THE BEST JOB IN WASHINGTON

...The president may not call to offer you this extraordinary assignment, but he could...

...You won’t find yourself in a nest of dedicated, eagle-eyed sleuths happily banging out the reports that newspapermen will later make into headlines...

...Says it could be the best job in Washington...

...But suppose, just for the sake of fantasy, that in the midst of your apoplexy the phone rings-and it’s the White House calling...

...GAO’s dramatic growth could be explained to some extent, of course, by the vastly expanded role of the government during World War 11...

...The result may look impressive, but GAO data are to direct observation what pureed zucchini is to Three-Alarm chili...

...In his first few years at GAO, he seemed to be truly a magician- a man who could rock a boat without making waves...

...You’ll have an annual budget of more than $200 million to work with, and a staff of more than 5,000 at your command...

...They thought words like “overcharge,” “unnecessary costs,” and “failure to protect the government’s interest” were unduly loaded...

...THE BEST JOB in WASHINGTON by Thomas N. bethell It’s that time again...

...When Robert McNamara’s economists persuaded Washington that the key to efficient government was their Planning- Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS), Staats agreed...

...They lined up a powerful champion in Congress-Rep...

...You hesitate, wondering what he’s talking about...

...Nibbling at the Bedrock In his 1961 farewell address, Eisenhower startled Americans with his bleak warning about “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” inherent in “the acquisition of unwarranted influence...

...Indirectly, their responsibility will be shared by the Washington press corps...

...On the seventh floor there’s an office set aside as a museum to the early days...

...Instead, GAO recommended hiring more auditors...

...Shielded by his 15-year term, and with a little help from his friends, a fearless comptroller general could go a long way toward making the job what it was once intended to be-the most useful in government, “not excluding the president and his cabinet...

...as much as three fifths of that time can be consumed by sending the report through layers of editing, including the time spent permitting agencies to rebut GAO charges before the report is issued...

...With the passing of time, McCarl acquired a reputation as a hopelessly ossified nitpicker, a condition exacerbated by his personal loathing for FDRs expansionistgovernment policies...

...Senior GAO bureaucrats tend to talk about the hearings as though they had ended just last week, and it’s clear that nobody wants to get caught in that kind of brouhaha again...

...Maybe...

...Don’t water down your reports for fear of offending the powerfulthey can’t touch you...

...everyone agreed he was just the man to restore peace at GAO...

...GAO pumps out 1,100 reports a year...

...Perhaps influenced by having read too many GAO reports, the committee couched its conclusions in language that sounded like a parody of Elmer Staats: “The effective integration of accounting skills...

...Scrutineers and Advocates For nearly as long as there have been governments, there have been government auditors...

...On the other hand, every time a bureaucrat like Barbara Blum of the Environmental Protection Agency grumbles about GAO becoming “a fourth branch of government” (a charge based on her agency being subjected to more than 50 GAO investigations simultaneously), congressional conservatives will smile inwardly at the idea that GAO must be doing something right, by God...

...and mock-firing that big 105-mm...

...In mid-1965, Holifield launched a series of hearings inquiring into the adequacy of GAO investigations...

...Staats argues it’s not all-important to GAO, either...

...National security adviser...

...Here’s one: “Endangered Species-A Controversial Issue Needing Resolution...

...Alas, the president hasn’t been calling-and even if he did, he couldn’t offer you an appointment like that, because everybody knows there’s no such job in Washington...

...Don’t worry about finding work when you leave government service-remember, this job will carry you straight through to retirement...

...Presidents by nature are far more attracted to men like Elmer Staats-reasonable men...

...The companies fumed...

...Find the programs that need to be killed outright...

...Every time Business Week huffs about GAO becoming “a sort of supergovernment, the supreme second-guesser and final arbiter of everything” ( a charge occasioned by GAO criticism of the Army’s new XM 1 battle tank), congressional liberals will pause momentarily to reflect that GAO must be doing something right, by God...

