Watchdog of Congress:

...And, I assure you that every reasonable attempt was made to obtain access to the files held by those agencies in preparing our report...

...Here, in capsule form, is a GAO executive's admission of where the agency's highest priority lies: in protecting the Administration, rather than criticizing it...

...What, indeed, had happened to the GAO's touted impartiality...

...We have enough to do in this country"—a point completely obscuring the fact that it is American money that may not be going to its intended use...

...The Comptroller General then was Joseph Campbell, a New York City accountant in his sixties who became notorious for his uncompromising crackdowns on Government waste and unbalanced books...

...I formally wrote both the Attorney General and the Director of Central Intelligence to obtain such data...

...So while auditors under Staats may be better informed about their respective areas, they are also considerably more reluctant to criticize them...

...Try as it may, the GAO cannot insulate itself from the personal interests of all 535 members of Congress, not to mention the 18,000 members of their staffs...

...a number of people, including her parents, were understandably interested in the outcome of the GAO investigation...

...Staats's top assistant, John D. Heller, said in an interview, "As a matter of policy, I do not think GAO needs to go looking at communist countries...

...that the agency takes a new tack every fifteen years is evidence enough of this...

...investigated it for "60 Minutes" (April 8,1979), he could find no fault: "Even though only about a third of the work the GAO does comes from specific Congressional requests," he intoned, "this relationship has fueled criticism that the GAO can be manipulated by powerful Senators and Representatives...

...Fearing that construction would be halted if the GAO report became public, Stennis impressed upon Staats his desire that the GAO inquiry be suspended and its report suppressed...

...On February 21, 1979, an upper-echelon official, James D. Martin, distributed a memorandum to Mottern's and Rodenstein's immediate supervisors stating that the top-level Assignment Review Group (ARG) had considered the analysts' preliminary results...

...Moreover, he added in a letter to Ralph Nader, who had staged a press conference to publicize the report's findings, "I seriously question the value to anyone of a study that is characterized as preliminary and is lacking GAO's official approval...

...While some GAO officials (including the new Comptroller General, Elmer Staats) later remarked that these would be only nominal concessions, the watchdog of Congress had, in fact, kept its bark but lost its bite...

...Better to excise an offending passage, the conventional wisdom goes, than to leave it in and jeopardize the agency's credibility...

...When they sensed that it was only a matter of time before their research would be ground to the same insubstantial pulp as so many other GAO products, they resorted to desperate action: They leaked their draft to the press...

...In these three positions of authority, he is a man with whom Staats has had to reckon many times...

...Because it happens (to continue Duff's "hypothetical example") that this mayor is the brother-in-law of his country's president—a strategic ally of the United States in Latin America...

...How does Staats resolve this predicament...

...Because the system continues to reward precision and not speed, many GAO reports are so thorough and so accurate as to be obsolete even before they can be read...

...Whatever spirit the original auditor imparted to a draft has long been effaced by rewriting and editing by countless bureaucrats with no real interest in the result—except the fear of saying something that might be considered incorrect or unfair...

...The only alternative is to risk a political confrontation like the one that toppled Staats's predecessor...

...He finally received the second report in March 1979 and leaked it to a Washington Star reporter whose headline trumpeted "Cancer Agency Test Problems Cost Millions, GAO Charges...

...The [Assignment Review] Group recommends," Martin continued, "that this assignment not be done as presently scoped...

...With so many friends at the State Department, Duff has learned to think the way they do—an inclination that deprives him of the ideological autonomy needed to conduct impartial investigations of Department of State activities...

...Several years ago, Elmer Staats ran into senior Democratic Senator John Stennis in a confrontation that clearly put the GAO's integrity on the line...

...Joseph Campbell's method consisted of rounding up a horde of zealous accountants, turning them loose on the ledgers, and, if necessary, chasing the crooks down the halls himself...

...Staats then stationed his professionals in the very agencies they would be covering, so they could get a feel for the internal workings of the organization...

...But Campbell had had good reason for rejecting this proposal and, instead, rotating his accountants from agency to agency at six-month intervals: It prevented them from cultivating friendships with the people they were supposed to investigate...

...Given the opportunity to strip the GAO of its investigative authority, one Executive department after another, frustrated with the GAO's criticism of their own practices, joined the attack...

