been mentioned by the New York Times and Joseph Alsop as if Congress had been crying for gunboats and Jefferson stubbornly refused to buy them and it has assumed the standing of instant history.

Instant history is indeed what it is; and as usual somewhat closer investigation casts great doubt on its relevance. In his recent authoritative biography of Jefferson, Merrill D. Peterson tells the tale of the gunboat flap and reminds us that Jefferson was an enthusiast about gunboats because they seemed to him a cheaper defense of American waterways than fixed port fortifications or bigger battleships favored by the "big navy" advocates of the day.

The use of a . . . "mosquito fleet" in harbor defense (writes Peterson) had been first suggested in the crisis of the closure of New Orleans in 1802. The crisis passed before the law of Congress authorizing the construction of 15 gunboats could be implemented and the administration deferred the project until various models of these small vessels could be studied.

Jefferson, that is, did not defy the will of Congress outright; indeed, in the face of Federalist jeers and skepticism he went right on with the gunboat project. "When he left office," Peterson writes, "approximately 180 gunboats were stationed in American ports; if he had had his way there would have been at least 300."

It is true, as Mr. Nixon implied last week, that Presidents and Congress quarreled throughout the Jefferson and Jackson eras over the control of the purse. strings. But Leonard White's great administrative histories of those years make it "absolutely clear," in Mr. Nixon's phrase, that no President asserted, and no Congress conceded, a full presidential right to impound funds. The real fuss was over related but different questions; the degree of itemized appropriation by Congress; the transfer of surpluses from one account to another: reversions; the incurment of "deficiencies" (or deficits) which Congress would later have to make up. According to Professor White:

Congress was thus engaged. . . in a long battle to realize its full control of federal expenditures. Its principle of action was prescribed in the Constitution and was stated forcefully by Representative John Sherman . . . ‘that a specific sum shall be appropriated by law originating in this House, for a specific purpose, and within a given fiscal year. It is the duty of the executive to use that sum, and no more, especially for that purpose, and no other, and within the time fixed.' Congress never succeeded in making such a rigid interpretation of the Constitution a reality. It did not appropriate specific funds for the armed services; it regularly held appropriations open for two years: it did not punish executives for using more money than had been appropriated nor for requiring more time than had been planned.

What is novel about the current impoundment flap is that it exactly reverses the old pattern. Ever since the Stuart kings ran into trouble with parliament by taxing England without its consent, the usual source of legislative jealousy has been executives trying to spend more than they were given to spend, or to spend it in ways not specifically stated. Senator Ervin and other critics of impoundment argue that since the President clearly cannot spend money not appropriated, the converse is true: What Congress directs him to spend must be spent because a President is obliged by his oath to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

But President Nixon defies this logic. He is, as we have previously noted. seeking a virtual counter-revolution in American governing habits: he seeks to decentralize spending and power to local government. And since the Democratic Congress has resisted this aim, he asserts for tactical reasons a power to reduce and divert congressional appropriations for his own reasons; cutting and starving many existing programs so that they will vanish or wither, while funneling un-earmarked funds by "revenue sharing" to the states and localities. This practice raises all kinds of critical questions, apart from the right to impound. It is a direct challenge to the authority of Congress and its traditional power of the pursestrings. Even if the right to impound were as "absolutely clear” as Mr. Nixon claims. Mr. Nixon could not be conceded easy victory. Congressional acceptance of the Nixon doctrine would make the President a superlegislator, warmed with an assumed but not granted item veto, superior in authority to the 535 elected representatives of the people. And our brief look at the history of the matter suggests that the power Mr. Nixon claims is far from "clear,” and in any case certainly not “absolutely clear."

[From the Washington Post, Feb. 10, 1973]

BROYHILL, HOGAN ACT TO SAVE IMPACT AID

(By Martha Hamilton)

Reps. Joel T. Broyhill (R-Va.) and Larry Hogan (R-Md.) said yesterday they will introduce legislation to save federal impact aid to education from President Nixon's budget-cutting and to put it on a new, less vulnerable basis.

The President's recently released budget for fiscal 1974 eliminates a major share of the payment the Federal government makes to school districts in lieu of taxes on federal property located there-funds that amount to about $34 million for Washington area schools.

