President Kennedy has obviously chosen tax cut legislation as his dearest treasure in the coming session of Congress. If he plays this game as he played Trade Expansion a year ago, he will no doubt be willing to sacrifice everything else. Yet he ought not forget that if he leaves foreign aid defenseless this year he will do far worse than cause the resignation of the tenth aid agency director in eleven years; he will hear the death-rattle of the program itself.

It is certain that A.I.D. has never been so unpopular. When the Congress refused to swallow the President's request for long-term authority to borrow from the Treasury two years ago, it was just beginning to bend a sympathetic ear to Otto Passman's beefy hostility to the entire program. Last year Capitol Hill celebrated Mr. Passman's eighth year as chairman of the House subcommittee by cutting the Administration's request from $4.95 billion to $3.93 billion. Jealous of their prerogative of scrutinizing aid funds, both House and Senate remained deeply suspicious about the President's intention to transform two-thirds of economic assistance into long-term development loans instead of outright grants. This change, they maintained, was only a shallow disguise of A.I.D.'s proverbially wasteful expenditure.

What foreign aid needs now, as it always has, is realistic defenders in the Administration itself. Somebody will have to beat the idea into the woolly heads of the House subcommittee that most of the waste in economic aid comes from treating the program as an arm of highly limited notions of national security. It is not selfless humanitarianism, but a myopic desire to be brisk, that sends dollars to chase a crisis in Indonesia even when there is no reason to suppose that the Indonesians will use them properly. And yet it is only crisis assistance that Administration and Congress can always agree to accept. The money expended is inevitably misused, and A.I.D. inevitably discredited.

It is curious, if not at all reassuring, that of all the Administration's important officials concerned with aid, only the unfortunate Bowles has advocated consistently sound doctrine. He sees little point in giving substantial loans or grants to countries that are notoriously careless about their internal economic houses; at the same time, he wants a more liberal policy than the "showcase nation." Briefly, his theory is that aid funds can in themselves act in certain cases to spur economic reform and planning, and to train reformers and planners--the assumption behind the Alliance for Progress. He is a man of tougher mind and greater vision than the President ever gave him credit for, and it is time for a resurrection of his ideas.