...if the GAO had been a little bit more efficient, an incident like the one at Three Mile 1 sland just might have been averted...

...We must rely on the cooperation and good will of the agencies we are auditing...

...The Stennis affair shows clearly enough Staats's deference to powerful Congressional figures, but it takes a closer look to see exactly why he lacks the political autonomy to stand up to pressure from the Executive branch...

...All well and good—except that in the real-world machinations of Congress, some powerful Senators and Representatives are not so easily satisfied...

...He directs 5,000 professional policy overviewers and program auditors, operating with an annual budget of $200 million...

...So if the mayor wants a road built to show his citizens that he is bringing progress to the town, the U.S...

...Emphasis added...

...Already well acquainted with the limitations of operating within a political environment, Staats knew just what had to be done to protect the GAO's interests and his own...

...Where Campbell had steered the agency on a blind collision course with political controversy, Staats would choose the safer route of political compromise...

...Its leader, the Comptroller General, is appointed by the President for a fifteen-year term and cannot be fired without the approval of Congress...

...The fearless investigators—waiting patiently for the guilty parties to turn themselves in...

...To understand the GAO, one must understand the Comptroller General...

...One reason is that even though Federal departments do not have the statutory authority to withhold classified records from the GAO, a conflict inevitably arises whenever auditors pursue information that self-protecting officials do not wish to divulge...

...The battle was over before the first accusation had been fired...

...The irony, of course, is that the report took a full year to complete...

...Staats's reaction...

...But the greatest hindrance to GAO investigations of these agencies actually comes from within the GAO, owing to a practice initiated by Staats...

...Names wouldn't be named anymore, and confidential information would remain confidential...

...In a text required to be thorough, accurate, and non-partisan there is no place for passion or opinion, so almost every controversial passage is systematically removed by someone along the line...

...The watershed event which, more than any other, cast a shadow over Elmer Staats's fifteen-year tenure began in the early 1960s...

...Just about every GAO official admits that the six to eight months spent editing, rewriting, and fact-checking each report is far too long, but so far no one has done anything about it...

...They had decided to focus on aid to Mexico, one of the most important U.S...

...Government builds it—and you pay for it...

...Suppose also that the U.S...

...Where is GAO's impartiality and moral obligation to the U.S...

...Then here's a clue: When he retires in March, he will leave what may be the most powerful and secure Government job in Washington...

...He discovered exactly what he was looking for—and that evidence, but not the finished report, served as the groundwork for the Silkwood family's subsequent lawsuit...

...This might have been a credible excuse—except that the lawsuit against the Tennessee-Tombigbee to which Staats referred had been pressed in November, and the GAO had made no attempt to suspend its inquiry until December, after the Stennis phone call...

...Even without the GAO's seal of authority, Mottern's and Rodenstein's report has done well for itself, receiving praise from the Presidential Commission on Hunger and Malnutrition, the World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, the citizens' group Bread for the World, and even the Mexican government...

...To hear Duff speak, you would never know that criticizing Government spending is his job...

...While the hearings were still in progress, Campbell was forced to resign because of ill health (aggravated, some felt, by his confrontation with Holifield...

...Agricultural Policy...

...It also interested Stennis for another reason: He held $65,000 of stock in two chemical companies certain to profit from completion of the project, which would shorten commercial shipping routes...

...Unfortunately for Campbell, this crusade led him to a showdown with tough California Representative Chet Holifield, then head of the military operations subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Operations and later head of the full committee...

...The GAO's top officials never challenged the accuracy of Mottern's and Rodenstein's preliminary report...

...This, then, is the seamier side of the GAO, the side that somehow never makes it into the headlines...

...When asked about the potential controversy of publishing the Mottern-Rodenstein report, Heller admitted, "You don't want to put out information that would embarrass the Administration, that would be injurious in the political arena...

...Understandably, then, Stennis became alarmed when a GAO investigation in December of 1976 revealed that the Army Corps of Engineers had miscalculated cost-benefit figures for building the project...

...public...

...Without his determined leadership, the GAO could not muster a suitable defense.- The inquisition ended summarily with Acting Comptroller General Frank Weitzel's announcement of a GAO policy reformation designed to placate the subcommittee...

