Word: budgeteers
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Situation. The Senate had attached to the Deficiency bill an amendment by Georgia's dry Harris providing the President with an extra $24,000,000 for prohibition enforcement. Secretary Mellon opposed this, because the money did not pass through the Budget; because it only put more agents in the field without increasing the auxiliary branches of enforcement (courts, Coast Guard, Civil Service Commission, etc.); because a survey of needs, he thought, should come first...
Significance. The House showed a strong and unprecedented inclination to resist the dictates of the Anti-Saloon League on prohibition legislation. Beneath the parliamentary complications of the issue and the veneer of fiscal concern about the Budget system seemed to lie a tendency, even among ardent drys, to follow the commands of the new Administration and pursue moderate, middle-of-the-road enforcement?in other words, to continue the farce with politic solemnity and let Mr. Hoover proceed "constructively" with the "experiment . . . noble in motive...
This tenet of the Coolidge credo was reiterated by the President at last week's semi-annual business meeting of the government in Washington. It was the dominant note in an address devoted to the eight years of budget system history. Those years have seen the public debt reduced from $24,000,000,000 to $17,000,000,000. Big business, an invalid in 1921, has revived. Unemployment has been lessened, economic confidence restored...
President Coolidge gave credit largely to the elimination of government extravagance under the budget system, whose history is almost all within the Coolidge era. Forty-three scattered and isolated departments and bureaus were coordinated for unified effort, their expenses checked by meticulous budgeteers and initialed by a prudent chief executive...
...which would have doubled our annual cost of government. Had there not been a constant insistence [by the speaker] upon rigid economy, many of these bills would have become law. A decrease of less than 10% in the income of the nation would produce a deficit in our present budget...