...That would make one person (or a team) responsible for the accuracy of a reportand if the report turned out to be a dud, the investigator would be turned out too, That system seems to work all right for responsible practitioners of investigative journalism...

...Maybe it’s time to put out the fire, call the dogs, and head on back to the eighteenth century...

...Hewlett-Packard, with the support of the rest of the industry, took Campbell to court, challenging GAOs right to inspect company records...

...But in their interpretations of their authority, all five of the comptrollers general appointed since 1921 have left GAO’s scope and range diminished in ways not required by law...

...even the titles would be phrased in “less controversial” language...

...And it excludes the 3,500 staff people working directly for congressional committees...

...Not in so many words, perhaps...

...A hound that stays up all night sniffing at the wind and barking at every stray cat in the neighborhood may technically qualify for the term “watchdog,” but it may also be fast asleep when burglars come for the silverware in broad daylight...

...GAO may take anywhere from 12 to 24 months cranking out a routine report...

...Campbell was acutely aware of the problem...

...GAO has its share of dedicated peopleprobably more than its share-but they work under the terrible handicap of never really knowing where they’re going...

...Meanwhile, tomorrow’s paper will surely bring another of Jack Anderson’s sweatypalm dispatches from the front, describing how the government squandered a zillion dollars of your tax money training ghetto youths to become deep-sea divers, with a zero-percent job placement rate...

...Nobody seems to be sure...

...But a typical GAO report-“Federal Agencies Can and Should Do More to Combat Fraud in Government Programs”-which severely criticized the internal auditing procedures of six agencies, didn’t suggest that they might identify failed programs and rip-offs by sending out bright people to see with their own eyes...

...He was fresh out of graduate school (economics and political science) when he settled in Washington, worked briefly at the Brookings Institution and then, in 1939, moved to the Bureau of the Budgetwhere he stayed and stayed, rising to become deputy director, a job in which he managed to serve Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson without ever offending anybody...

...In the numbers game, GAO is the readiest of resources, and the temptation to rely on it can be overwhelming...

...Staats is always ready for criticisms like these...

...Thwarted, he took care to see that McCarl’s successor would be more congenial...

...GAO veterans remember him today as a man who “loved to chase the crooks down the halls”-an image that seems wildly romanticized except by comparison to his predecessors...

...GAO investigators have ideas-but by the time their reports go through the Cuisinart, their observations have been reduced to a flavorless, dehumanized mass of pulp...

...Although the hearing transcripts fill more than 1,000 pages of fine print, there’s not much in them challenging the essential validity of GAO’s investigative work...

...That’s onlydirectemployment, naturally...

...For its part, Congress seems to have largely despaired of ever getting good advice from anyone...

...How can you report that a program is a failure without numbers to back up your charges...

...Each year, for example, they would sift through about five million government transportation vouchers (sometimes stopping to question the cost claimed for a single cup of coffee) and nearly 500 million canceled checks...

...Kessler used GAO materials in his investigation, but he had the great advantage of not being hamstrung by GAO tradition...

...Staats Rites Except for a few congressmen who enjoy an especially comfortable working rapport with Staats, the evidence is that most of the people on Capitol Hill have seen no improvement since that report was written...

...he appointed an exceptionally low-profile senator named Fred H. Brown, whose main claim to fame was that he had once played baseball for the Boston Braves...

...By not asking more of GAO-by continuing instead to use the convenient shorthand phrase, “Congress’s watchdog agency,” in every story-reporters are helping to perpetuate an amiable myth...

...Between 1974 and 1978, for example, GAO published more than 200 reports on the General Services Administration, consistently finding “unsound” accounting practices but never catching on to the bigger picture of fraud and corruption later exposed by Washington Post reporter Ronald Kessler...

...GAO operating procedures guarantee that the problems will persist...

...GAO might really have made waves if its investigators had been allowed to report their true feelings about the tank...

