Word: 85th
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BUDGET CUTS: The 85th Congress went on a budget spree...
...began, ironically, when Republican Treasury Secretary George Humphrey made his famous observation last January that continued big budgets would lead to a hair-curling depression. President Eisenhower helped it along by inviting Congress to try cutting his budget. Senate Leader Johnson, undisputed mastermind of the 85th, accepted the Republican invitation and turned it into a Democratic party...
...result was a cut of about $5.5 billion from the Administration's $72 billion budget. But the cost of economy-at-any-price may have been high. In the year of the Russian ICBM. the 85th Congress lopped $2.4 billion from the $36.1 billion requested by the Defense Department, virtually scuttled the U.S. Information Agency (cutting its appropriations by $48 million to $96 million), passed a $3.4 billion foreign aid bill - about $1 billion less than President Eisenhower had deemed necessary to the security of the free world...
...budget showed Congress that it could defy President Eisenhower, despite his personal popularity, and get away with it. The session was marked by the deliberate undercutting of the Eisenhower program. Of the major and minor legislative recommendations sent to Congress by the Administration, only 15.8% were approved. The 85th Congress failed to pass a school construction bill to relieve the nation's critical classroom shortage, failed to provide for a turnover of Government in case of presidential disability, failed to appropriate funds for flood insurance, failed to approve statehood for Hawaii or Alaska, failed to follow Hoover Commission recommendations...
...political push and pull of the 85th Congress turned many an old alliance inside-out, spun many an old party position roundabout. Five years of the Eisenhower Administration had shattered the historic coalition between conservative Senate Southerners and Republicans...