...Where Campbell had insisted on approaching each investigation with an open mind, Staats wanted a staff with expertise in the programs they would be reviewing...

...trading partners and the most rapidly developing nation in Latin America—as well as one with continued widespread starvation...

...Government had spent $1 million to install radar bombing sights on Pakistani jets, and non-functioning bomb sights at that, because a Pakistani general had thought the little contraptions would look good, even if they didn't fit that particular model of airplane...

...In two separate episodes, which he related to GAO auditors— Duff calls the stories "hypothetical" but one can speculate otherwise—Duff advocated what amounts to censorship in the name of national security...

...And when he knew the names of those responsible, he named them...

...Rodenstein met more resistance within the GAO than from the countries they were investigating...

...After the six-to-eight-month editing process that takes it from an auditor's hand to the GAO printing office, a GAO report has been waxed and polished beyond recognition...

...James Duff, a thirty-year GAO veteran in its international division, is a case in point: He received his training at the Foreign Service Institute, where he mingled with those who would later become leading American diplomats and policy makers...

...The canal's construction promised new jobs and economic benefits for Stennis's home state of Mississippi...

...Similarly, when a GAO study of inadequate emergency plans at nuclear power plants arrived on the desk of Comptroller General Elmer Staats, awaiting his signature, on the day of the Three Mile island accident, it became a highly touted example of the GAO's ability to forecast and investigate a significant hazard on its own...

...A later comment by Heller is more revealing...

...While from a technical, legal standpoint it could be argued that GAO is not bound by classifications made under executive orders, as a practical matter, we recognize that executive agencies would not release classified data to us if we did not follow such classifications...

...its release allowed "inadequate opportunity...

...Why is it that even aggressive journalists like Dan Rather are reluctant to penetrate the GAO's attractive veneer...

...Zealous over-editing has eroded the language to a uniform dullness and the content to a patchwork of comments that everyone has agreed upon, a lowest common denominator...

...To understand how this practice permits the GAO to be corrupted by the very people it is investigating, it is convenient to contrast the two divergent strategies for carrying out Government oversight employed by Staats and his predecessor...

...They resorted to desperate action...

...Stennis was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee as well as a ranking majority member of the Appropriations Committee (the one responsible for the GAO's annual funding) and head of its defense appropriations subcommittee...

...The project had been demoted to a low-level "staff study," and the emphasis had been shifted away from countries receiving American aid to the United States itself...

...Staats's decision to place each auditor at a single location seemed to make sense: How better to keep tabs on an agency than to have a GAO expert keep his permanent office right in the midst of the agency itself...

...When Representative John Dingel...

...Consider the two situations: If the U.S...

...Staats terminated the investigation, his official explanation being that it is GAO policy not to review matters currently under litigation...

...Two-and-a-half-years ago, a pair of GAO consultants found out the hard way that Duff is not the only top-level official who thinks along these lines...

...Founded in 1921 as a Congressional agency to keep an eye on Government spending, the GAO has established an image of itself as a tough corps of investigators cracking down on corruption and rooting out inefficiency left and right throughout the Federal Government...

...they simply dismissed the possibility that the GAO could ever come out in favor of a communist practice...

...even though the GAO is under no obligation to observe that classification, it will, as evidenced by Staats's letter to Dingell, abide by it...

...a letter to the Secretary of Defense from a top GAO official, Henry Eschwege, reveals the hurried attempt to conceal this discrepancy...

...Within a matter of months, Mottern and Rodenstein had encountered so much internecine fighting and red tape that they began to wonder whether they would ever complete the project...

...Furthermore, the reporters who rely heavily on the agency as a news source assume that an organization whose job is to criticize others is itself beyond criticism...

...A look at how the GAO really operates reveals something quite different from the public perception: an agency as subject to corruption and political manipulation as any other, a Comptroller General as prone to censorship and compromise as any agency head...

...the character of the original has faded from existence...

...In May 1977, for example, Representative Henry Waxman requested two investigations of the National Cancer Institute's program to identify environmental carcinogens...

...In addition, Weitzel noted, sensational language and controversial titles would be excluded from the GAO's future reports...

