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Show More Shared Experiences Needed Presidential Commission Assures Incisive Challenger Assessment Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon and an accomplished test pilot and aeronautical engineer, as vice chairman, the commission includes representatives from academe, the military, industry, business and journalism. white wash. Besides Mr. Rogers and Mr. ArmOur initial reactions that the strong, the members are: White House might be trying to politiBrig. Gen. Charles (Chuck) cize the investigation of the disaster Yeager, USAF, retired, a former test that took the lives of the seven mem- pilot and member of the National bers of the Challenger crew, or that it Commission on Space; was directing an undeserved kick in Dr. Sally K. Ride, an astronaut the pants at the integrity and dedica- and who was the first Ameriphysicist tion of engineers and scientists at the woman in space; can National Aeronautics and Space AdDr. Albert D. Wheelon, a physiwere unfair and grossministration and senior vice president of the cist ly incorrect. Aircraft Co. who also is a White House spokesman Larry Hughes of member the Presidents Foreign InSpeakes put things in their proper con- telligence Advisory Board; text, noting that the president believes Robert W. Rummel, former vice NASA officials have conducted themselves throughout the space pro- president of Trans World Airlines and an aerospace engineer who heads a gram with the utmost of professionalconcern called Robert W. ism, and they have continued to do so Mesa, Ariz., Rummel Associates; since last Tuesdays accident. Dr. Arthur B.C. Walker Jr., But this, he said, will give the American people the opportunity to professor of applied physics at Stanknow that an outside group of experts, ford University; Richard P. Feynman, a Nobel distinguished Americans, who have no ax to grind either way, have come in laureate and professor of theoretical to review the findings of NASA and to physics at the California Institute of request additional data and report to Technology; him. Eugene E. Covert, professor of at the Massachusetts Inaeronautics announcements Tuesdays explain, conincidentally, why the interim NASA stitute of Technology and a NASA on rocket engines; investigation board was so named. sultant B. Hotz, former editor of of Robert an the Obviously, concept independent investigative panel began to be Aviation Week and Space Technology considered within hours of the explo- magazine; sion aboard Challenger. David C. Acheson, a former seThe interim idea was recogni- nior vice president and general countion that it was immediately neces- sel of the Communications Satellite sary to gather all data and records Corp. and a Washington lawyer in the pertinent to the disasters investiga- firm of Drinker, Biddle & Reath; tion, even if they were to be subseMaj. Gen. Donald J. Kutyna, to investiover turned other director of space systems and USAF, quently and gators. Some person or persons had to command control take charge, even if just temporarcommunications. ily, thus the interim board. Mr. Reagan has retained the opNow a permanent board has been tion of naming eight additional memestablished and ordered to complete bers to the commission. its work in 120 days, around June 3. It is a group, as it exists, that Mr. the short time Considering brings to this crucial investigation a his and staffers had available of talents and skills. The multitude Reagan to them, they have assembled a highly commission represents a sufficient diversified, yet totally competent variety of academic and professional Commission. disciplines among a forceful, but senHeaded by former Secretary of sitive, group of professionals. The reState William P. Rogers, regarded as sult will be a penetrating, exhaustive an efficient and incisive administraand encompassing examination of the tor, as chairman, along with Neil A. Challenger disaster. President Reagans decision to apcommission to point a take a hard look into the cause of the explosion that destroyed the space shuttle Challenger is, on second thought, a good idea; one that can reduce to barest minimum any claims of ' ' Broken Families Need Help Tne case of Benjamin Studer, the who was found living with his father in Alabama after his picture was broadcast on a recent TV show about missing persons, offered more evidence that the nations family laws the and policies require reform kind of reform now being considered in the Utah Legislature. Like many other children, including some who turn up in Utah periodically, Benjamin Studer was the object of a custody dispute between his divorced parents. For an unexplained reason, his father snatched and hid him from his mother for a year and now faces federal kidnapping charges. Not quite a year ago, a similar situation surfaced in Summit County. At that time, an officer of a Utah juvenile court reported an increased incidence of these kidnappings. Obviously something is seriously wrong when parents are willing to risk their own freedom to keep their children away from the other parents. Perhaps they are driven by revenge. Maybe they fear for their childrens $afety. Or, possibly, they are unable to spend time with their children unless they steal them. Whatever the reasons for this fa- , Orbiting Paragraphs What's more irritating than a young whippersnapper who thinks your freckles are age spots? Hemember back when HAVING your name in the telephone directory was a status symbol? Nowadays it takes a fire engine to tract the attention an automobile at- used to get minor miracle is when a kid still has both overshoes from last winter. A major miracle is when they still fit. A t milial phenomenon, children caught up in it are likely to suffer emotionally, decreasing their abilities to adjust normally to the maturing process. It would be in their best interests, as well as societys, then, for the causes to be researched and reflected in state and federal laws. A bill before the Utah Legislature this session qualifies as a one which may help measure conditions that lead to the prevent and other divorce-relateproblems. The Dispute Resolution Act, sponsored by Rep. Richard Maxfield, and passed by the House of