The Broyhill-Hogan measure would set a new formula for the payment of impact aid and would require the administrator of the General Services Administration to set the level of payment, instead of leaving it up to Congress and the President each year.

Every president since Harry S. Truman has tried to modify or cut back the program that operates in every state and in 385 congressional districts, but every congress has defeated the effort.

This year, though, chances of avoiding a cut in impact aid are slimmer, according to sources on Capitol Hill.

Under present procedures, Congress must appropriate funds for impact aid each fiscal year based on a formula that multiplies the number of students that federal installations add to an area by the average per pupil expenditure. The appropriation may be vetoed by the President.

The Broyhill-Hogan measure would make the payment automatic, based on an amount that the General Services administrator determines to be fairly equivalent to the taxes the local government would have received if federally owned property were privately owned instead.

It would require no payment for parkland or unused federally owned land, concentrating instead on "federal operations on which people are employed and which are located in the communities for the benefit of the federal government and not of the local residents," Broyhill and Hogan said in a letter describing the bill to other congressmen.

A new formula and putting the payment in the hands of the GSA would "protect the communities who are victims of federal impact without the on-again-offagain threat of the loss of revenue because of confusion as to the purpose of this payment," they said.

Opponents of the impact aid program frequently point out that the money aids affluent counties as well as counties in financial need. Critics fail to realize that the payment is simply the payment of a legitimate debt without regard to need, the congressmen said.

[From Philadelphia Bulletin, Feb. 2, 1973]

BULLETIN NEWS ANALYSIS-NIXON BUDGET SETS STAGE FOR BATTLE; CONGRESS FIRES OPENING SALVOS

(By Linda J. Heffner)

Washington-The stage was set for a long and bitter battle this week when President Nixon turned over his fiscal 1974 budget to a Congress awestruck and angered over his axing of many sensitive social welfare programs.

Now that American involvement in the Indochina war appears to be ending, the controversial issue of domestic spending is undoubtedly going to dominate the relationship between the White House and Capitol Hill for a long time.

"Believe me, this is going to go down in the history books as one of the biggest battles ever mounted between a President and his Congress," one Democratic senator said shortly after the budget was delivered.

TAX WARNING

What has angered many Democrats is the way the President has put the spending burden squarely on Congress, warning of higher taxes and higher interest rates if his budget is exceeded.

This has worried at least one liberal senator who is concerned that this will temper some congressional criticism, particularly in the House where members must face reelection every two years.

"Let's face it," he told reporters after a hearing this week, "it's nice to be able to battle for the programs you believe in, but it's not so nice if you're going to get blamed for raising taxes."

What has hit hardest is the elimination or drastic reduction of programs that flourished under the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Some congressional leaders took it even further back.

House Speaker Carl Albert (D-Okla) angrily claimed that the Nixon budget was "nothing less than the systematic dismantling and destruction of the great social programs and the great precedents of humanitarian government inaugurated by Franklin D. Roosevelt and advanced and enlarged by every Democratic President since then."

The obvious targets for the Democrats are the budget's abolition of the Office of Economic Opportunity, its phasing out of the public service employment program and its freeze on new housing funds.

OTHER TARGETS

Other items that will cause the most problems in Congress are the gudget proposals for:

-The dispersion of antipoverty programs into other agencies with many being phased out, including the key element in former President Johnson's war on poverty-the Community Action Program.

-Raising the costs of Medicare so hospital patients will pay more than double what they now pay for the average visit.

-The dismantling of most elementary and secondary education programs and their replacement with revenue-sharing funds earmarked for education.

-Severe cuts in rural housing subsidies and other Agriculture Department spending, including the special school milk program.

OPENING SKIRMISH

Each doomed program has its special interest group in Congress, and many legislators are waiting to cause Mr. Nixon some bad budget frouble.

While the budget controversy was going on, Congress, in fact, began the first battle in the spending war.

Two Senate subcommittees, one chaired by Sam Ervin, (D-NC) and the other by Lawton Chiles (D-Fla), began joint hearings on an Ervin bill to limit the President's power to impound appropriated funds.