...Indeed, when the usually hard-hitting Rather Peter ?. Engel has written for Scientific American, The Washington Monthly, and other publications...

...The same subtle process is at work in the GAO's upper echelon...

...Congress has introduced a bill to grant the GAO subpoena power over Executive agencies, but until it is passed, the GAO will remain beholden to the Attorney General (a man accountable to the President) for authority to gain access to confidential files...

...In a February 1979 letter to Representative John Dingell of Michigan, the Comptroller General explained why the GAO failed to pursue aggressively the classified documents it needed for its inquiry: "We agree that the FBI and CIA files on the NUMEC issue are vital to a complete investigation of the matter...

...Staats," who was given an opportunity to proclaim his hard line on political compromise: "Been one or two cases," Staats drawled, "where I get a call where people would say, 'Well, do you really want to say this?' 'Well,' we said, 'well, this is the way we see it.' And so they respect that, and we go ahead with it...

...How does Duff manifest this tunnel vision...

...By the time the official GAO version, with its baby-blue cover and seal of the Comptroller General, came out a little more than a year ago, the original manuscript of 130 pages had been trimmed to a fourteen-page booklet entitled "Agricultural Trade: Issues Affecting U.S...

...Several years ago, for instance, the GAO began a routine investigation of conditions at the power plant where Karen Silkwood had worked until her death...

...Although his district did not contain any contractors, one could not be the senior member of the California Congressional delegation at that time and ignore the pressure from the state's vast military constituency, especially when the idea of repaying the Government for what the GAO deemed "excess profits" didn't strike the contractors too favorably...

...Should the GAO report this waste of American funds...

...For the GAO to get anywhere at all, Staats implied, it must remain on good terms with its adversaries...

...It is a dubious assumption: The watchdog of Congress needs a watchdog of its own...

...P.M.E...

...Campbell reveled in what one former GAO official calls "chasing the crooks down the hall," and felt no inhibitions about raising a public outcry when the books didn't come out number-perfect...

...It would be encouraging if the Stennis request could be dismissed as an isolated incident, but in fact it is merely one manifestation of the GAO's lack of political independence from the branches of Government over which it is supposed to be keeping watch...

...Whether an aggressive Comptroller General might have successfully unmuzzled the GAO at that point is a moot question, but one thing is clear: The agency's new leader, Staats, was not about to launch a crusade against the same forces that had toppled his predecessor...

...who had requested the study, read the final GAO report and found it too innocuous and inconclusive to be believed, he asked to look at the working papers and primary-source docu- · ments instead...

...There is no better evidence Polishing the product Even as it struggles for independence from the rest of the Federal Government, the General Accounting Office (GAO) wrestles with a different, purely internal problem: an excessive bureaucracy...

...In 1965, Holifield undertook a series of subcommittee hearings to decide whether, in its zeal to monitor military spending, the GAO had overstepped its legal bounds...

...The political reality of getting along in the GAO has instilled in Heller—as in Martin, Duff, and many others—the necessary willingness to be a team player...

...Hired to assess the effectiveness of U.S...

...They proposed to contrast this analysis with an examination of the economic policies of five developing nations that had made great strides in overcoming malnutrition: China, Taiwan, Cuba, Sri Lanka, and Kerala State in India...

...The purpose of this bureaucracy is to ensure that all of the agency's reports are thorough and fair, but the result is a product almost guaranteed to have no impact at all...

...In a subsequent interview, Martin said, "I would not want to advocate that we cure our problems as in a dictatorship [like] China and Cuba"—but admitted that he knew relatively little about food policies in those countries...

...Agency for International Development were building a road in a foreign country, at your expense, and that road began nowhere and ended nowhere, but was being constructed only to satisfy the petty ambition of a small-town mayor, you would want to know about it...

...than his stand on the GAO's investigation of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC...

...Furthermore, a GAO auditor had written in a memo, "Senator Stennis's staff expressed their concern about the possible negative effect which our report may have on the Tennessee-Tombigbee project and indicated that they would rather see reports which are strongly supportive of the project...

...It is hard to see how someone so obsessed with America's public image could ever come down hard on the Executive branch...

...Defense, for example, can release documents but require that GAO reports using them be classified...