...Some years ago, the late Richard Rovere of The New Yorker concluded that the fatal flaw of almost every reform effort initiated by the executive branch of government lay in the tendency “to quantify wherever possible and, when recommendations are in order, to urge only procedural and structural reforms...

...Our Friend GAO Covering GAO critically is a problem for reporters, because the existence of the agency makes life so much easier than it would be otherwise...

...A visionary comptroller general could hardly have asked for more, and it was said at the time that “the opportunities of the comptroller general to serve the United States...

...Instead, witnesses zeroed in on what they called GAOs “inflammatory, colored, and sensational” language...

...Wilsonian reformers in the White House worried about who was minding the store, and their opposite numbers on Capitol Hill shared their concern...

...Eisenhower appointed a man who surprised everybody by really rocking the boat...

...The act created the unique job of comptroller general-a government employee whom the president could hire but not fire, a concept not found in the Constitution-and gave him the explicit mandate to investigate, report on, and make recommendations about “all matters” having anything to do with the use of public funds...

...GAO’s investigators, unlike the Army’s tank-thinkers, were perceptive enough to understand that battlefields seldom meet EPA ambient-air standards...

...Peter Engel and Steven Findlay provided research assistance for this article...

...the British built it into their system more than a century ago...

...If these numbers convey an image of bodies falling over each other in the rush to Xerox each other’s reports, that’s not too wide of the mark...

...It’s his success at this game that obscures his overwhelming failure to do more than make GAO the Great Quantifier of governmental problems...

...A few months later, GAO was in the news again with the “zinc stink...

...In the numbers game, GAO is the readiest of resources, a reporter’s best friend...

...Rabbits and Eggs If Elmer Staats ever had any rough edges, they’ve long since been buffed to a soft, smooth sheen...

...But by the time their reports go through Elmer Staats’s bureaucratic Cuisinart, their observations have been reduced to a flavorless, dehumanized pulp, heavily garnished with data...

...GAO would be “semijudicial,” according to Rep...

...It will be your last job, the most useful you will ever hold...

...Wilson himself had written that in an era of governmental growth it was vitally important for Congress to “look diligently into every affair of government” and “talk much about what it sees...

...A born compromiser, Warren was also an instinctive bureaucrat...

...The hearings ran on for two months...

...Federal Reserve...

...GAOs report, in final form, suggested that the Army should think about using a diesel engine instead...

...cannon with a push-button computerized rangefinder, you’re like a kid with a toy...

...The thought occurs to you: Maybe Howard Jarvis and the Libertarians are right, by God...

...GAO is still regularly criticized for refusing to undertake projects it doesn’t want to handle, for taking unconscionable amounts of time pulling together the projects it does accept, and for pulling its punches when it finally gets a report completed...

...Nearly 80 per cent of the congressmen surveyed by a news service a few months ago said they seldom if ever make any use of GAO reports...

...In the old days, Staats’s predecessors railed against other government agencies for spending too much time and money propagandizing and massaging congressmen and reporters...

...Somewhere in this 105-page epic you’ll find documentary evidence that the Interior Department has been heartlessly neglecting its responsibility to the Pine Barrens Tree Frog...

...But the terms are misnomers, of course...

...Arguments like these sound like the essence of sweet reason and enlightened management, of course, and Staats uses them skillfully to reinforce his image as an eminently responsible boat-rocker...

...Find the programs that need to be changed...

...The prevailing mood matches the paint-pale gray, pale green, pale beige, depending on where you are...

...Or, if you choose to approach it from a different bias, you’ll find evidence that foot-dragging bureaucrats have delayed dozens of vitally needed public-works projects for fear of disturbing the Santa Cruz Long-Toed Salamander...

...It’s instructive to wander through GAO headquarters at 441 G Street in downtown Washington on a weekday afternoon, listening to rankand- file GAO staff people...

...We’re obsessed with data these dayswith the need to quantify everything...

...When Carter rejected Management by Objectives in favor of Zero-Base Budgeting, Staats concurred...

...Chet Holifield, chairman of the House Government Operations Committee’s subcommittee on military affairs...

