Is Anybody out There Doing His Job?

Ah, so You Are beginning to wonder what all those 2,851,576 civilians on the Federal payroll are doing to help you. When your mail is ten days late, you wonder. When they decide to build a Federal highway through your house, you wonder. You may also wonder when you hear that our benign bureaucrats are shipping tobacco labeled Food to Asian peasants.

Moreover, it probably gripes hell out of you to know that, while your effective income shrinks, the people living off your Federal taxes are doing pretty well—half a million of them are knocking down salaries of $14,600 or better, and that's just the white-collar crowd; it doesn't count the top-bracket salaries in the postal and so-called blue-collar divisions of the Federal work force. Thanks to your generosity, a Federal employee can retire on $2808 a (continued on page 216)Is Anybody Doing His Job?(continued from page 103) month, having spent a lifetime of playing sick on Fridays and almost always being "away from his desk" when somebody from the outside world calls for help. You are now supporting 1,200,000 Federal retirees or their survivors at a cost of nearly $370,000,000 a month.

So what are you getting out of all this expense and all these "faceless and nameless bureaucrats" (one of George Wallace's useful expressions), especially the swarm of 333,141 who have burrowed into the Potomac mud? Virtually nothing.

So devoid of talent and energy is this mass of Government flesh that it is difficult to maintain even the necessary semblance of productivity. When a manager skilled in appearances is found, he becomes almost indispensable; I know a top-drawer bureaucrat who, because he is vastly skilled at making Government seem to function when it isn't, has been called out of retirement five times in the past 20 years. Talent is that rare around Washington.

Honesty is even rarer. It doesn't pay to be honest. Remember Ernie Fitzgerald, the Pentagon official who had the gall to publicly disclose that Lockheed and the Pentagon had conspired to hide evidence that they wasted two billion dollars in the building of one airplane? He was fired for that. After a four-year legal fight, which really isn't over yet and which will probably cost half a million dollars by the time it is concluded, Fitzgerald finally forced the Pentagon to rehire him; but he has been stuck in a corner, far away from any potential interference with big weapons contracts, and candidly warned that he will be released from Coventry only after "you have gained the acceptance of your enemies."

In a Government where an honest man is told he is surrounded by enemies, where no one marches to a different drummer because all drumming is prohibited by U.S. Code, Article 1073, Section 24.35, and where survivable talent is looked upon as something as rare as ambergris, is there any hope for something in return for your Federal tax dollars? Is anybody in all that worm pit doing his job? If God were to threaten to turn everyone in Government to salt if at least half a dozen persons couldn't be found doing their duty, would Washington be doomed?

No, hallelujah, eight good workers (maybe more, if you've got the stomach to continue the pursuit) have been found, alive and functioning.

Lewis A. Engman

Somewhere along the line, Lewis A. Engman went sour—that is, by Richard Nixon's standard. But Nixon can't be blamed for bad judgment. After all, who could have guessed? Engman had all the outwardly slick, smartass attributes of the business types so common to Nixon's Administration. (continued from page 103) From the middle of 1971 to early 1973, he was just another of John Ehrlichman's high-level flunkies.

So there was no reason for Nixon to suspect, when he promoted Engman from the White House staff to chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (the youngest in FTC's history) in February 1973 that he wouldn't slavishly follow the Administration's probusiness line.

But you never can trust an egghead, and especially one who has been contaminated by Harvard and the London School of Economics. No sooner had Engman arrived at the FTC—once conservatively described by Ralph Nader as an agency suffering from "alcoholism, spectacular lassitude and office absenteeism, incompetence by the most modest standards and lack of commitment to ... regulatory missions"—than he began doing strange things, like cracking down on corporations that sold dangerous drugs and toys to children via TV advertising, and launching an investigation to discover if lack of competition may account for the robbery retail-food prices.

Many in the Nixon camp doubtless thought Engman had lost his mind when he proclaimed in a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California in mid-1973 that the first duty of his agency was to promote real business competition and that he was convinced "tough enforcement of the antitrust laws can help prevent a recurrence of inflation by attacking abuses of economic power." To say such things for public consumption was bad enough, but then to act on them! Why, the man became absolutely wild. In the first 17 months of his reign, the FTC filed 18 major antitrust complaints against companies ranging from Boise Cascade to Textron and forced some of the biggest corporations to break up their cozy interlocking directorships.

