‘Watchdogs’ for Congress

December 6, 1954

Last week I pointed out the constant tendency of our foreign giveaway schemes to grow rather than to taper off. This tendency to expand is certainly not the result of any demonstrated efficacy in these schemes. Our billions of economic aid have not led Europe or Asia to abandon harmful governmental controls. On the contrary, they have subsidized the prolongation of such controls. There is no clear evidence, in spite of constant reiteration, that the postwar recovery of Europe has been any faster than it would have been without our aid. On the contrary, the most dramatic recovery has been made in West Germany, which was not receiving our aid. Instead of buying gratitude and dependable allies, our handouts have been accompanied by a steady loss of American prestige abroad.

And wherever our government-aid program has entered we have reduced the incentive to self-help. As long as foreign governments are assured of funds from the American Government, they will not bother to make the reforms necessary to attract private capital. Yet only these reforms can bring lasting prosperity.

Individual congressmen, certainly, are not unaware of these disappointing or harmful qualities of our foreign-aid program. But when the time comes for our foreign-aid agencies to ask Congress for a new annual appropriation, these agencies let loose a tidal wave of propaganda that overwhelms and drowns out the criticisms and misgivings of disinterested individuals. Within these agencies are hundreds of bureaucrats whose very jobs depend upon the continuance or enlargement of the foreign-aid program. Many of these bureaucrats become full-time propagandists for it. Moreover, often the officials appointed to direct the U.S. aid program abroad see themselves as fairy godmothers and forget that their easy benefactions are at the expense of the American taxpayer.

In addition, committees in Congress that have jurisdiction over foreign aid, the chairmen of which usually wish to carry out the Administration’s program, call as witnesses mainly the officials of the foreign-aid agencies themselves. The minority members of the committees, or those who have misgivings about the program, have no equal means of obtaining the factual information, or the analysis, to combat the government agency’s expansion arguments. A congressman is compelled to make decisions on a hundred different issues. He seldom has time to keep fully abreast even of the particular issues that he must follow as a committee member. And so Congressional decisions usually follow, by a sort of default, the recommendations of executive agencies that are clearly not disinterested.

Yet this situation could be remedied, at least in large part, if Congress were to appoint a committee of private citizens, outstanding authorities on the subject, whose sole function it would be to study the activities of the foreign-aid agencies and report to Congress their own appraisal of the annual recommendations for new appropriations and activities made by these agencies to Congress. Congress would then be assured of a systematic, authoritative, and relatively disinterested judgment of the foreign-aid agency’s proposals.

A committee of the type proposed would preferably be one whose members served without salary. But it should be authorized to employ one or two full-time salaried researchers and a modest secretarial staff. This private committee should be as far as possible nonpartisan. Such an objective could probably best be assured by allowing the majority and minority members of the appropriate Congressional committees to select the makeup of the private advisory committee in the same ratio as the committee balance within Congress itself.

In fact, if a similar private year-round “watchdog” committee were appointed by Congress to study the work and recommendations of, say, every Federal agency that spent more than $100 million a year, the effect would be to restrain the present alarming expansion of spending programs and to save the taxpayers billions of dollars a year.