Washington

The victims of the wave of negativism engulfing Washington are many; they include the Administration’s efforts to insert more reason and order into the way that the government does its business. This is no minor setback, for what is at stake is not simply the smooth flow of memoranda or the efficiency of the machinery but the capacity of the government to be relevant.

A sort of creeping nihilism, has been developing that reflects the national erosion of confidence. Yet because of the hothouse nature of this town the feeling is more intense here than it is elsewhere. One of the most surprising aspects of this erosion is that it has developed so quickly. About a year ago the word was that Washington can’t do it all; these days it’s that Washington can’t do anything. The search for alternatives to government-as-usual is healthy, but sometimes it leads to chic simplicities and fashion in thought. The current rage, then, is decentralizations of decentralizations. Formerly it was just about everybody’s opinion that control must be transferred from Washington to state and city governments; people who have taken a closer look at those governments are now insisting on “community control.” The tendency to write Washington off is born of disenchantment, of impatience, of wishful thinking. It stems also from the political disarray that is the result of the Vietnam War, the Johnson style, and the conservative resurgence in Congress.

Fiscal ritual

Yet it can reasonably be predicted that the federal government will not be dismantled in the near future. The question, then, is, what have been some of the effects — on policies and people — of the recent political battering?

One place to focus for insights into what has been happening here is the battle over the budget which took place during the last session of Congress, and which is likely. to be repeated in some form this year.

There is, to be sure, a certain ritual to the uncorking of fiscal oratory that marks, the annual submission of the President’s budget message to Congress. From Capitol Hill we hear about the economic ruin that is about to befall us if government spending is not curbed, and from the Administration (not just this Administration) we hear somber proclamations of fiscal virtue and faithful attention to restoring efficiency in government.

The problem now is that Congress has declared all-out war on total government expenditures, but opposes specific reforms in government spending. This need not have been such a sticking point in the old days. Under normal circumstances there is about a $7 billion to $8 billion increment in the government’s revenues each year through progressive income taxes on a growing economy. This “fiscal dividend” is enough to keep old programs going, start new ones, and even cut taxes from time to time. It is, in fact, where the idea of “block grants” to state governments all began; the thought was that some of these incremental revenues could be handed over to the states without interference to ongoing programs. But these are not normal times. The cost of the Vietnam War now absorbs in one year the equivalent of three years’ fiscal dividend. There simply isn’t any spare cash around to pacify proponents of old programs as a quid pro quo for starting more relevant ones.

Administration officials become understandably cynical about the budget fights. For while the public thinks that there is just one Congress, the officials know that there are two. There is the Congress which makes impassioned public utterances on the traditional canons of thrift; and there is the other one that the executive branch hears day after day after day demanding more spending for peanut research laboratories or airplanes or cotton prices or highways. The members of the Congress, on the other hand, know that the Administration for its part is not above a bit of budget flimflammery. They remember how in 1963 President Johnson was saying that it would be impossible to keep the budget below $100 billion; then he huffed and he puffed and he came up with a $97.9 billion budget — a tactic which won him his 1964 tax cut. That particular budget was, says one participant in the process, “a piece of dramatic invention that would have done credit to our greatest playwrights.” It gets around that sometimes when we have been offered yuletide scenes of our President down at the ranch, with officials flying in and out, straining for all his might to make last-minute cuts in the budget, the budget was already at the printer’s.

Spreading the pain

It is hard to imagine any more difficult circumstances that might have been imposed on those who had to produce this year’s budget and pretend that it represented any sort of plan. They do not know whether Congress will raise taxes; they did not know until the end of December what last year’s spending levels for a number of programs would be. Just about everything that could go wrong with the economy — prices, gold, interest rates — was going wrong. This on top of the fact that the evident damage around Washington indicates that last year’s was no routine budget fight, nor is this year’s likely to be.

When the Administration found itself in midsummer with (taking its word for it) a possible $28 billion budget deficit, it was faced with a set of unattractive choices: a great debt, a substantial tax rise, a severe cut in federal programs. Inevitably, it decided upon a combination of all three. Everyone knows what happened to the tax increase. (It is not quite accurate, it should be noted, to make Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills the goat in the tax fight. Students of the House of Representatives, which presumably include the President, have long known that Wilbur Mills is no dogmatist. He does have a highly sensitized allergy, based on a humiliating defeat early in his House career, against bringing bills to the House floor if he does not believe that they will pass.)