But the pinnacle of Engman's wildness was reached when the FTC filed a complaint against the eight largest U.S. oil companies—Exxon, Texaco, Gulf, Mobil, Standard of California, Standard of Indiana, Shell and Atlantic Richfield—charging them with illegal monopolistic practices.

Washington was stunned and, to nobody's surprise, the House Appropriations Committee threatened to cut off Engman's antitrust budget for next year. Could any civil servant receive a higher compliment? In mid-1974, the White House announced that Nixon was considering "major changes" in the regulation of business and in the antitrust law. Engman was doing his work too well.

David S. Schwartz

Sometimes a bureaucrat of good conscience can do his duty to the public only by functioning in the style of an underground resistance fighter, willing to risk his professional life by operating right under the nose of the enemy. And the enemy, as often as not, is his own boss.

David S. Schwartz, Ph.D., for example. Schwartz is assistant chief of the Office of Economics at the Federal Power Commission. The FPC commissioners, all appointees of Richard Nixon's, want to take off all price controls on interstate natural-gas sales.

They can't do it without Congressional approval. Every time FPC Chairman John N. Nassikas, speaking on behalf of the entire commission, marches up Capitol Hill and argues that the petroleum gang should be turned loose to set any price it wants, Schwartz marches right up behind him and warns that Nassikas is advocating legal looting, that if natural-gas prices are deregulated, the consumers in this country will pay five billion dollars to 12 billion dollars more each year.

He also argues that the oil barons are withholding great quantities of natural gas from the market to keep the price up and that, contrary to the panic propaganda, there is a sufficient amount of natural gas to last us at least another 60 years.

Such treacherous testimony—Schwartz's Office of Economics is the only rebellious agency within the FPC—makes the commissioners, naturally, foam with rage. Oh, how they loathe Schwartz, a pudgy, friendly, 50ish, crafty, balding but still red-haloed New York Jew boy (to use Dick's term), a child of the Great Depression whose life is centered on controlling industrial monopolies.

You can understand their anger: Here's the commission's own economics expert. He's supposed to be working for them—not for the public. And here he is, ratting on them right out in the open, showing how they are in the oil industry's pocket.

They don't put up with him out of good sportsmanship. Indeed, they have made no bones of trying to figure out some way to can his ass. So far, Civil Service has protected Schwartz and you'd better pray for its continued success, for a few relatively honest fellows in Congress, and Schwartz, are all that's standing between you and that five-to-twelve-billion-dollar bigger gas bill.

Rudolph Kapustin

Shortly after eight A.M. on November 3, 1973, a Pan American 707 cargo plane took off from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, bound for Prestwick, Scotland. About 100 miles east of Montreal, the flight crew reported smoke in the storage area under the pilot compartment. They swung back toward Boston to make an emergency landing. But as they approached Logan Airport's runway 27, smoke and fumes so obscured the pilot's vision and interfered with his physical reactions that he lost control. Ground observers saw the plane pitch and go into a "Dutch roll." The left wing struck the water and the plane disintegrated, with the burning wreckage scattered over a one-third-mile area. The three-man crew was killed.

Tough luck. But it could have been far worse. The plane was loaded with more than 16,000 pounds of corrosive acids, including 400 liters of nitric acid. What if the plane had crashed in a populated area? Nitric acid isn't a nice thing to have sloshing around the neighborhood.

Three hours after the crash was reported to Washington, a ten-man "go team" of National Transportation Safety Board crash experts, headed by Rudolph Kapustin, was on its way to the site. (They were slower than usual; as a rule, it takes them no longer than an hour and a half to be on their way, but this time their own plane had troubles.)

This was commercial aviation's first major crash involving hazardous materials. But it was the first only because we've been lucky. Many thousands of tons of hazardous materials, including radioactive materials, pass overhead every year. Much of them are handled in a relatively careless fashion. That's where the NTSB comes in. In this case, Kapustin and his fellow experts found that the nitric acid had been incorrectly labeled, incorrectly packaged and incorrectly stored in the plane; the cartons had been packed in sawdust, which is a no-no, and placed on their side instead of upright: Acid leaked out and set the sawdust on fire. Since then, the NTSB has issued tough orders to the air-cargo industry to shape up.