...Where a draft had read, "It has long been our practice to avoid reviewing matters which are in litigation," the final letter substituted, "We prefer, if possible"—an admission that this policy had not been followed uniformly in the past...

...So when Staats took office, he dismissed the existing army of accountants and hired a corps of engineers, economists, and computer scientists— issue specialists who happened to have the same background as the people employed by the agencies the GAO was investigating...

...However, they refused to provide it...

...Elmer B. Staats is the Comptroller General of the United States—the invisible man behind the General Accounting Office (GAO), an agency that since receiving the epithet "watchdog of Congress" many years ago has earned the praise of journalists and members of Congress alike...

...On this occasion, the issue at stake was Stennis's long-time vocal advocacy of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway Project, which would connect the Tennessee River with the Gulf of Mexico...

...As a result, criticisms are often couched in such timid prose that it is easy to miss the point—if, indeed, it is there at all...

...The GAO would no longer publicize individual cases of deficient Government contracting, he wrote, but would produce more comprehensive and constructive reviews of military spending as a whole...

...Staats's more conservative strategy has been to stress policy overview and program analysis rather than strict tallying of assets and liabilities...

...Martin's memo expressed ARG's concern that the GAO might be "propelling itself into an advocacy type of role" if the Mottern-Rodenstein inquiry were to show that the United States should "encourage the developing countries to consider adopting the basic political and economic policies of countries like China and Cuba to deal effectively with poverty and undernutrition...

...No, says Duff—to do so might jeopardize America's national security...

...And if the GAO found out about it, you would consider it the GAO's responsibility to make the story public...

...When Campbell's auditors began detecting millions of dollars in excess profits that kept accruing to certain military contractors—coming up with such names as Lockheed, Boeing, Grumman, and Honeywell—Holifield became duly concerned...

...The report was "premature...

...It is "just using good common sense" to acknowledge* the "political reality" of the situation—to keep that compromising information to itself...

...Case closed...

...State, for its part, can make life difficult for a GAO auditor going abroad by refusing him diplomatic clearance, security, or a translator...

...But not Duff—he realizes that it would be politically expedient to suppress that information...

...agricultural exports and foreign aid in combating world malnutrition, Nick Mottern and...

...During the early 1960s, a period of heightened Congressional criticism of military spending, Campbell was, as usual, intent on making sure that Government contracts were being fulfilled to the dollar...

...The answer may lie in the cozy symbiosis between agency and press: The media provide the GAO with good publicity, and the GAO provides them, in turn, with good stories...

...Campbell knew, furthermore, that any individual who spends an inordinate amount of time in one environment grows accustomed to thinking along the lines of officials who work there...

...The auditor added a plaintive handwritten note at the bottom of the page: "It seems the decision [to suppress the report] was made solely to keep from offending Stennis...

...The purpose of their comparison: If American dollars intended to alleviate hunger weren't actually going to the poor and malnourished, then someone ought to know about it and put that money to better use...

...Not so,' says Mr...

...Replacing Campbell was a dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrat who had served as deputy director of the Bureau of the Budget since the Truman Administration...

...In truth, the GAO has never been politically independent, but it took four decades and the agency's first serious run-in with Congress to find that out...

...Newscaster Dan Rather has called the GAO "the bane of bureaucrats and the taxpayers' best friend...

...Silkwood was the woman allegedly murdered for trying to expose compromising information about nuclear hazards at the plant...

...Instead of remaining aloof and impartial, then, a GAO auditor stationed permanently in one agency would tend to become part of the internal workings of that agency...

...In the last three years alone, the GAO claims to have saved taxpayers more than $11 billion in misappropriated funding and mismanaged Federal programs...

...With this attitude of political expediency, it is no wonder that the GAO under Staats does not carry out the hard-hitting investigations that his predecessor pursued...

...But in the almost two years that had elapsed since the beginning of the study, theNCi had decided not to wait for the GAO and to revamp the testing program on its own...

...GAO's greatest hindrances come from within Besides withholding confidential documents, departments such as Defense and State have developed a repertoire of techniques for keeping the GAO out of their affairs...

...In addition, the agency's previous record of terminating investigations of projects under suit was inconsistent at best...

...to ensure that the study met GAO standards of accuracy and fairness...

...But Mottern and Rodenstein were not team players...