that would have prohibited the use of the Export-Import Bank to guarantee Russian payments to commercial traders in the U.S.-Soviet wheat deal. That threatened to throw the aid bill or the wheat deal--or both--back into a welter of confusion and conflict. Only under the urging of both Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Minority Leader Everett Dirksen did Mundt finally agree to withdraw his amendment and to submit it later as separate legislation.

Only Half the Struggle. That withdrawal cleared the way for Senate passage. The Senate version next goes to a conference committee to be squared with a House bill authorizing $200 million less. Ordinarily, foreign aid conferees pretty much split the House-Senate differences, which would make this year's foreign aid authorization come to about $3.6 billion.

But the authorization is only half the struggle. After that, the Congress must approve the actual appropriations. For years Louisiana Democrat Otto Passman, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's foreign operations subcommittee, has been trying to cut foreign aid to the barest bone. But in the climate of the 1963 Congress, Passman seems likelier than ever to have his way. And what does he say? He says: "Anything over $2.7 billion would be a waste of money."

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