Kapustin, 49, who became a Federal safety expert a dozen years ago after working as an engineer in the Far East for Curtiss Wright, is named here only in a symbolic way; he is typical of the entire 100-man staff of investigators at the NTSB. We might just as easily be talking about one of the others—Doug Dreifus, for example, who headed the go team that investigated the 345-death crash outside Paris some months ago (our safety experts go anywhere in the world that a U.S.-built plane goes down), the worst air accident in history. These fellows wade through gore and shredded flesh to find the trouble spot. A shinbone embedded in the cabin ceiling was the clue to the cause of one crash.

Despite interference from industryoriented politicians, the NTSB boys have managed to lean on the airlines and on the plane manufacturers heavily enough to cut deaths per passenger mile by 50 percent in the past decade.

Jonathan L. Goldstein

George Beall, the U.S. Attorney in Baltimore who led the legal assault that proved Spiro Agnew was a crook and drove him from the Vice-Presidency, has received much deserved publicity as a feisty go-getter. But it is significant that before Beall went after Agnew, he made a special trip to New Jersey to learn the finer techniques of uncovering political corruption from a couple of young Federal attorneys, Herbert Stern and Jonathan L. Goldstein—a prosecutory team whose success has been perhaps unique in the annals of modern law enforcement.

Just out of New York University Law School in 1965, Goldstein joined the Department of Justice. His officemate was Stern. They were so tough and effective in prosecuting a corporate-corruption case in 1968-1969 that when one of the defense lawyers, Frederick Lacey, was appointed U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, he hired them as his top assistants.

Then, when Lacey was made a Federal judge, Stern moved into the U.S. Attorneyship. And when Stern was made a Federal judge last year, Goldstein took over. Today, at 33, he heads a prosecuting assault team of 56 attorneys whose average age is a remarkably babyish 28. Outside the courtroom, Goldstein would probably strike you as gentle and reticent. But inside the courtroom, he is the smoking hand of a vengeful God.

Under Lacey and Stern, and now on his own, Goldstein has been part of an unprecedented crusade against crooked politicians; no other U. S. Attorney's office has come even close to cutting so many scalps. More than 75 politicians have been indicted and more than 50—including a Congressman and eight or nine mayors—are now in the clink as a result of the Newark office's work over the past few years.

Goldstein personally handled the prosecution that sent two former mayors of Atlantic City to prison for extortion and the prosecution for tax fraud (and other assorted crimes) of Nelson Gross, former state G.O.P. chairman and a former U.S. Undersecretary of State in charge of coordinating the fight against the international drug traffic. His two-year sentence is on appeal.

Goldstein still has three years to go on his appointment, by which time penal reform may be a standard plank in every New Jersey politician's platform.

And, lest you think Nixon deserves credit for appointing Lacey and Stern and Goldstein: Don't. The senior Senator of the party in power has control over the appointments of his state's U. S. Attorneys, which means that the advent of purity in New Jersey is due solely to the good choices of Senator Clifford P. Case, one of the few honest Republicans in Washington.

Frances Knight

Three years ago, Frances Knight, director of the State Department's Passport Office, had a swell layout in a building just a spit from the White House. It was really swanky, right next to Lafayette Park. An American citizen who dropped by to get his passport there would leave the country with sweet memories.

But then Miss Knight (actually, she is Mrs. Wayne Parrish, wife of the multimillionaire who once published aviation magazines) got into another fuss with her bosses at the State Department and they moved her offices to a high-crime area of Washington. As the moving men carried her files into the new headquarters, they were propositioned by prostitutes and some of her clerks lost their purses to pickpockets.

But don't worry about Frances Knight. If anybody can survive, she can. Not for nothing did Tom Wicker call her "the dragon lady." At 69, she looks a handsome 55, handles herself in the marvelous old-fashioned sassy-blonde style and enjoys being considered a ruthless gut fighter. "Somebody in Congress once called me an ogress," she laughs. "Do I look like an ogress?" No, indeed.