...No, he says, it’s much more important than any of those...

...Holifield trotted out a parade of heavyduty witnesses, led by Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Ignatius, who said he just couldn’t understand why GAO was putting out so many reports on Pentagon activities- 544 reports in 1964 compared to 206 just two years previously...

...The Bureau will know at all times that GAO is watching it,” Good said, “and that for every appropriation there will have to be a legitimate use...

...This time a high-ranking Defense Department official was found to have ordered the purchase of zinc by the trainload, ostensibly for the nation’s strategic stockpiles program...

...they would emphasize “constructive and corrective changes for the future, rather than focusing on errors of the past...

...Campbell ran a tight ship (shrinking the GAO workforce back to about 4,000...

...The president says he is aware of your anger-shares it, in fact-and needs your help...

...Rooting in the Leaves The first GAO chief, J. Raymond Mc- Carl, who served from the early days of Harding’s administration until nearly the end of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term in 1936, was a fanatic about petty government improprieties...

...Language like that, reflecting the honest outrage of a sensible man, never sees the light of day in GAO reports...

...GAO investigators do conduct site inspections, and like other human beings they react to what they see...

...He appointed Elmer Staats...

...They work for an investigative bureaucracy-a contradiction in terms...

...There was the “cheese squeeze,” for example, in which GAO sleuths caught the Agriculture Department participating in a brazen scam-buying 42,000 tons of cheese from food producers and selling it back to them at a lower price...

...Secretary of State...

...This sweeping corollary to the theory of checks and balances-embodying the novel idea that a permanent congressional agency would have the unrestricted right to second-guess everything the executive branch initiated-was carried forward intact into the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921...

...Elmer Staats, the 65-year-old chief of the General Accounting Office, is the man with the best job in Washington-or, more precisely, he is the man with what could have been the best job, if only he had been visionary enough to see it that way...

...Gradually this kind of thinking led to the establishment of an interlocking budget- control system, to be operated from opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue...

...He gives you a thumbnail description: First, the appointment is for a 15-year term-longer than anyone else’s in government, except judges-and once you’ve been confirmed by the Senate you can be removed only by a joint congressional resolution approved by the president, So you’ll be about as politically independent as anyone could hope to be...

...And when all that sophisticated hardware breaks down in the middle of nowhere, you’re not going to get it going again with your average Army mechanic and an open-end wrench...

...GAO investigators complain that their raw material bears little resemblance to what finally emerges from Elmer Staats’s great beige word processing machine...

...The seductive attraction of GAO reports has to do with a trap into which even the best reporters sometimes fall: the need to quantify everything...

...If people seldom remember what GAO served yesterday, it’s largely for that reason...

...Under Staats, the GAO no longer criticizes other people for that kind of thing...

...And since its entire product (except for classified reports) is public, it shouldn’t need much of a “public information” office either...

...But when the magician leaves the stage, the rabbits and the card tricks go with him...

...Several years ago he restructured the agency into 12 divisions responsible for 29 different categories of investigation in every field from energy to consumer protection...

...Says there’s an important job vacancy coming open early next year, and he wants you to think about filling it...

...In his reorganization of GAO, Staats took pains to establish the agency’s first “congressional liaison” office and its first “public information” office...

...Washington has left you broken and bleeding, just like last year, and when you look to the future all you can see is the certainty of getting mugged again in 198 1. There’s no escape...

...Looking for the tiniest traces of wrongdoing, they tended to overlook the big scandals-like Teapot Dome-and had almost no effect on the corruption that would be remembered as Harding’s legacy...

...Nor is it our job to assess overall national program priorities or budget funding requiremen t s .” You may be forgiven for asking the obvious: If it’s not GAO’s job to figure out what’s wrong and suggest how to make it right, whose job is it...

...It isn’t clear that Congress is getting any better advice from four agencies today than it was getting from one in 1970, but it is clear, of course, that more people are doing the advising-6,290 “congressional support agency personnel” now, compared to 4,814in 1970...

