Water Resources
and Issues
We haggled over some other projects, too, and would override the Bureau of
the Budget once in a while, by somebody going to the White House. By going
over their heads, sometimes you'd get the Bureau of the Budget to change their
comments or tone them down or something like that. And this, of course, was
a political matter where the secretary would be the only one that could go to the
White House, or maybe an assistant secretary, not a staff person like me.
That went on once in a while, but I don't know that there was ever any
prevention of a secretary of a department sending a report to Congress as long
as he would send the comments.
By the time I got to the Bureau of the Budget in 1954, they had prohibited the
Bureau of the Budget from saying something was or was not in accordance with
the program of the President, unless it had been taken to the President himself.
Now, of course, with Eisenhower, that meant to Sherman Adams, but still, that
was pretty close, and Sherman Adams would probably mention it to the
President .
The reason that happened was that during the Truman administration, Truman
went out somewhere with Senator Clint Anderson and said, We've got to build
this dam and we're going to put it in next year's budget. And then the Bureau
of the Budget wrote that the project wasn't in accord with the program of the
President. Clint Anderson just went to Truman and raised hell. This was when
Clint was a senator not when he was Secretary of Agriculture. And that's
when, I think, the Bureau of the Budget got its instructions. I never saw it in
writing, but it was understood we could not say something was or was not in
accordance with the program of the President unless he had definitely approved
it.
Let me mention one time when the Eisenhower administration liberalized the
Corps' policy. The Corps, as far back as the beginning of the century, had
what they called a "single user" policy for navigation projects. If you were
going to build a project which was going to be used by just one user-for
example, dredging a
channel, up to Baltimore-and if the only shipping
that needed a
channel, deeper than a
channel, was the
Bethlehem Steel Company, the Bethlehem Steel Company should be taxed by
a local port agency to pay half of the cost of deepening the channel from 40 to
feet.
104
Previous Page
