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More important, under this setup, aid would be handed out on a more hardheaded basis than it is now. Since Harry Truman launched the Point Four program of aid to underdeveloped countries in 1949, every President has argued that aid to struggling nations serves the national interest because, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it recently, "as others grow in economic strength, so the U.S. will continue to prosper."
Pride & Potentates. Sound in conception, the idea has often proved severely flawed in execution. The U.S. now doles out economic aid to 100-odd nations in an often unselective, incoherent program that Congressmen are fond of calling a boondoggle. Instead of paying for development, countless U.S. aid dollars have paid for jet planes to please a foreign potentate, or uneconomic steel mills to satisfy a new nation's sense of pride.
Under the proposed new program, economic aid would be tied more firmly to immediate U.S. policy objectives, and the task of long-range development would be left more to multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, the International Development Association and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Inevitably, this approach raises cries that the U.S. would be buying friends and tying political strings to its aid. Indeed it would, and should—provided the U.S. also makes it clear that its aid will not be limited to such short-range goals.
There are, of course, those who doubt that the Ball committee will accomplish anything of value. "Does the speed with which this Administration is acting indicate that such a body could possibly report back any kind of intelligent opinion and result?" asked Iowa's Republican Senator Bourke Hickenlooper last week. He answered his own question: "Of course it could not."
Such skepticism is not hard to fathom. Past administrations have usually responded to congressional criticism of foreign aid by appointing a committee, reshuffling a few alphabetical agencies, giving the program a different name, and hiring a new boss. In its lifetime, the program has had no fewer than seven aliases and 17 administrators—without ever achieving basic reforms. If such reforms do not come this time, it may mean the end of foreign aid.