...Lyndon Johnson wasn’t about to make the same mistake...

...Report your findings boldly to the Congress and the nation...

...GAO was auditing hundreds of defense contracts and turning up one gross abuse after another...

...he believed in naming names and using appropriate adjectives when reporting tales of byzantine malefaction...

...But Staats has always been quick to adapt to shifting trends...

...Government by Xerox One reason may be that GAO itself has become a listless and largely purposeless bureaucracy under Staats...

...You nibble away at this,” he said, “and you nibble away at something far bigger than an occasional refund out of the millions of transactions in which we are involved .” H olifield, abandoning any pretense of neutrality, chimed in: “The Chair is in complete concurrence...

...In retrospect, it seems unbelievable that the witnesses weren’t laughed out of the hearing room...

...For a man like Elmer Staats, the key to political survival is to make sure his opponents left and right cancel each other out, and Staats does that as well as anybody in Washington...

...GAO eagerly watches to see which pf its reports get “nationwide media coverage” and, naturally, keeps stats: 200 reports make the grade every year now, compared to a mere 31 back in 1972...

...GAO has always had its share of institutional caution-accountants Holifield seems to have left an enduring legacy of apprehension that partially accounts for GAO’s excessively self-protective posture today...

...sooner or later we all have to come back to the real world...

...Staats has buttressed this impression with some reorganizational touches...

...Even the rare GAO report with a life than days or hours contains the same basic shortcoming...

...In that locked and empty office there’s more spirit than you’ll find anywhere else in the building...

...Television offers only the regularly scheduled spectacle of candidates slipping stealthily across state lines to whisper outrageous promises into the ears of anyone old enough to vote and young enough to believe in the tooth fairy...

...The courts upheld the comptroller general, but his victory was long in the litigating...

...But he could certainly take full advantage of the natural affinity between the press and GAO...

...Naturally, he has numbers to back this up...

...And they can actually use theirs...

...Warren’s minions carried out the first investigations of profiteering defense contractors-scandals that began to establish the GAOs public image as “the watchdog of Congress”-but GAO auditors remained, for the most part, bogged down in trivia...

...That’s where you’re wrong...

...The third comptroller general, Lindsay Warren, was a veteran congressman from North Carolina, neither a champion of the New Deal nor an opponent, and above all loyal to his colleagues on Capitol Hill...

...The Washington Post carries an average of three GAO-generated stories a week-not always attributed...

...Since GAO operates in a closely related field, why not try it...

...The sheer mass of these reports reinforces the impression that GAO keeps every aspect of government under close scrutiny...

...In the absence of any demonstrable need for vast stockpiles of zinc, GAO suggested the explanation for the purchases might lie in the fact that the government official in question was on leave from his regular job as president of the American Zinc Company...

...In 1974 Congress created the Congressional Budget Office, which keeps tabs on the budget and conducts economic analyses of federal programs-just as GAO does...

...When the House Select Committee on Congressional Operations studied GAO’s troubles in 1978, it concluded that “bureaucratic rigidities” and internal rivalries between the old green-eyeshade types and the new policy-analyst types were hobbling the organization...

...with the evaluative skills of the policy sciences required by GAO’s post-1970 responsibilities has not yet succeeded in reaching a desirable objective...

...The president would have a Bureau of the Budget, charged with the proper allocation of limited resources among competing programs, and Congress would have a General Accounting Office to follow the cash flow and see where it all wound up...

...General Motors, Boeing, Lockheed, Westinghouse, and General Electric-along with many other companies stinging from GAO criticism- began forming a corporate vigilante group, ready to sandbag Campbell as soon as the opportunity arose...

...in fact, he’ll have to call someone about it before March 8, 198 1, because on that day Elmer Boyd Staats will complete his 15-year term as Comptroller General of the United States...

...Far from it-what you’ll find is a place indistinguishable from most other government offices...

