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DEFENSE, cut back to $76.4 billion this year, would inch up to $77.5 billion for fiscal 1972. The new money would go mainly for pay increases designed to make military service more attractive, thus helping to end draft calls by mid-1973, and for moving ahead with hardware projects delayed by the high costs of Viet Nam. Among them: new ships and underwater missiles for the Navy and the Air Force's B-1 bomber.
SPACE would drop a bit, with a small decrease in NASA's outlays. The Apollo program would be cut from $1.2 billion to $843 million.
PEACE CORPS funds would slip from $87.9 million to $72.9 million.
ENVIRONMENT would get a boost by way of authorization for a threeyear, $6 billion program of aid to local governments for sewage-treatment plants.
THE SST has $281 million earmarked for outlays on further development, but there are already hints that the Administration will not press very hard for it.
SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT will get a big 7.6% increase, to $16.7 billion, including the $100 million for cancer research that Nixon proposed in his State of the Union message. Other new funds would go mainly for studies in health, pollution, energy resources, crime and transportation. The Administration has been criticized for cutting down on R & D funds.
MASS TRANSIT is supposed to benefit from a $10 billion, twelve-year program of expansion and improvement, not all of it yet written into law. If the funds are parceled out year by year in relatively small amounts, as they would be under revenue sharing, no city will be likely to get enough to do much good. Major new systems, like California's San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit network, require major financing commitments at the outset.
Nixon's 1972 budget calls for no new taxes, except for the Social Security increases. That does not mean, however, that the President has no long-term plans for tinkering with the federal tax structure. At a Senate hearing last week Nixon's Treasury Secretary-designate, John Connally, revealed that the President has charged him with a full-dress review of the whole revenue structure. One major focus of Connally's studies will be the value-added tax, a kind of national sales levy widely used in Western Europe. That, Connally said, might well replace some of the existing income sources.
Many of the increases in Nixon's 1972 budget, notably for social welfare, are what his budget men call "the un-controllables"—outlays determined by formulas fixed in law. These can be treacherous: federal unemployment funds were originally budgeted at $3.2 billion for the current fiscal year, but because of the lagging economy, the Office of Management and Budget expects the total will be $5.9 billion. In fact, Nixon's fiscal-1971 budget got altogether out of hand, mainly because the economy did not revive on schedule.
Possibly because he recognized that his 1971 plans were going awry, Nixon involved himself earlier and deeper in the planning for fiscal 1972. Where a year ago he put in only 40 or 50 hours on the budget, this time he immersed himself deeply. The tedious process of budget making has no special fascination for Nixon, but he believes that the budget is the die with which to make his presidential stamp on the U.S.