NIXON VOW

While the senators collected favorable testimony from Democratic colleagues such as Hubert H. Humphrey (Minn), Edmund S. Muskie (Maine) and Thomas F. Eagleton (Mo), as well as consumer advocate Ralph Nader, Mr. Nixon girded for battle down on Pennsylvania ave.

At a surprise press conference, the President insisted he would continue to impound funds and that it was his constitutional right.

[From Washington Weekly, vol. II, No. 31 (1972)]

BARE BONES BUDGET: STORY OF BOMBS VS. BOOKS

(By Ron Hendren)

Washington-With the unveiling of President Nixon's "bare bones budget" as Senate Minority Leader Hugh D. Scott (R-Pa.) termed it, the stage has been set for one of the most historic and far-reaching confrontations between Congress and the White House in recent years.

Eight pages of the President's budget message were filled with the names of programs he plans to reduce or terminate. They read like a history book of Democratic administrations since Roosevelt, for the programs Mr. Nixon plans to scrap are primarily legacies from the New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier and Great Society of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson.

According to the President's view, people programs (such as federal grants to elementary and secondary school libraries) should not be funded by federal tax dollars. As these programs are phased out, his projected savings grow from $6.5 billion in the current fiscal year to $21.7 billion in Fiscal Year 1975.

At the same time, however, the President has called for an increase of $4.7 billion in the Defense Department budget, an amount which exceeds the total budget of the Office of Education.

While Mr. Nixon's message of frugality was delivered in the spirit of holding down taxes, interest rates and inflation-goals to which every politican and citizen aspire that spirit was tainted with the harsh reality that Mr. Nixon, places domestic problems low on his totem pole of priorities.

A keystone in the White House strategy for winning the budget fight will be to secure the support of the nation's governors, mayors and other state and local elected officials. The golden carrot on the end of Mr. Nixon's stick is the promise of greatly increased revenue sharing, and already some of the country's most influential mayors are publicly licking their chops. The President apparently believes that with their support and by holding down taxes, he will be able to carry the day against Congress and the special interest groups which benefit from federal domestic spending.

What Congress will attempt to show, on the other hand, is that those special interest groups include the poor, the elderly, children in public schools—indeed, nearly all Americans. For example, the proposal to phase out library grants has already been termed "a disaster for our schools, which would set elementary library. . . development back ten years," by the president of the American Association of School Librarians. In plainer language, those grants have for years meant that children and adults in communities all across the land have had ready access to books. Without the aid, the story will rapidly change. Without books, what happens to education?

And federal grants to libraries represent just one of the myriad of programs which the President proposes to end. Whether he will be able to have it his way depends in large part upon the determination of Congress to fulfill its Constitutional mandate to allocate federal funds. And if Congress' will in the months ahead is no stronger than it has been in the past, the picture will be grim indeed.

[From the Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va., Feb. 4, 1973]

THEY'RE TRYING TO OPEN THE MONEY TAP

(By Don Hill)

WASHINGTON. ". . . We have nothing to do with policy. Much as we love the President, if Congress, in its omnipotence over appropriations and in accordance with its authority over policy, passed a law that garbage should be put on the White House steps, it would be our regrettable duty as a bureau, in an impartial, nonpolitical, and nonpartisan way to advise the executive and Congress as to how the largest amount of garbage could be spread in the most expeditious and economical manner."-Charles G. Dawes, first director of the Bureau of the Budget, now the Office of Management and Budget. 1921.

"There seems to me some irony in observing that one result of the water pol lution (funds) impoundment is to impose a three-year delay-for want of $83.7 million made available by the Congress on the expansion and improvement of the Blue Plains sewage treatment facility for the Potomac River... had the Congress wished to deposit garbage on the White House steps, Mr. Chairman, it could not have done so more efficiently than the President has managed to do on his own."-Sen. Edmund S. Muskie, D-Me., chairman of the Senate Public Works Air and Water Pollution Subcommittee, 1973.

Years ago, in Portsmouth, a witness in an annexation case was defending the city's dumping of live sewage into the Elizabeth River during repairs on the sewage treatment plant.

"But it didn't smell," said the witness.

