Bogged in Budget

Since the adoption of the 20th Amendment to the Constitution, the President of the U. S. is assured of at least one Christmas gift: a headache. The 20th Amendment set the annual opening of Congress on Jan. 3. and unless a President is more forehanded with his work than Franklin Roosevelt, Christmas inevitably finds him bogged in the Budget.

The maker of the world's most superior mouse trap never had a more worn path to his door than that which Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, Budget Director Bell, Public Works Administrator Ickes, Works Progress Administrator Hopkins, Resettler Tugwell and CCChief Robert Fechner beat to the door of the Executive Office last week. Day after day they went, conferred, departed uttering only Delphic nothings to the Press.

For all practical purposes all the elements of the budget, except one, had long been disposed of. The requirements of all the regular Government departments had been settled before the President finished his Thanksgiving visit to Warm Springs. The Treasury's guess as to the amount of revenue available in fiscal 1937 had been filed away as a State secret. All that remained was to settle how much money Franklin Roosevelt would ask. not for the Government, but for the unemployed.

Knowing that he wanted to surprise the country with a deficit that would look like a trifling puddle beside the oceans of red ink spread on the Government's books during the past two years, many a Washington wiseacre believed the President would profess uncertainty of Relief needs. He might, for example, ask only a billion for Relief. This would lend the budget a cheerful aspect that would last through next year's elections, after which another Congress could appropriate another billion.

If such thoughts coursed through Franklin Roosevelt's busy brain, they were secret. Only two concrete hints reached the Press last week. One came from CCC Director Fechner. He admitted that the Administration plans to cut the CCC enrollment from 460,000 to 300,000 to reduce the number of CCCamps from 2,248 to 1,456. The other hint came from President Roosevelt himself. A newshawk asked at a Press conference whether he planned to allocate $3,000,000 for work on the Florida Ship Canal. Funds for such large projects, said the President, would be included in a Public Works Bill to be sent to Congress, a bill that would carry appropriations of not more than $500,000,000.

Taking the hint, the Press jumped to the conclusion that big Federal works, such as the Florida Canal and Maine's Passamaquoddy Dam. would be separated from Relief projects, brought inside the regular budget. Right or wrong in its guess, the Press was brought up short on a matter of terminology. To a newshawk who asked if the "double-budget system" would be continued, the budget-burdened President gave an irate answer: There never had been any double budget. Regular and Relief expenditures were kept separate for the same reason that the War and Navy Departments were kept separate in money matters.

P:In the general public interest, the President: 1) told delegates to a great Accident Prevention Conference, called by Secretary of Commerce Roper, that the U. S. would do whatever the Conference figured the U. S. could do to prevent accidents: 2) called a North American Wild Life Conference.

P:Never have the daily life and domestic arrangements of any Presidential family been so fully explained to the public as Mrs. Roosevelt has explained them. She has arranged to write for United Features, beginning with the New Year, a feature called "My Day" in which she will report her daily doings "serious or humorous, important or trivial." Last week she undertook to give her female Press conference a first-hand view of living conditions in the White House by escorting newswomen through the service quarters, rebuilt as a WPA project last summer. The tour took nearly an hour. Proudly exhibited were: 1) the servants' dining room, radiant in white and pale green, containing a long table set with 14 places: 2) the fireplace where Presidents had their food cooked a century ago; 3) the office of White House Bookkeeper Henry F. Nesbitt who records all parcels received at the White House, keeps an eye on the silver vault: 4) the room where Mrs. Nesbitt, the housekeeper, stores the State table linen in special cupboards, where she interviews tradesmen; 5) the office of Captain Ross T. Mclntire, White House physician, who is really not a servant; 6) the storeroom with shelves full of canned and bottled goods and one corner given over to pheasants, ducks, grouse, woodcock, quail and other game hanging until they become "high" enough for the President's taste (see cut. p. 5); 7) a ''salad room" lined with cupboards and refrigerators and equipped with four chromium chairs around a modernistic table.

In the kitchen itself one corner is devoted to pastry, with a large electric dough mixer and a row of enormous cans on casters labelled "Bread Flour," "Cake Flour," "Whole Wheat Flour." Along one side stands the new, 24-ft. electric stove with two ovens, each capable of baking 40 loaves of bread or roasting 125 lb. of beef at a time. Mrs. Roosevelt was particularly pleased with a steam table called a "Thermotainer," as big as an emperor's sarcophagus, for keeping food hot. Another Thermotainer resembling a heavy, chromium riling cabinet on small balloon tires is used to deliver the President's desk lunch to him in his office.

"We still don't always have things hot when served," said Mrs. Roosevelt wistfully, "but we hope that the new devices will take care of that when the kitchen staff learns how to operate them."

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