Representatives last week, would require couples to obtain mediation on their way to divorce court. The goal is to work out property and child custody agreements, if possible, in a environment. family-sensitiv- child-snatchin- e d Critics of the legislation contend not all couples need arbitration. But as proponents point out, such couples could avoid higher attorneys fees and court costs by participating in formal negotiations. And the many benefits to others, who need an unbiased party to help work out fair compromises and to consider whats best for the kids, would make mediation even more worthwhile. course mediation isnt a panacea for all divorce-relateproblems in this country. Other steps, including the development of the human relations skills that would prevent unwise marriages and the passage of realistic child custody, visitation and support laws, would be ideal. In the meantime, however, Rep. Maxfields proposal would give family matters a small share of the special legal treatment they deserve. Of d Universal Press Syndicate It comes as a surprise to many who tend to think of our generals and admirals, and indeed all military personnel, as inanimate objects who are useful only to drop bombs on people, actually to come across such folk and discover, sometimes with a start, that they are as intricately concerned with questions of general policy as the heads of labor unions, corporations or universities. I have in mind a recent encounter with the commandant of the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base. That is the installation in Alabama that evolved from the flying school Orville Wright established in 1910 in a little runway. The hangar alongside a complement was Orville, five student flyers, and one mechanic. Maxwell houses now an air university and an air training center that, among other things, provides instrucn tional materials for more than a students every year. Charles Peters, the attractively opinionated editor of The Washington Monthly, expresses, among his myriad obsessions, the conviction that one of the things the United States needs is a universal draft. We are losing, he says and writes, our sense of community in America because there are fewer and fewer shared experiences. The commandant at Maxwell has points to make. A general peacetime draft? Peters correctly observes that the voluntary military is more expensive than a conscriptive military would be because the Pentagon of needs to reach in and bid for the s young men and women in the free market. But, the commandant points out, if you had a universal draft you would face a pool 10 times as large as the mili of 192-fo- ot half-millio- managed, even so, to maintain our cohesiveness while absorbing the streams of immigrants who came to America with little in common with the fledgling institutions of a young country. But in recent years there is a hankering for the common experience. Franklin Thomas of the Ford Foundation is eloquent on the subject of universal service of some kind or other, and I have written on the subject, eager and inquisitive. You couldnt draft them all anyway, unless the armed services were transformed into something very different, namely a huge welfare agency, sort of an adjunct of the Department of Health and Human Services. What device could be used, otherwise, to mobilize the soldiery? What about a lottery, the visitor asked? The trouble with a lottery, the commandant reflected, is that too much is at stake, "too big a role. Military service, even in peacetime, is a huge psychological and physical commitment, and probably any fissure currently sustained by having Americans who serve (in a volunteer army) and Americans who have never served would grate as hard in a lottery system. We must remind ourselves, the commandant said, that there is a progressively smaller and smaller percentage of Americans who have ever had military service, as the veterans of World War I all but disappear and as we arrive at an age when many Americans were only 10 years old at the time the Vietnam War ended. But both Charles Peters and the commandant feel the tug of a lack of commonly held experience. We never had the universal military experience advocated by George Washington and Harry Truman and weve tary would need. The commandant is right, universal service can't be based on the military, because its requirements would not need the services of an entire generation, and the military has no appetite to become, so to speak, an extension of the Red Cross. Whats needed is imagination by the private sector. And once every five years or so I quote myself on the subject. If the dozen leading colleges in America were to specify as a condition of enrollment of a freshman evidence of a years activity in civic, charitable or relia common denominator being gious work the offering of a young persons time for the an ethos might quickly benefit of others develop, backed by the private sector, and embracing the whole country. Complicated, yes: the financing, the regulations, the exceptions. But entering college at age 19 having spent a year helping to care for old people in h.mes, or teaching ghetto children to read, or shoring up security in the subways, or helping to maintain the parks and museums and libraries, would add up to a little but indelible contribution to a society that permits us so much by giving us freedom and sovereignty and including the concern of Maxwell Air Force Base. Murder, he woteT' Austerity Takes Fun Out of Lawmaking By Norman Ornstein Special to The Washington Post WASHINGTON An ugly fact is slowly dawning on Congress: takes the fun out of being a legislator. The new era of budget austerity poses obvious problems for 535 people who derived much of their political sustenance, until recently, from using the publics money to shower the landscape with highways, dams, missiles and other goodies. Austerity reduces their legislative opportunities, and perhaps also their prospects. As they enter the new era, activist members of Congress face the grim prospect of becoming what former Senate Majority Leader Howard H. Baker described as 18th century who need only spend a few months of the year in Washington doing the equivalent of legislative gardening. Human