The Administration offered, as a swap for the tax bill, governmentwide reduction in spending. Having once indicated that such cuts were possible, however, and faced with an outsize deficit, the cuts had to be made, tax bill or no. The congressmen took the opportunity to go on record for the economies the Administration had already pledged it was going to make, and as one of their last acts of the season wrote the across-the-board spending reductions into an appropriations bill. True to their Al Capp image, however, the congressmen exempted themselves from the requirement for government-wide economizing; they specifically noted that the legislative budget was not to come under the ax.

The trouble is that for both institutional and political reasons it is not easy to cut spending, and when across-the-board cuts are made, the pain is not evenly spread. Priorities get out of kilter, and rational choicemaking is seriously undermined. Almost one third of the military spending this year is for Vietnam, and making a cut there isn’t even mentionable. Nearly one half of government spending in the civilian sector is “uncontrollable” —either because the programs operate according to an automatic formula, or because the expenditures have been obligated in previous years. That leaves intact the spending for such institutions as farm price supports, merchant marine subsidies, welfare, veterans’ benefits, and ongoing public works projects. The spending for highways, which this year will amount to nearly $4 billion, was similarly immune to the cuts because the highway program operates outside the appropriations process, through a trust fund. Every so often the White House lets it be known that it might curb spending by delaying highway construction projects; just as often, after the full wrath of the governors and the roadbuilding lobby has been unleashed, the Administration lets it be known that really, fellows, we were just kidding.

So across-the-board cuts put the knife deeply into such “controllable” programs as education, poverty, and housing, the tattered remnants of the Great Society. (Even the term “Great Society” mysteriously appears and disappears in White House pronouncements. Government servants, like good apparatchiks, note this in their morning papers and follow suit.) The dispirited curators of the Great Society programs say that the damage, in terms of disruption of people, plans, and momentum, is more serious than the simple monetary decreases would indicate. When a new program is getting off to a shaky start –as just about all new programs do—it is one thing to say, as is often true, that more money will not buy a lot more progress. But it is quite another thing to say that with less money not that much is lost.

The President’s aides explain that an across-the-board cut was the only option. Had they singled out for cuts those programs which buy hardware but not social change, the President’s attempt would have been rebuffed and the powers on Capitol Hill would have taken revenge by inflicting still greater damage on the Great Society. In the House, the conservatives were in the saddle. Even the more liberal Senate was a problem. Western senators who could make or break the model cities and rent supplement programs, for example, have more than a glancing interest in spending for hardware, not necessarily military hardware, in connection with programs which bring federal money to their states. The space and Supersonic Transport programs are particular cases in point. (There is an anti-SST underground in the government, but it has not yet found a way to shoot the project down.) This is why there was the anomaly during the year of the President both insisting on his money for the cities and expressing the hope, so as to share the blame for both the deficit and the cuts, that Congress would reduce spending. He was trapped.

Tilting at sacred cows

Every so often some bright new officials pull into town, and set forth to straighten out the mess. Then they learn how hard it is to kill sacred cows, or to nurture what one Cabinet officer refers to as “my little ewe lambs.” The tragedy of what is happening here is that there have been in this government of late some men of unusual talent and the will to rationalize government business, and their efforts had the interest and support of the President. They know that their mission is absolutely necessary. They are aware that the budget is bloated by programs that are of little use. They understand that not only is this a drain on national resources, but also on their own; their energies, as well as our money, are frittered on too many things at once. One of the ablest and most liberal men in the government once admitted privately to having to fight the propensity to blot out the morass of messy old programs and focus attention on “clean” new ones. It is more “fun,” he said, to think about the artificial heart or the antiballistic missile than about urban renewal. The men who evolved urban renewal probably felt the same way.

The drive to root out, or even substantially pare, senseless old programs has just about been given up. But not for want of its having been tried. When in 1965 President Johnson tried to close eleven veterans’ hospitals, the ensuing uproar, it is said, nearly rivaled Vietnam for his attention over a period of months. In the end he was permitted by Congress to close six.

