A Hard Look

The foreign aid bill that finally limped through the Senate last week took the worst beating in the 17-year history of the program. But it was nothing compared to what will surely happen next time unless the Johnson Administration makes wholesale changes in the shape, size and aims of the program. Even Arkansas' Senator J. William Fulbright, long a staunch friend to foreign aid, has served warning. The only reason that the Foreign Relations Committee, which he chairs, did not recommend an end to foreign aid was, he said, the expectation that the next program will be "revamped in major respects."

Hurried & Worried. With such sentiments in mind, and with President Johnson's budget message due this month, the Administration is engaged in a hurried, worried attempt to see just what changes it can make. Three weeks ago, Johnson set up an eight-man committee headed by Under Secretary of State George W. Ball and urged it to "seek all possible means to achieve economies and efficiencies" in the aid program. Next week the Ball committee is due to report back to him. Said one member: "We are not only discussing structural changes within the Agency for International Development; we are looking at the whole concept of aid--from slight, conservative changes to sweeping, drastic measures."

With men like AID Administrator David Bell and former World Bank President Eugene Black among its members, there is little doubt that the committee will endorse the basic concept of foreign aid. But what form the new program will take is another matter.

One possibility, suggested by Fulbright and tentatively endorsed last month by Johnson, would be to split up aid into two separate budgets. Military aid, which has accounted for a full third of the $100 billion spent since the end of World War II, would go into the Defense Department's budget. Economic aid would be handled in a separate budget all its own, and would thus present a smaller target to congressional sharpshooters. But unless this proposal included some machinery for a closer scrutiny of aid spending, Congress might reject it as a mere rejiggering of figures without any real reforms.

Creating a Precedent. Even more drastic is a plan, said to be favored by George Ball, that would abolish AID altogether. Under this program, military aid would be placed in the hands of the Pentagon. But, in addition, an Under Secretary of State for Economic Development would be named to coordinate all economic aid with the help of a small staff. Decisions on aid programs would be handled solely by the existing Assistant Secretary of State for each geographical region instead of jointly with a regional AID administrator. Except where the State Department lacked the personnel to handle the job, AID's worldwide staff of 12,000 would be disbanded. Only last month, the President created a precedent for just such a reorganization by putting the $20 billion Alliance for Progress under the control of Thomas Mann, newly appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs.

More important, under this setup, aid would be handed out on a more hardheaded basis than it is now. Since Harry Truman launched the Point Four program of aid to underdeveloped countries in 1949, every President has argued that aid to struggling nations serves the national interest because, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it recently, "as others grow in economic strength, so the U.S. will continue to prosper."

Pride & Potentates. Sound in conception, the idea has often proved severely flawed in execution. The U.S. now doles out economic aid to 100-odd nations in an often unselective, incoherent program that Congressmen are fond of calling a boondoggle. Instead of paying for development, countless U.S. aid dollars have paid for jet planes to please a foreign potentate, or uneconomic steel mills to satisfy a new nation's sense of pride.

Under the proposed new program, economic aid would be tied more firmly to immediate U.S. policy objectives, and the task of long-range development would be left more to multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, the International Development Association and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Inevitably, this approach raises cries that the U.S. would be buying friends and tying political strings to its aid. Indeed it would, and should--provided the U.S. also makes it clear that its aid will not be limited to such short-range goals.

There are, of course, those who doubt that the Ball committee will accomplish anything of value. "Does the speed with which this Administration is acting indicate that such a body could possibly report back any kind of intelligent opinion and result?" asked Iowa's Republican Senator Bourke Hickenlooper last week. He answered his own question: "Of course it could not."

Such skepticism is not hard to fathom. Past administrations have usually responded to congressional criticism of foreign aid by appointing a committee, reshuffling a few alphabetical agencies, giving the program a different name, and hiring a new boss. In its lifetime, the program has had no fewer than seven aliases and 17 administrators--without ever achieving basic reforms. If such reforms do not come this time, it may mean the end of foreign aid.

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