The Daily Alaska empire., 1951-08-22

The drum beating of the Inter for Department and it's satellite Reclamation Bureau up here in Alaska is following and will no doubt continue to follow the pro- paganda pattern that has been well established in the western states. What the Department aims to do is to dominate those west ern states and Alaska. and the propaganda campaigns are tail ored to serve that purpose.
 Three principal items of the campaigns are:
 l. An effort, common to a num- Der of government agencies, to hoodwink the people into believing that their tax dollars can be taken on a round trip to Washington and returned to them, undimin- ished, in the form of Federal aid.
 3. A constant barrage of propos- als for turning additional acres of arid land into farm land by ir- rigation.
 3. Continued assertions that the United States is woefully short of electric power and that this short age must be eliminated by having the Reclamation Bureau build more and bigger hydroelectric pro- jects.
 The fallaey of the first of these tenets is so apparent that even some state legislatures have been able to see it and have petitioned Congress to leave the taxes at home and to let the states carry on their own aid programs and projects.
 Federal aid programs probably do not, on the average, return more than two bits on the dollar to the people who put up the cash, and the shrinkage has been estimated to run as high as 90 DCTCelI Oil SDIllC LII tAlCiA.
 As to the farm land proposals of the Reclamation Bureau, the Department of Agriculture is cur rently spending millions of dol lars every year to prevent flood ing of the markets by the crops from our present farms.
 Moreover, there are thousands of acres of land in the United States that can be turned into productive farms by low cost clearing and draining when there is need for more acreage.
 The Water Resources Policy Commission, an independent body estimates that land can be drained at about one tenth the cost of retaining arid land by irrigation.
 Tie original function of the Reclamation Bureau when it was created in 1902 was to reclaim dry lands and put them into pro- duction by means of irrigation projects.
 Some 15,000,000 acres of arid lands in the West have been put into production by reclamation projects that were privately and locally financed, and the Recla- nation Bureau has salvaged an- other 5,000,000 acres during the past half century.
 But the Bureaus reclamation work was something like 80 per- cent completed by 1945, which was about the time the Bureaus an- nual budget started to increase by leaps and bounds.
 This growing budget was, of course, contrary to all normal ex- pectations. AS it was originally set up, the Reclamation Bureau should have been self liquidating. The costs of the various reclama- tion projects were to have been paid off within 10 years by the land owners who received the water
 Under this plan, when a suf- ficiency of land had been reclaim ed and all of the project costs paid off, the Bureau would have closed it's doors.
 But liquidation is somthing that no hureaucrat undergoes willingly and without a fight. It presents him, for one thing, with the dreary prospect of having to go back to work for a living.
 A great many government bur- eaus have been abolished at one time and another, but almost ln- evitably two or three or half dozen new ones have sprung up fer each one abolished.
 The Reclamation Bureau has done a thorough job of assuring itself something like perpetuity. It's first device to accomplish this was to extend the repayment per iod on the projects, first to 20