nature and Congress being what they are, congressmen and senators will not willingly accept such a passive role. I venture a prediction: Unable to use the budget to make its influence felt, Congress will rediscover some recently discarded tools and pick up some new ones. Specifically, Congress will: Move back into the regulation business from which it is still withdrawing. Increase the use of the tax code to negating one of accomplish social goals the ends of tax reform even before the new tax law is enacted. As a result, Congress has less flexibility and freedom to legislate. Benefit payments, or entitlements as we commonly call them, are relatively fixed; they aie formula programs with monthly checks. Interest payments are beyond the direct control of government, short of default. And, despite the talk about the defense pork barrel, very little in the defense budget can be easily manipulated by Congress to benefit particular districts the way public-work- s projects can. subcontracts tend to be arWeapons-systeranged and distributed by contractors, not by congressional subcommittees. By the same token pressure is growing to cut or eliminate military bases, another m citizen-legislator- Touch the untouchable and require means tests for entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. Move to reduce defense spending by finally cutting the number of American troops in Europe. The underlying reason for this redirection of Congressional attention is the growing, inexorable loss of discretion in the federal budget that has been building for several deficits have made it years. The Reagan-er- a far worse. Regardless of how we deal with the deficits in the near future, whether by Gramm-Rudmaautomatic spending cuts, inaction or other alternatives, the problem will grow for the next several years. n As our political leaders have focused on of the immediate problem, the deficit reduction, they have tended to ignore the forest for the trees. The forest is shaped by one simple fact: Three basic items account for 85 percent of the federal budget direct benefit payments to individuals, defense and interest on the debt - and they're all growing. Everything else in government, what we can call discretionary domestic from the FBI to food stamps and spending farm programs, from bridges and dams to control and the White House accounts for only 15 percent of the budget and is shrinking. here-and-no- - air-traff- Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar the American Enterprise Institute. at vehicle for funneling money to localities. particular What is left, the discretionary domestic component (a good deal of it, from the FBI control or the and Coast Guard to Internal Revenue Service is not really discretionary at all) is the governments main route to solving or coping with problems. It and it is is the lifes blood of Congress drained away. being The problem has been germinating for several years, as we have directly and indirectly, intentionally and unintentionally, altered the nature of the budget. The changes have come in several seminal stages: The Johnson Era: Guns and Butter. In the heyday of the Great Society, 1967, discretionary spending was maintained at about one quarter of the budget, roughly the same as entitlement programs; meanwhile, in the midst of Vietnam, defense was a staggering 43 percent of the budget. Years: Down With DeThe Nixon-Forfense, Up With Entitlements. After Vietnam, the federal response was to rein in defenses from the Johnson high share of the budget of the total by 1977, and barely to five years later. At the more than same time, the budget slack created was more than taken up by entitlement programs like Social Security. Entitlements jumped in two waves: first, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, through massive annual increases voted for Social Security, as entitlements rose from 26 per cent of the budget in 1967 to nearly 39 per cent by 1972. Alarmed at their own largesse Congress and the president reacted by insu lating the programs from further direct po litical pressure through the reform of indexing entitlement payments to inflation. That led, ironically, to the second wave of growth: Fueled by inflation, entitlements skyrocketed to 46 percent of the budget by 1977. time-honore- d air-traff- The Carter Years: Growing Interest. White House stabilized defense and entitlements. But largely because of soaring interest rates, federal interest payments, which had been between 6 and 7 percent of the budget for decades, jumped to nearly 10 percent by 1981 again coming at the expense of discretionary spending. The Reagan Era: Discretion Disappears. The policy and budget changes of the previous two decades set the stage for Reagan-era budgets. The steep increase in defense spending to redress the military cutbacks of the 70s have moved defense back up to a higher cut of the budget pie. The defense hike, though, has not been accompanied by a corresponding decline in entitlements; they have stayed roughly stable at 45 percent of the budget. Meanwhile, the largest deficits in history have caused interest payments to increase sharply as a proportion of the budget. The victim of sharp increases in defense and interest costs combined with no change in entitlements again discretionary domestic spending. For the next couple of years, Congress will be preoccupied, to say the least, with the problems of the moment, including simply keeping government afloat and the heart of key programs alive. But before too long say, by the next presidential inauguration the broader problem of bare pockets will begin to loom over lawmakers looking for something to do. The next major era of will begin. In stark terms, Congress will face two choices. One is to embrace Howard Baker's vision: become citizen legislators, with entitlements on automatic pilot and most key defense decisions made for the next generation, and preside passively as part-tim- e caretakeis over government. Given its desire to do something and no money to spend. Congress will move on multiple fronts to find more routes to action. The Carter policy-m- aking d one-thir- d one-fift- ( h staunch defenders of freedom of speech, how can we allow Shultz to As speak? |