July 31, 1950
MEMORANDUM
The President met with the group of Congressional leaders on the supplemental Mutual Defense Assistance Program. The President announced that he was going to ask for an additional amount of $4,000,000,000 , that this was a matter of the greatest possible urgency and then plunged into the matter of legislative method.
In the discussion, which was at some times confused, the following points evolved:
In the Senate a point of order will lie against an appropriation bill without legislative authority unless the question arises in the course of Senate consideration of an appropriation bill passed by the House. In that case, the point of order will not lie. In view of this statement by the Vice President, which was concurred in by the other Senators, it was thought unwise to adopt the method of attaching the appropriation as an amendment in the Senate to the Military Bill which the House will vote on today. That led to a discussion of two other possible methods. The first was to have the Authorization Bill amended and then have the appropriation made. The other method was to have the appropriation originate in the House under a rule and then attached to the first appropriation bill in order of time to come up. Representative Taber thought that this would be the deficiency appropriation bill. There seemed to be general agreement that this would be acted on before the Omnibus Bill and it seemed to be the preference to attach the matter to this bill rather than have it a separate one.
Senator Wherry spoke in favor of having the legislation merely appropriate $4,000,000,000 to the President for general purposes of the defense of the United States under such terms as would permit him to use it for MDAP or any other thing that he chose. Senator Wherry argued that this would give him authority to use the funds in Spain, Japan, Germany, the Unites States or elsewhere. It was pointed out that Spain already came under the MDAP, and Secretary Johnson stated that the President had authority in case of emergency to take the goods made under this Act for the United States if that should be necessary. He also claimed that under other legislation the President acting through General MacArthur could if he wished use materiel already in the Far East or to be sent there for the arming of Japanese if that would be necessary. I think these questions should be looked into.
I took the position that the important thing at present was to make the appropriation available under the MDAP Bill so that production could start, it would take some time for production to be completed and if in the course of that time new powers seemed to be necessary they could be asked for.
The President asked whether there was unanimous consent for him to send a budget estimate to the Appropriations Committee, accompanying it by letter which would contain what was in the proposed message, and this view was adopted without dissent, although, as stated above, several people reiterated that they thought the courses which they had advocated earlier were preferable, and that problems might develop on the floor. The decision, therefore, was to go ahead with the budget estimate, the budget estimate to be sent today if possible to the Appropriations Committee with a letter containing the substance of the message in lieu of a message as such.
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