The cross-examining lawyer, then Norfolk State Sen. Edward L. Breeden Jr., chuckled wryly and dismissed the witness. "You-all must have a different kind of sewage over here in Portsmouth than we have in Norfolk," he said.

That was in the day when you could still get a chuckle, even a wry one, out of water pollution. Even then, the nation's cities and factories were dumping billions of gallons of poison a year into the waters upon which their lives depended. It's no laughing matter any more, if it ever was. Scientists, environmentalists, and water engineers have warned that America is fast running out of water-to drink, to bathe in, and to cleanse away the vitriol which technology smears about us everywhere.

In 1972, Congress took the warnings seriously enough to establish as a national goal that "the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters be eliminated by 1985." And, untypically, Congress didn't just talk. It authorized expenditures of $18 billion for fiscal years 1973 through 1975.

President Nixon denounced the act as inflationary. He vetoed it, and he said, "even if this bill is rammed into law over the better judgment of the executiveeven if the Congress defaults its obligations to the taxpayers-I shall not default mine."

Congress overrode the veto by a vote in the House of 247-23 and in the Senate of 52-12. Despite this overwhelming mandate by the only branch of government permitted by the Constitution to make laws, President Nixon has announced he will refuse to implement most of the Water Pollution Control Act.

This means a cut to each of the states which would have received the money to build or upgrade sewage treatment plants. In Virginia, it will mean a reduction of $175 million and in North Carolina of $50 million. In most places, unlike Portsmouth, that means something's going to smell.

The doctrine under which President Nixon has moved to defy Congress is one which presidents since Thomas Jefferson have called "executive impoundment of funds." But this is one area in which a Nixon doctrine has gone farther than any other president's. In fiscal year 1972, alone he "impounded" $12 billion.

Last month, a Richmond based organization called Campaign Clean Water joined with lawyers from Ralph Nader's public citizen organization in Washington to sue the Nixon administration. Campaign Clean Water asked U.S. District Court in Richmond to order the "law and order" administration to obey the law and the constitution and to release Virginia's money.

The Virginians thus joined some potent allies. The Missouri State Highway Commission is presently in the U.S. Court of Appeals seeking highway money it has been given by law and refused by the Nixon administration. North Carolina Sen. Sam Ervin and all the Democratic leaders of the Senate have filed a brief in support of Missouri. Ervin last week also conducted a series of hearings on his bill to control attempts by Nixon and future presidents to impound funds. The bill has been cosponsored by 51 others senators.

The Ervin hearings attracted press and TV coverage. The reports showed Edmund Muskie inveighing against the administration. They showed Hubert Humphrey pounding dramatically on blue and yellow copies of the fiscal year 1974 federal budget.

But they failed to rouse great public interest in the doctrine of executive impoundment, an esoteric political science question after all, or in the danger that the executive branch may be swooshing up power constitutionally intended for Congress, the people's branch.

The issue became easy to grasp at times during the hearings, however. Like when a North Carolina building contractor demonstrated how construction funds, impounded for "economy reasons," actually ended up costing the nation more. Or when Edmund Muskie noted that impounding Medicare funds doesn't economize on medical care, just shifts the cost to the feeble shoulders of the elderly.

But perhaps the easiest impoundment issue of all to understand is the one involving the Water Pollution Control Act.

That's the one after all that brings the stench of presidential usurpation of authority to the doorstep of us all.

[From the Evening Star and Daily News, Washington, D.C., January 1973]
NIXON SAYS RIGHT TO IMPOUND BASED ON U.S. CONSTITUTION

(By Garnett D. Horner)

President Nixon insists that his right not to spend money voted by Congress "is absolutely clear."

He told a press conference yesterday that Congress must decide whether it wants to "raise taxes in order to spend more" or to trim spending, as he is trying to do.

Declaring that he is going to stand for the "general interest" of the country rather than the "special interests" which congressmen represent. he defined the general interest as: "Don't break the family budget by raising taxes or raising prices."

Asked how he responds to criticism that his impoundment of funds abrogates power that the Constitution gave to Congress. Nixon said "the same way that Jefferson did, and Jackson did and Truman did.”