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Show IS Congress losing control of the Government'! purse strings? When appointed officials, such as the Postmaster General and the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission can thumb their noses at the power of the Congress, which has the sole authority under the constitution to appropriate the taxpayers' money, and get away with It with the approval In advance, ad-vance, of the president of the United States, It looks very much like the Congressional control is slipping. Mr. Arthur E. Summerfleld, the Postmaster General, flouted both the budget law and the antideflci-ency antideflci-ency law, and forced Congress to its knees to get an additional $41 millions dollars to run his department depart-ment until the end of the fiscal year June 30, 1957. And President Elsenhower told his press conference, confer-ence, he had approved the action In advance. Here's what happened. Last year at budget time, Summerfleld came before the appropriations committee commit-tee and asked for $2,118,000,000 to run his department during the fiscal year 1957 ending June 30. Congress gave him over $3 billion. Under the budget Act this money is allocated by quarters, and it is the duty of the Executive official to spend it that way. But Summer-field Summer-field borrowed from the second quarter for his first quarter and so on through the year. When he saw he would not have enough money left to run out the fourth quarter, he went to Percival Brun-dage, Brun-dage, director of the Budget, for deficiency estimates to bail him out. Brundage time and again told him ne would have to live with the money Congress gave him. finally however, with the President's approval, ap-proval, Brundage yielded and sent rtfleiency estimate of $47 million to the House although Summerfleld still had more than a half billion dollars of his original appropriation. appropria-tion. Congress balked. Summeifl-'ld told them he would shut down the postal service, and did on Friday night April 12, discontinued mail service on Saturday April 13. along with some other functions, for the first time in the history of the nation. na-tion. Not to save Summerfleld, but for the protection of the taxpayers and the mail users and particularly particular-ly for business dependent for its very life on mail service, Congress Con-gress rushed through an appropriation appropri-ation bill giving Summerfleld $41 of the $47 million he had demanded. de-manded. Congressman Clarence Cannon, chairman of the up-to-now powerful power-ful appropriations committee tells it this way: "No one can deny that the Postmaster General knew all along that he was overspending and his continued support of extravagant ex-travagant programs was every month making a deficiency imperative im-perative and inescapable. His continued con-tinued application to the Bureau of the Budget for a deficiency estimate esti-mate is proof positive of th?t. The Postmaster's violation has been deliberate. He knew last July that he didn't have enough money to go through the year at the rate at which he wanted to operate. Ha could have cut down a slight amount then, spread the reduction over the entire year and come out within the money given him. Much has been made of the fact that Summerfleld paid millions of dollars into the treasury. The law requires that every nickel taken in by any department of government go directly into the general treasury. treas-ury. From there it is allocated by Congress for the expenses of running run-ning the departments. |