Recollections of this and similar settos, plus the knowledge that the President has, as it were, other wars to fight, have led to new caution before suggesting program reforms. It is difficult for rational men to blink at costly federal subsidies to support middle and upper classes– subsidies for air travel, Coast Guard protection of private boating, the low fees cattlemen pay for the use of public lands. But they eventually learn that the middle class is more extensive than the articulate intellectuals who get upset over this sort of thing, and more articulate than the poor.

The Johnson Administration has had better luck at straightening out the government through structural overhaul — as in the new Housing and Transportation Departments — but lately has been running into trouble here, too. The creation, after much effort, of a new form of government for the District of Columbia was a significant achievement, all the more so because the rest of the country could not care less. But the President’s proposal last year for combining the Departments of Commerce and Labor, a sound way of releasing both from the grip of their constituencies, was sacked by the labor unions. The President has had before him a number of other proposals for overhauling the domestic agencies and the State Department, but it is clear that the time is out of joint.

It is also clear that the government will never be neat and tidy, for no amount of rearranging the organizational boxes can keep up with the complexities and the changing nature of the problems the government has taken on. It simply is not feasible to keep setting up departments having everything to do with poverty or jobs or cities each time that conventional wisdom tells us that that is the problem. There will always be overlap and underlap. One important step for dealing with this has been taken within the White House, where Joseph Califano, the President’s top assistant for domestic matters, has built a staff of bright young men whose responsibility is to deal with issues on a broad problem-oriented or program-oriented basis instead of on a bureaucratic, or agency, basis. Just across the street the Bureau of the Budget, the policy arm of the White House, has recently been reorganized under its remarkable director, Charles Schultze, to provide similar breadth of view. “Califano and Schultze,” said one high Administration official, “are holding the whole rickety business together. Without them it would be a shambles.” Whether this glue will outlast these two able men’s government careers and become institutionalized is a question.

Sobering up

Another sufferer from what has been happening in Washington has been the system of planning-programming-budgeting (PPB) introduced throughout the government a little over two years ago to provide a more rational way of making decisions. PPB, out of the RAND Corporation via the Pentagon, is essentially a method of measuring programs in terms of their costs and their results, and of comparing alternatives in those terms. The idea was that since there will always be a limited number of federal dollars, it would be useful, if not conclusive, to know which dollar expenditure yielded the most results. PPB is still here, and likely to remain so, and has been of some help; but it is being embraced with diminished expectations.

The men from RAND who were dispatched about the government to install PPB now admit with engaging candor to their own naïveté. It used to be thought that PPB would offer the President information about the comparative worth of building dams or training dentists or improving Indian reservations. It can do no such thing. The RAND men underestimated the extent to which the bureaucracies would resist any measurement of their performance, and they overestimated the knowledge the bureaucracies would have about what they were doing. They were stunned to find, for example, that the Office of Education could not tell them how many people had learned to read and write under an adult education program designed to teach people to read and write. They have a heightened comprehension of the difficulties of comparing dams and dentists, and a sobered awareness, based on recent experience, that reason will never supplant politics. No matter what their calculations tell them about which programs make more or less sense, Congress will have the last word.

Tag end

All of this has caused a sharp downturn in the Capital’s morale. It is difficult to sort out all of the factors in the demoralization. The war, of course, is overriding. There is also the constant presence of the uneasy feeling that things in general are out of control. There is the awareness that the good people in government are not being replaced at the rate at which they are leaving, and that the depletion will intensify significantly in the coming year.

This is true throughout the ranks. In the case of the Cabinet, in fact, the issue of personnel was turned on its head by the McNamara affair. Thereafter, it was a matter of the White House reacting defensively to reporters’ questions whether soand-so was leaving; the real question is why more members of a tired seven-year-old Cabinet had not left, or been replaced, before.

A good bit of the demoralization had to do with a facing up to reality. Things look rosier at the beginning, and governments are no exception. This town is now in the tag end of a term of a President who seems immobilized and whom the polls tell us the country does not like. Another wave of able men has tried to improve the government, and though they cannot be said to have failed, they have found out how hard it is. It is virtually un-American to suggest that with reason and willpower, even in better times, we cannot solve all of our problems, and in fairly quick order. But we cannot, and that is a lesson that Washington, like the rest of the country, is taking very hard. —Elizabeth B. Drew