Clean Sweep For Jimmy

A new Cabinet department and an almost unwrapped package

While friends and congressional supporters applauded, Jimmy Carter whipped out a black pen and scrawled his signature across an inch-thick bill. With that simple ceremony in the White House Rose Garden last week, the President brought into being the Department of Energy, the first new Cabinet agency to be established since the creation of the Department of Transportation in 1966. In another Rose Garden ceremony at week's end, James Schlesinger, whose confirmation hearings were held even before the department formally existed, was sworn in as the first Secretary of Energy.

It was a fitting climax to a week that witnessed an impressive flurry of successes for Carter's energy program. At the onset of his presidency, Carter had selected energy as the test case by which he was willing to be judged. Now, only 130 days after he sent his first energy message to Congress, the results were rolling in faster and more favorably than almost anyone had dared to predict.

In addition to the creation of the Department of Energy, the House last week passed the President's package of energy legislation almost unwrapped; no more than a few ribbons were torn off. The Senate is likely to act favorably on it when Congress returns next month from its August recess. Carter also signed into law the first federal strip-mining bill, which requires mining operators to restore excavated areas to their original soil condition and contours. The legislation is regarded as essential to remove the uncertainties that have prevented mining companies from making the huge investments necessary to bring about the two-thirds increase in coal production that Carter wants by 1985.

The President's victory was all the more surprising because during the past few months his program often seemed to be in trouble. Part of the problem was Carter himself. In late April, when he introduced his package, he pulled out all stops, calling it "the moral equivalent of war." Within a few days, he retreated from that overheated rhetoric and talked down the sacrifices that his program might cause. Many people were left wondering whether there really was an energy crisis. Meanwhile, opposition to the presidential package began heating up on several fronts. The big oil companies criticized the program as lacking incentives for exploration. Conservationists bemoaned the President's emphasis on increased use of coal, which they consider an ugly pollutant.

Yet, even as the critics protested, Carter's program was being efficiently spirited through the mazes of congressional committees. Taking personal charge of the legislation, House Speaker Tip O'Neill set up a special ad hoc energy committee under Ohio Democrat Thomas ("Lud") Ashley. That committee's job was to mold into one hill the legislation that emerged from various committees. Even as those hearings were under way, the House and Senate were also studying Carter's other keystone energy proposal--a bill to create a new Department of Energy.

As it turned out, Congress acted on that proposition first, approving it by lopsided margins. The DOE, as it is already being called in Washington, immediately became the tenth largest Cabinet department in number of employees (nearly 19,000) and seventh biggest in spending ($10.5 billion budgeted for fiscal 1978).

As one senior White House energy expert puts it: "The new department is a curious kind of hybrid." Among other things, it inherits the entire Federal Energy Administration, the Federal Power Commission, the Energy Research and Development Administration and some 50 functions now performed by other agencies throughout the federal bureaucracy. It has a management responsibility, including the huge Bonneville dam project, a weapons research-and-development complex stemming from the old Atomic Energy Commission, and a huge research-and-development program that explores energy sources from wind to thermonuclear fusion. The new department will also create some new sections, notably an Energy Information Administration, which will develop reliable statistics about oil and gas output and reserves, and an Economic Regulatory Administration, which will audit and police the energy companies more closely.

There is no time to waste; very soon the new department will get its legislative mandate. The few changes that the House made in the energy package mostly involved expendable parts. The legislators scrapped Carter's plan to give tax rebates to buyers of small cars, because they feared that the plan would amount to a subsidy for imported autos, which have captured 18.7% of the U.S. market. But the House kept heavy taxes on buyers of big gas-guzzlers. Carter's recommendation for graduated increases in gasoline taxes, which could have totaled 50-c- per gal. within ten years, was dropped, and the House also defeated a substitute proposal to raise the 4-c- per gal. federal gas tax by 5-c-. That setback was no great loss; there is a suspicion in Washington that the 500 proposal was planned in the first place as a throwaway to give Congress something to kill. Also the President could not sell the House on giving him power to order factories to switch from oil or natural gas to coal as fuel--but the House did enact a special tax on plants that fail to make the switch.

Otherwise the President's program remained intact. In a crucial vote last week, Carter's supporters in the House turned back a move to deregulate natural-gas prices completely and backed the President's proposal for continued controls --though permitting a price increase. On a few points, Congress has actually been moving to toughen Carter's bill. The President, for example, proposed setting higher energy-efficiency standards for seven types of appliances; the House increased the number to 13, including TV sets and washing machines. And the Senate energy committee voted last week not just to tax but to forbid outright, beginning with the 1980 models, the sale of autos that do not get at least 16 m.p.g. Pondering these results, some of Carter's energy planners now express an ironic regret: they wish that they had sent Congress a tougher package.

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