For 19 years, no Secretary of State has crossed the threshold of the Passport Office. All seem to have realized, via that silent communication of the bureaucratic jungle, that that was strictly Miss Knight's turf. From her domain, she has issued statements calling her superiors "creeps" and "tightwads." She has accused them of trifling with the security of the United States by "putting the passport on the same level as the duck stamp."

Most of Miss Knight's troubles—and she has had plenty—have stemmed from the fact that she is concerned about such matters as internal security. She is a patriot in the sense that lost status two decades ago. At the time of her appointment to the Passport Office directorship in 1955, it was alleged that Senator Joseph McCarthy had once proudly identified her as a member of his "legal American underground." The right wing loves her. The left does not. Until the U.S. Supreme Court told her to cut it out ten years ago, she was overly enthusiastic about refusing to issue passports to people she called "political suspects." Four years ago, there was another hell of a fuss when it was discovered that the Passport Office had a list of a quarter of a million names, including about 15,000 in a category of "known or suspected Communists or subversives." When any one of them applied for a passport, she tipped off the FBI.

Nevertheless, she runs one of the most efficient offices in Washington. Since she took over as passport czar, the output per man-year has more than doubled. In the past five years, the number of passports processed increased 40 percent, while her permanent work force increased only 26 percent. Her enemies in the Budget Bureau are trying to starve her into submission, and it has affected her efficiency—now, at peak season, it sometimes takes ten days to process your passport, twice as long as it used to. But if you are in a real emergency situation, Miss Knight will get you out of the country without a passport, immediately. She has a duty officer around the clock to help the desperate traveler. Where else in Washington can you get such service?

Dr. Mary Mandels

If you want to find some of the most authentic heroes of the Federal bureaucracy, go deep into the boondocks. There you'll find, occasionally, the likes of Dr. Mary Mandels, 5'2" brunette (turning gray), brown-eyed, grandmotherly microbiologist who operates in a dismal threeroom basement lab at the U. S. Army Laboratories in Natick, Massachusetts. For help, she often has to shanghai enlisted personnel from the Army or lure visiting foreign scientists to lend a hand. She operates her lab on what, by Federal standards, is nothing: $50,000 a year.

But someday we'll look back on Dr. Mandels as the lady who helped save us from being buried under garbage and manure—and saved us in an enormously profitable and wholesome fashion.

Last year, in this country alone, about 200,000,000 tons of trash were carted away from our cities and hidden or burned; the mound of trash and garbage grows by five percent each year. And that doesn't count industrial waste nor the 800,000,000 tons of livestock manure produced annually in our feed lots.

Yet there's a lot of good eatin' in all that crap and trash, and there's a lot of good fuel, if you know how to get it out. Dr. Mandels (1947 Ph.D. from Cornell in plant physiology) knows how, and she is well on the way to showing how it can be done commercially.

Originally, the goal of her lab was to figure out a way to prevent the fungus Trichoderma viride from eating up the uniforms and fiber gear of our Servicemen in tropical or subtropical countries.

But when the Army began switching from cotton to synthetic fibers, Dr. Mandels' strategy for fighting Trichoderma viride became obsolete. "At that point, in the mid-Sixties, we shifted from thinking about Trichoderma viride as an enemy and started thinking about it as a friend," she recalls. "We stopped fighting it and started trying to use it."

Results: By a process much too intricate to explain here, materials with a cellulosic base can be turned into glucose, which in turn can be processed into a food supplement that could take care of much of our protein requirement, or into ethanol, which can be added to gasoline to increase our vehicle energy supply by at least ten percent (while decreasing smog emissions by as much as 70 percent). To give you an idea of the potential, Dr. Mandels estimates that one ton of wastepaper can be converted into one half ton of glucose, which can be fermented into 68 gallons of ethanol.

Of course, since the oil companies and agribusiness giants haven't got a franchise on our garbage dumps as yet, they aren't too enthusiastic about what Dr. Mandels is doing.

Admiral Hyman Rickover

"The most dangerous man, to any government," H. L. Mencken once observed, "is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos." If that's true, Admiral Hyman Rickover could be viewed as a real viper in the Government's bosom.

