Washington cover-up

by Clark R. Mollenhoff

The GAO was established in the Budgeting and Accounting Act of 1921 as an arm of the legislative branch of government. Once the Comptroller General has been appointed by the President, he becomes an agent of the Congress. To assure the independence of the office, the Congress established the long term and provided that the incumbent could be removed from office only by joint resolution of Congress or by impeachment.

The Budgeting and Accounting Act also gave the GAO the power to examine all information and reports in order to determine whether money was being spent in a legal manner. The section on access to records states:

“All departments and establishments shall furnish to the Comptroller General such information regarding the powers, duties, activities, organization, financial transactions, and methods of business of their respective offices as he may from time to time require of them; and the Comptroller General, or any of his assistants or employees, when duly authorized by him, shall for the purpose of securing such information, have access to and the right to examine any books, documents, papers, or records of any such department or establishment.”

The law allowed but one exception to the Comptroller General’s legal right to demand and obtain access to “records of any such department or establishment.” That one exception gave the Secretary of State the power to determine whether there should be a publication of expenditures of funds used in dealings or treaty making with foreign nations.

The law should have been clear to anyone. The GAO auditors were to be given access to all papers and all records dealing with the expenditure of federal funds. It was the only way they could carefully examine contracts and determine whether any frauds or illegal procedures were involved.

But through the years, as might be expected in a bureaucracy, some officials had been reluctant to put all the cards on the table for the GAO. The reluctance increased in proportion to the bungling, mismanagement, or fraud that might be uncovered by prying GAO investigators.

In the first years of Joseph Campbell’s tenure as Comptroller General, his office faced some of the normal bureaucratic reluctance. But, on the whole, the holding back was spotty. Usually the departments produced the records demanded when the inspection provisions of the Budgeting and Accounting Act were pointed out to them.

By 1958, however, the use of “executive privilege” had become so widespread that it was interfering with the work of the GAO. The interference gradually came to light through the work of an Armed Services subcommittee headed by Representative F. Edward Hebert, the Louisiana Democrat. Chairman Hebert had asked Comptroller General Campbell to do a thorough study of the multibillion-dollar Air Force ballistic missile program. He had also set the GAO on the trail of a dozen other smaller projects where it appeared that influence, favoritism, incompetence, or fraud had cost the taxpayers millions of dollars in excess costs.

To Chairman Hebert this unjustified secrecy was serious business. For nearly ten years he had been engaged in important investigations which had proved that the military services could not be relied upon to police their own spending. It was vital that there be an adequate policing job on a Defense budget that totaled about 40 billion dollars a year—approximately half of the entire federal budget. Year after year, Chairman Hebert and Chief Counsel John Courtney had conducted hearings showing incredible waste and inefficiency. The staff of the Hebert subcommittee was small, and Chairman Hebert was forced to rely on the GAO for the major part of the auditing work and legal studies.

The Defense Department could not avail itself of the claim of “national security” when the GAO auditors started an investigation because the GAO auditors were cleared to handle “Secret” and “Top Secret” classified material in the same manner that Defense officials were. Lacking the “national security” claim, the military services latched onto the claim of “executive privilege.” One directive followed another, gradually pulling down the secrecy curtain. The periodic, quiet protests by Campbell went unnoticed by the public until the usually mild-mannered Comptroller General fired off a letter to Defense Secretary Neil McElroy.