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Voice of Prophecy. Ironically, the first President to violate the budget process was one who had been a strong advocate of it. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1913-21), Franklin Roosevelt campaigned in defense of the budget program. In the 1932 campaign he promised to balance the budget. He appointed Lewis Douglas, a conservative Arizona Democrat, as Budget Director.* But Roosevelt's sudden decision to spend the U.S. out of the depression was too much for the budget and Lew Douglas (who stalked out of his job). Finally, Congress just handed Roosevelt some $8 billion and told him to get it spent.
In 1940 old Charlie Dawes—with no inkling of what World War II's demands were about to do to his cherished budget —roared up out of private life to prophesy: "Some day a President, if he is to save the country from bankruptcy and its people from ruin, must make the old fight all over again, and this time the battle will be waged against desperate disadvantages. Against him will be arrayed the largest, strongest and most formidably entrenched army of interested Government spenders, wasters and patronage-dispensing politicians the world has ever known."
Shameful Brawls. Harry Truman tried hard to make the fight and he tried the only way he knew how. He was bedeviled by billions of new commitments—e.g., veterans' benefits, interest on the tremendous new debt—that he could do nothing about. So he slashed billions from the armed services on the valid theory that they had learned to live extravagantly in the lush days of World War II. A slash, his budget people told him, would teach the services to live efficiently; once they had learned austerity again, perhaps they could have some more money.
With hindsight it is easy to see the flaw in this reasoning. Truman needed first to work out a solid concept of what the armed forces were supposed to do in defense of the U.S., and then cut away the nonessentials. In the absence of this concept, the Budget Bureau was literally running military policy. This in turn provoked shameful interservice brawling like the 1949 "Revolt of the
Admirals" against the Air Force's B-36 program. Moreover, Truman made all of his major nonmilitary spending commitments, such as British loans, the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods agreement, without ever consulting the Budget Bureau at all.
Behind the Barricades. The first man Ike sent to Washington, before inauguration, was Detroit Banker Joe Dodge, who was ticketed as the new Budget Director. Dodge looked over the shoulders of the Truman team as they polished up the $78.5 billion budget that Eisenhower would have to live with in fiscal 1954 (July i, 1953 to June 30, 1954). Before the year was over, Ike abandoned what he called "feast or famine" military policy in favor of the "long haul," with its accent on nuclear air power. Dodge, for his part, pruned $10.8 billion from the Truman budget, worked out a $65.5 billion budget for fiscal 1955, then went home to Detroit,* turning the job over to the man who had been his deputy for a year, Rowland Hughes.