Drive Against the Deficit

President Eisenhower briefly eyed the total figure of preliminary budget requests for 1960, handed to him at a recent Cabinet meeting by Administration Department heads. Said he, flatly: "I don't accept this." Last week, following up his refusal, he issued a memorandum ordering all department and agency heads to stay strictly within the budget limits set by tightfisted, hard-minded Budget Director Maurice Stans. The President, who meant to work at enforcing his order, had set himself to one of the toughest jobs of his White House life: a no-holds-barred effort to present to the 86th Congress a balanced budget after a crisis-ridden year in which the U.S. is going about $10 billion into the red.

The President's staunchest allies in the fight against red ink are Budget Director Stans and Treasury Secretary Robert B. Anderson, who has taken to arriving at his desk by 7:30 a.m., staying until 7 p.m. or later, and was recently heard to mutter wearily: "Somebody has got to invent a 48-hour day." Anderson and Stans hope to hold down fiscal 1960 spending (beginning next July) by cutting into the scandalous $7 billion-a-year cost of farm programs, switching to the states some federal responsibilities for slum clearance, aid to the aged etc. But it is in the $40 billion defense budget that the real cuts must be made if the Administration is to approach its budget goals. To that end. President Eisenhower has ordered that a decision, delayed for many months, be made at last between the Air Force IRBM Thor and its Army rival Jupiter.

It takes dedication and determination to strive for a balanced budget in late autumn 1958. In a nation that only lately climbed out of a steep recession, and that has elected a Congress likely to be less cost-conscious than its predecessor, the goal seems almost unattainable. Even if the Administration is right in its prediction that the economy's upward surge will push federal income in fiscal 1960 to an alltime record of $75 billion, a deficit of more than $4 billion still looms if spending stays at this year's level of $79.2 billion. And the pressures on spending are upward, not downward: the fantastically elaborate military hardware of the missile age keeps getting costlier, each international crisis makes defense cuts harder, and demand for Government services keeps spreading.

But the real meaning of the Administration's effort to balance the budget lies not in whether or not it actually succeeds. A balanced budget, in and of itself, is no cureall. It is, instead, the principles of government that lie behind the attempt, the refusal to accept inflation as inevitable and budgetary elephantiasis as incurable, that make the effort of deep and lasting importance.

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