...The theory here is that the more numbers there are to look at, the more people there should be to look at them...

...This was great stuff for reporters-but to Campbell’s surprise, many congressmen were not amused...

...About two thirds of its projects now are self-initiated, a statistic that suggests not so much any spirit of feisty independence as the absence of congressional interest...

...The germ of this approach exists at GAO, but it has never been permitted to grow beyond the first stage...

...Air Force Assistant Secretary Robert Charles rumbled warnings about destroying “the bedrock of our commercial system”-the sanctity of contracts...

...The big difference,” says a GAO official, “is that editors don’t have to spend half their time in front of congressional committees explaining themselves...

...Talk about shattered illusions...

...If they concluded that a project or program was utterly useless, the report would say so...

...Thomas N. Bethell is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...Rovere enthusiastically supported the idea of a much more freewheeling approach, using investigators-some of them definitely not government careerists, and others recruited from the ranks of skeptical outsiders who wouldn’t trust a government even if they were in charge of it-who would go out, conduct site inspections, satisfy themselves that their observations were accurate and representative, and write reports reflecting exactly what they saw and concluded...

...are greater than those of any other elected or appointed public officer, not excluding the president and his cabinet...

...An all-out effort by Congress to cut GAOs budget would almost certainly fail if GAO went public with its side of the story, explaining that it was being emasculated for the crime of being honest...

...The salary is generous-$64,000 a year, and climbing-and at the end of your term you’ll retire at full pay...

...you will be the government’s management consultant, the ombudsman for an entire nation...

...This gives Staats and GAO great credibility with the press, but it also tends to mask GAO’s continuing difficulty with determining the difference between leaves and trees...

...Change came, hesitantly, with the arrival of the fourth comptroller general, Joseph Campbell, appointed by Eisenhower in 1955...

...In this, he has the unwitting assistance of his critics...

...Here, the idea really caught on only with the rapid expansion of government during the first world war...

...through the door you can see two roll-top desks, some green eyeshades, a stand-up telephone, a couple of battered Underwoods...

...Reports henceforth would generalize more, to avoid embarrassing individual companies...

...On a slow news day, reporters and editors paw through piles of the pale blue reports, confident of finding something with shock value among all the statistics and the stultifying sentences written in purest governmentese...

...In the middle of the hearings, Campbell quit, claiming failed health, and soon thereafter the GAO ran up a white flag of unconditional surrender, agreeing to ease off...

...McCarl mobilized a small army of 1,700 crotchety accountants and marched them out to ferret among the government’s growing piles of voucher slips and check stubs...

...Meanwhile, a united front of opposition was forming against him...

...Their own internal operating manual says, on the one hand, that GAO’s evaluations are to cover the entire spectrum of assessing “the efficiency, economy, legality, and effectiveness” of government programs- but elsewhere it warns: “Our objective is not to become the ‘think tank’ for the Congress on the best solutions to pressing national problems...

...They are surrounded, every day, by contradictions...

...Think it over, the president says, and call me in the morning...

...In the rapidly growing forests of federal programs, he wasn’t even looking at the trees...

...The idea that the government could make itself more efficient and fraud-proof by trimming rather than expanding its own managerial ranks hasn’t penetrated GAO...

...Staats’s defenders recoil at the idea, for the same reason they balk at the idea of having investigators sign their reports...

...Sniffing an unmistakable odor, he followed it to its source...

...Cheese Squeeze, Zinc Stink Campbell was a New York City accountant who had been treasurer of Columbia University when Eisenhower was the university’s president...

...These terms are so common in Washington and so innocuous that nobody seems to have spotted the contradictions...

...it doesn’t include the thousands of consultants who work for GAO, CRS, OTA, and CBO...

...In the 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act, for example, Congress converted the Legislative Reference Service to the Congressional Research Service, with responsibility for advising Congress on the effectiveness of legislation-a responsibility that overlaps GAO’s own area of expertise...

