No Escalation

One war that seems to be in little danger of escalating is Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty. Last year, despite bloated Democratic majorities in Congress, $138 million was sweated out of the President's $1.75 billion request. This year, with 47 more Republicans in the House--most of them vociferously critical of the program's waste and mismanagement--even deeper cuts are expected to be made in the President's $2.06 billion request. Moreover, the war's command post, the Office of Economic Opportunity, will be lucky to escape in one piece.

Opportunity Crusade. Under a G.O.P. antipoverty plan unveiled last week, appropriations would total $315 million less than Johnson wants. The OEO would simply be abolished and all its programs--the Job Corps, VISTA (the domestic Peace Corps), Head Start and the Community Action Program--transferred to other federal agencies, mostly John Gardner's Department of Health, Education and Welfare. As for Antipoverty Czar R. Sargent Shriver, he might, quipped Minnesota's Republican Congressman Albert Quie, become an assistant secretary under Gardner. "Shriver and OEO," said Quie, "have failed." Unless the program is overhauled, echoed New York Republican Charles Goodell, who joined Quie in offering the Republicans' "Opportunity Crusade" as an alternative to the Demo cratic program, "Congress may well kill off the whole thing."

Seeking to blunt Republican criticism, the Administration weighed in last week with recommendations for some major changes in the basic antipoverty law. Among them: Screening of Job Corps applicants will be tightened to keep out the troublemakers who have plagued some of the 120 communities with corps centers; mayors and businessmen will be assured by law of representation on local antipoverty boards, assuaging local fears that boards controlled by the poor might get out of hand; poverty workers will be barred from using federal funds for "illegal picketing or demonstrations" or other partisan politicking.

Obvious Need. OEO officials believe that the changes--particularly the one limiting participating of the poor on local boards--will reduce the program's value as a tool for "trying, testing and learning." Even so, they are unlikely to silence opposition from Republicans or Southern Democrats who accuse poverty agencies of fomenting local unrest. When Pennsylvania's Democratic Senator Joseph Clark and three members of his poverty subcommittee began hearings in Mississippi last week, for example, Governor Paul Johnson accused "the four socialist-minded Senators" of fostering strife and "pitting the haves against the have-nots."

Inasmuch as Clark's companions included not only New York's liberal Senators, Democrat Robert Kennedy and Republican Jacob Javits, but also California's conservative Republican George Murphy, the Governor's description bordered on the ludicrous. Murphy, for one, found nothing to laugh about during a daylong tour of the Delta's impoverished Negro communities. Said he, visibly moved by what he had seen: "I didn't know we'd be dealing with starving people." Such testimony--and such obvious need--will unquestionably save most poverty programs. Whether it will save the OEO itself is another question.

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