The Same or Less

Still in an economy-minded mood, President Johnson sent to Congress last week a foreign aid message asking for a bare-bones $3.4 billion for fiscal 1965. It was the lowest figure since Harry Truman inaugurated the program in 1947, and $1.5 billion less than President Kennedy originally requested last year.

By keeping his sights somewhere close to a realistic target, Johnson was proceeding on the premise that Congress would call this a sensible procedure and keep its whittling knife sheathed. But initial Capitol Hill reaction was different.

Warned Louisiana's Democratic Rep resentative Otto Passman, the biggest aid-chopper of them all: "Those of us who are charged with finding the fat in this program know there is an asking price and a taking price. I hope we can work the asking price down to the taking price." Oregon's Senator Wayne Morse thought the request could "safely be cut 25% ," to around $2.5 billion.

Administration staffers insist that there is no fat. Moreover, they point to a flock of new, money-saving features. Six countries, for example, have been lopped off the list of aid recipients. Seven nations will no longer get military equipment grants, and 14 countries will be phased out of the plan altogether, possibly as early as 1968. Two-thirds of the $1 billion earmarked for military aid will go to eleven countries located on the periphery of the Sino-Soviet bloc. Of the total aid appropriation, 88% will go to 25 countries, more than half of them in Latin America. And furthermore, Johnson has ordered the Agency for International Development to cut back its staff by 1,200 people.

In addition to all that, the President said he would ask Congress for a 30% tax credit for U.S. private business investment in underdeveloped nations, and noted that he was following up on a suggestion made by Kentucky's Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper that he create a citizens' committee to study the aid program on a country-by-country basis.

The Administration is thus convinced it has done its level best to show Congress that it has squeezed every nonessential penny out of foreign aid proposals this time. "We didn't feel we had much choice," says one top foreign aid official. "We'd got to the point where Congress didn't believe us, and we had to do something to restore faith."

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