...The obsession with data-as a substitute for direct observation-skews our entire politics, of course, leading to news reports of candidates leaping and falling in popularity based on 30-second “surveys” of a few hundred people, and to monthly updates on inflation written by people who don’t know the first thing about how productivity is “measured” or how the Consumer Price Index is “determined...

...Staats’s rabbits are the reports that come hopping out of GAO with such awesome frequency-about 1,100 a “year, on the average...

...In 1972 Congress created the Office of Technology Assessment, which spends much of its time secondguessing energy and environmental policies- just as GAO does...

...When Johnson sent his name over to the Senate, there was no serious opposition...

...The humiliation of GAO would have done credit to the Spanish Inquisition...

...Far from it-they won the day...

...With his support, Congress in 1970 passed a law giving GAO specific authority to “review and analyze the results of government programs” (emphasis added), and he claims that over the past decade GAO has shifted steadily away from its green-eyeshade mentality and more toward an overview approach...

...And now, the president says, here’s the truly great thing about this job...

...Exit Elmer The problem, of course, is that it’s hard to imagine any president (at least among the current crop of possibilities) unleashing that kind of person on the government...

...Within the government, the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission were particularly eager to take him on...

...A series of congressional hearings followed, spreading cheese all over the front pages for weeks and endearing GAO to the Washington press corps...

...The comptroller general can’t tell a committee to go to hell...

...Congress and the White House will share the responsibility of deciding what, if anything, to do about that...

...GAO made headlines, for example, with its report on the XMI tank, noting particularly the silliness of equipping a tank with a turbine engine that runs reliably only in dust-free conditions...

...Suddenly GAO began interrupting the comfortable slumber of the Eisenhower years with periodic revelations...

...Roosevelt tried to maneuver a bill through Congress giving the White House more control over GAO...

...He churns out letters, press releases, and congressional testimony in which he patiently explains that his agency must always guard against any erosion of credibility- and, to do that, it must never sacrifice accuracy to speed, must continue to be selective about accepting and rejecting project requests, and must give everybody’s brother the opportunity to comment on its investigations-in-progress...

...he was snuffling noisily among piles of dead leaves, pursuing a modus operandi that haunts GAO to this day...

...Whatever your slant, you can be sure of a story before the day is out...

...Off the record, one government investigator describes the XMl as “the biggest fraud since the C-5A cargo plane...

...The man chosen by Lyndon Johnson in 1966 to succeed Joseph Campbell at GAO is a veteran Washington survivor, a man who looks both ways before deciding not to cross the street...

...It’s easy to forget that the thing is too heavy for any cargo plane (except the unreliable C-5A), too inefficient to go any distanceit gets less than half-a-mile to the gallon, so you can imagine the logistics of supplying fuel to these things when they’re advancing...

...But there are limits to fantasy, of course...

...You can pick up any report at random, and once you’ve fought your way past the title you’re bound to strike gold...

...The notion of trying to insulate auditors from political influence isn’t new, either...

...The finely tuned instinct for compromise that Staats had nurtured over the years at the Budget Bureau traveled easily to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue...

...This doesn’t prove that GAO reports are better than they were eight years agoonly that more and more reporters are leaning on GAO to provide copy...

...But the report read like any other GAO report, and the Army’s allies on Capitol Hill eventually smothered it with the usual reassurances about making a few changes and the usual criticism of GAO for using old data...

...he inherited a staff of 4,400, but within a few years he had more than three times that many people rooting through the leaves...

...Without GAO, Jack Anderson’s column would appear some days as a blank space, and 60 Minutes would sputter into silence after half an hour...

...He wasn’t exactly an outsider at GAO-he was already in Washington, at the Atomic Energy Commission, when Eisenhower tapped him for the job-but he wasn’t clubby with Congress or chummy with friends of the administration...

...Aristotle called them “scrutineers and public advocates”-terms that would be hard to improve upon...

...Sounds terrific...

...That’s one reason GAO people frequently leak drafts of their reports to the press...