A couple of times each year, Rickover, the grand old man of the Navy's nucleardevelopment program, emerges from his crevice in the bureaucracy and gives some Congressional committee a lesson in independent thought.

Not long ago, called to testify on the Pentagon's budget, he dropped hundreds of observations, all as rich as these:

• "We have more senior officers in the military today than we had in World War Two, when our fighting force was over five times larger. As we reduce the number of people in the Armed Forces, we increase the number of officers. That is ridiculous on the face of it." He advocated cutting Pentagon personnel, and the entire bureaucracy, by 30 percent.

• "Tinkering with the organization has always been a preoccupation of Department of Defense reformers.... Generally, the only result is a new, impressive chart. But neat charts don't produce better organizations. No one has yet been able to draw an accurate chart of the structure of Franklin Roosevelt's Executive branch. By contrast, Defense agencies are perfect for chart-drawing purposes. The difference is that Roosevelt's agencies operated effectively, while the Department of Defense agencies haven't. Rather than greater coordination, they have provided new bureaucratic layers of coordinators and planners, and coordinators of coordinators."

While the Congressional dullards sat there openmouthed, the 74-year-old salt performed intellectual entrechats around the committee chambers, quoting from Rousseau and Spinoza. He talked about everything from how defense contractors swindle the public to what he called "purpose in life." That last may sound schmaltzy, but it isn't when Rickover unloads it. He is one of the few men in Washington who can say, as he did, "The object and the result of true discipline is to inspire men with bravery, firmness, patience, and with a sentiment of honor," without evoking snickers.

The reason that Rickover isn't considered dangerous in the Mencken sense is that nobody at the top of Government pays any attention to him. They consider him a quaint old duffer. After he has delivered his truths to their faces, they pat him on the back and send him on his way to the job he does incomparably well: superintending the building of atomicpropulsion devices. And he does this job with such thrift that sometimes he underspends his budget. Which makes him all the quainter.

Elmer B. Staats

The General Accounting Office, traditionally called "Congress' watchdog," is a classic case of the good-dog/bad-dog schizophrenia that one so often runs into in the bureaucracy. Among its 5000 or so employees are a tremendous number of time-serving hacks just sitting around pushing pencils and dreaming of the day they can retire. The agency, because so many of its employees grew up reading ledgers, is critically afflicted with "accountant's mentality." The agency spends far too much time on trivial studies and it is far too easily intimidated by tough rascals in the Executive branch and in the bureaucracy—the very people it is supposed to be policing.

Nevertheless, the GAO is Congress' most potent "external" investigative tool and, considering the GAO's many weaknesses, it's really a pretty good ol' dog. To a great extent, its successes can be credited to its director, Comptroller General Elmer B. Staats, a redheaded Kansan with a Ph.D. in public administration from the University of Minnesota.

Not only must he goose his own investigators out of their normal bureaucratic lethargy, he must also get along with a boss who doesn't really approve of what he is doing, most of the time. Congress is his boss and most of its members, being on the take, aren't very happy when his investigators go out and uncover crooked defense contractors and dirty meat-packing plants. They especially complain, of course, when the GAO reveals that the Humphreys and McGoverns of this political world are just as happy to shuffle campaign money under the table as are the Nixons, though they aren't so successful in quantity.

It's significant that although any member of Congress or any committee can ask the GAO to investigate a situation, only about 30 percent of its studies are conducted at the request of Congress. Most of the GAO's work is self-started.

Staats and his diggers, for defensive reasons, operate under a gray cover. They are, in fact, Washington's most efficient ghostwriters. The GAO's uncovery of dirt and stupidity is often credited to others.

Smart guys like Senator William Proxmire and Congressman Les Aspin, who know how to play the press, have built big reputations as critics of the Pentagon by using material supplied by GAO investigators. In one recent year, Proxmire initiated 25 percent of all GAO reports done at the request of members of Congress. Indeed, many of the exposes credited to The Washington Post and other reputedly go-getter newspapers are based on material gleaned from, with little credit given to, the GAO. That's OK; that's what public servants are for.