Snares & Conspiracies

"Killing sparrows," Georgia's Senator Walter George called it scornfully. But Illinois' Paul Douglas and Michigan's Homer Ferguson doggedly went on setting their small snares for the bureaucratic idler and the freehanded spender. In the Senate last week, first one and then the other bobbed up to offer money-saving amendments to the $2,528,000,000 appropriation for the Federal Security Agency and the Labor Department.

There are too many Government automobiles, said Democrat Douglas. He asked that the Senate deny Labor and FSA any additional new cars for fiscal 1952, allow them to replace only half of those that wear out. Savings: 79 cars and $100,000. Republican Ferguson got the Senators to strike out pay for departmental chauffeurs, thus eliminating 53 full-time jobs and 101 part-time.

But what worried the two economizers more was the swollen Government payroll, which has grown at the rate of 1,448 civilians a day since the start of the Korean war. Ferguson offered an amendment cutting FSA-Labor payrolls a flat 10%, warned that he would try to make the same cut in all Government departments. The debate became sharper. New York's Herbert Lehman, a man who is always pleading to save something, pleaded to spare the payrolls of such public health activities as heart disease and cancer research. West Virginia's Matthew Neely gibed that Douglas was "not only a great debater but, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, also a great liberal." Neely, who is an unimpressive Fair Dealer all week, orated that the cut would "have calamitous consequences."

By a vote of 58 to 24, the Senate approved the 10% cut (savings: $11,700,000), later directed its Appropriations Committee to make a similar cut in the $6,235,000,000 Independent Offices bill.

Last week the Senate also:

P: Largely ignored a chance to hear a 60,000-word attack on Secretary of Defense George Marshall by Wisconsin's poison-tipped Joe McCarthy. Despite McCarthy's loud advance promise to expose "a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man," only a dozen Senators were on hand when he began. In familiar fashion, McCarthy twisted quotes, drew unwarranted conclusions from the facts he did get right, accused Marshall of having "made common cause with Stalin" since 1943. By this time most of the gallery had emptied, only two Senators were listening, McCarthy had skipped more than half of his text, and Nebraska's Senator Kenneth Wherry, G.O.P. floor leader, had pronounced it "the kind of speech we need."

The House:

P: Cut out $125 million worth of pork-barrel projects tucked into the rivers & harbors bill by Harry Truman, slapped away the eager hands of members pleading for pet projects, sent the $514,400,000 appropriation to the Senate.

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