Even without LBJ’s death, January would have been a month of epitaphs for the Great Society. First the White House announced an unprecedented freeze on appropriated funds for public housing and sewage treatment. Then it proposed a budget liquidating the most ambitious social projects of the 1960s—a Republican version of the withering away of the state. Although total federal spending in the new budget will actually increase by $19 billion, that figure hides the degree of implicit retrenchment. Large increases would be necessary just to cover inflation. And most of the new money reflects no social priorities: $4 billion more for the military, $3 billion for debt servicing and veterans’ benefits, $10 billion for mandated Social Security increases (much of which the Administration had opposed).
Few domestic programs escape unscathed. Some are slated for outright extinction: community action, model cities, housing and hospital construction subsidies, local mental health centers, public works for depressed regions, direct subsidies to universities and libraries. Other programs will be weakened by fund cuts, revised administrative procedures, or diffusion of responsibility. Medicare patients will be forced to pay more for a day in the hospital. Federal education funds will be siphoned through state and local agencies; ceilings will be imposed on manpower training programs.
Liberals in Congress have attacked not merely the budget but the motives behind it. The President, they argue, has taken advantage of public irritability to create a spending package that is antiblack and antiurban. He has used the excuse of revenue shortages to unravel liberal programs, while squandering even more than the habitual billions on needless military hardware. But many liberal critics who have no use for Nixon’s motives have a more complex reaction to his plan to dismantle federal social programs. During the past few years a group of serious social scientists and technocrats, many of them former advisers to Kennedy and Johnson, have been finding fault with the spending programs of the Sixties. Their work, far from being an opportunistic response to a perceived public drift to the right, reflects a growing skepticism about the notion of meeting social problems with bureaucratic remedies.
The annual publication of the Brookings Institution study Setting National Priorities summarizes these discontents. Its authors are a sort of liberal cabinet in exile—Charles Schultze, for example, was Budget Bureau Director under LBJ, and Alice Rivlin was an Assistant Secretary at HEW. Their short essays on federal programs ranging from child care to strategic defense provide the single most authoritative guide available to the effects of federal programs.
The sober budget projections of the most recent volume received more attention than its muted criticism of liberal social programs. But the two are connected. Ten years ago projections of continuing economic growth promised an annual fiscal dividend of between $10 and $20 billion in the form of automatically rising federal revenues. That projected dividend was considered the best hope for Executive attempts to blunt conservative congressional opposition—new programs without new taxes. But …