...We’re going to spend $12 billion to buy 7,000 of these things over the next ten years and when we’re finished the Russians will still have four or five times as many tanks...

...He married a congressman’s daughter, went to church regularly, played a social game of golf, and liked to lunch with friends at the Cosmos Club...

...Pull no punches...

...GAOs reports named the companies, documented the overcharges and the cozy relationships between the defense industry and the Pentagon, and insisted that contract windfalls should be returned to the public treasury...

...it would have a “reflex influence” on the Budget Bureau (later to become the Office of Management and Budget...

...The essence of magic, of course, is to persuade the audience it’s seeing something that isn’t really happening-rabbits in hats, eggs popping out of sleeves...

...As a wholly-owned subsidiary of Congress, GAO shouldn’t need congressional “liaison” any more than, say, Barnum 8c Bailey need “liaison” with Ringling Brothers...

...The sheer mass of these reports, all bound in their pale blue covers, reinforces the impression that GAO under Elmer Staats is really and truly keeping every aspect of government under ceaseless scrutiny...

...Magicians aren’t supposed to reveal each other’s secrets...

...He’s a builder,” Johnson said with one of those treacly smiles, “not a doubter...

...James Good, a sponsor of the enabling legislation...

...by the military-industrial complex...

...Although Holifield had no defense contractors in his own California district, his state was crawling with them...

...After a mere 14 months on the job, he suddenly stepped down, claiming ill health, and faded instantly into the footnotes...

...It would require courage...

...Like any good magician, he planned ahead in case anyone in the audience noticed these sleights of hand...

...Prompted by irate corporate lobbyists, they held hearings in which Campbell was flailed for minor inaccuracies in GAOs report and for leaking it to the press before delivering it to Congress...

...For the next 15 years, youare to serve as America’s supreme whistleblower, Uncle Sam’s personal scourge, authorized by statute to roam fearlessly across the entire landscape of federal policies and programs searching for abuse, misuse, fraud, waste, corruption, malfeasance, misfeasance, misdirection, irrelevance, obsolescence-searching, in short, for wretched excesses and unjustified bureaucratic entrenchments of every kind...

...Hardly a man is now alive at GAO who can remember anything about Fred H. Brown...

...Stopping along the way to collect numbers was important to him-but not all-important...

...According to many GAO sources, the scars of the Holifield hearings have never fully healed...

...This would have exactly the opposite of the desired effect: Whenever the government hires more people to watch over the people who are already hired, the opportunity for fraud increases in direct proportion to the increased confusion and paperwork generated by increased employment...

...Congress relieved GAO of much of this burden in 1950, with a law transferring responsibility for routine audits to the individual agencies, but GAO did not immediately lift its eyes and begin looking among the trees for signs of disease, much less try to get an overview of the whole forest...

...This gave GAO a much more contemporary look, in line with Congress’s expressed desire to see the agency ranging broadly across programs rather than sifting through invoices...

...Staats’s great gift is to make everything he doesor doesn’t do-sound supremely reasonable...

...Congress, troubled by the same question, has spent much of the past ten years making matters worse by legislating GAO clones...

...He made a public fuss about such things as the unauthorized purchase of a mule by the Tennessee Valley Authority (for use in agricultural demonstration projects) and the unauthorized purchase of a camera by the Interior Department (queried by McCarl about the intended use of the camera, Secretary Harold Ickes fired off a famous one-line answer: “To take pictures, you damned By the end of his term, McCarl had few allies at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue...

...The episode gave Campbell a small taste of a much more bitter experience to come-a lesson that GAO has never forgotten...

...The great appeal of the tank, he says, is that “almost anybody can operate it-even a congressman-and when you’re going 40 m.p.h...

...Less than a year from now, when Elmer Staats steps down, it may be suddenly and painfully obvious that GAO is in trouble...

...GAO was on the defensive from the beginning and stayed there...

...Defense...

...When Nixon dropped PPBS and substituted Management by Objectives, Staats applauded...