COMMENTARY : Department Is the Engine of Economic Prosperity : Keep it: Elimination would hurt small business, and in any event the savings would be minuscule.

The Republicans in Congress want to abolish the Commerce Department. Why? Because, it seems, they vowed to kill one Cabinet-level department.

Is a blanket vow to pick a department, any department, and destroy it for ideological reasons a sound motive to make such a long-term decision? Shouldn’t the Republicans first determine the objectives of the Commerce Department, debate whether its goals are in our long-term interest and then objectively decide whether these goals are being realized? Do the Republicans smell blood because of Secretary Ron Brown’s legal problems?

The entire budget of the Commerce Department is $4.3 billion, less than a third of 1% of the government total. It has the smallest budget of any Cabinet-level department. If commerce and industry are the engines of economic prosperity and, hence, the basis of a better standard of living, better health care, education, social services and every other necessity of society, does it make sense to kill Commerce?

Commerce’s International Trade Administration, which the Republicans initially wanted to dissolve, has used its expertise in virtually every industry to track and assist American efforts to win foreign contracts. Yet a 1994 study showed that the United States spends much less on export promotion, including missions and financial aid, than our competitors. In 1994, for every $1,000 of gross domestic product, Japan spent 12 cents on export promotion, France seven cents and the United States three cents.

Commerce helps the nation’s 380,000 small manufacturers get access to new and more productive technologies. It helps communities restructure their economic bases. It provides weather forecasts crucial to agriculture and fishing, two of America’s largest industries. It helps promote tourism, which already accounts for 6% of the U.S. gross national product and is expected to be the world’s largest industry early in the next century.

The Republican Congress claims that dismantling the Commerce Department will save $7.8 million over five years. Their actual proposals, however, contradict their own philosophy of efficiency, consolidation and savings. In one proposal, the department would be replaced by three new agencies--recognition of the importance of Commerce’s functions. But it would cost an additional $2.3 billion.

The reality is that in the 1990s, foreign policy is no longer dominated by military or diplomatic concerns. International economics, trade and finance have at least as powerful an impact on our national interest. It is time to adjust the government’s structure to these realities; the Commerce Department needs streamlining and modernizing, not dismantling.

We do not have the luxury of assuming, as in the past, that the United States dominates the world economy, that the rest of the world plays by our rules or that the field is level because we want it to be. The United States must compete on the world’s terms. To believe otherwise is naive and self-destructive. Economic strength is an integral component of our national interest. We must not fail to promote it.