many of them myself. I had a census of the power rates taken. The utilities kicked; they did not want their overcharges exposed. If you are going to limit the agencies of the Government on what use is going to be made of the figures gathered by the census, you never would have any census legislation.

Mr. LELAND FORD. And if you continue along that line you will take the confidence away from the people that they have had in the Census, and the Census would break down.

Mr. RANKIN. I do not agree with that. Have you looked over these bills, Mr. May?

Mr. MAY. I have.

Mr. RANKIN. Which bill do you think comes nearest to meeting your needs?

Mr. MAY. My interest in the bills is solely as I have stated, in terms of whether a particular bill would give us the things we want. Mr. RANKIN. That is what I am asking.

Mr. MAY. I think there may be numbers of questions about other items that other agencies or other people in Government may bring forward. I don't know that. But Senate 1627 and House 5232 would, in my opinion, allow the Census to do the kind of job for us that we think is necessary for the defense effort. Whether or not there are other things in the bills which go beyond the defense story, that has to be the judgment of somebody else, and somebody else must have an opinion about it. But my story is that these two bills are the only bills that I have seen

Mr. RANKIN. That meet the situation?

Mr. MAY. Yes; that would meet the situation that I am concerned with. The other bills I have seen are lacking at certain points. I think at least I am informed by our counsel that those bills would not give the Census the right to get information for defense. upon a mandatory basis.

Mr. RANKIN. Let me ask you another question; this is definite information you are asking for, definite statistics?

Mr. MAY. Very definite.

Mr. RANKIN. Í have been on this committee longer than any other man in the room, and we have always tried to keep the Bureau of the Census out of the guessing phase of information. This would confine it exclusively to gathering definite information, would it not?

Mr. MAY. Exclusively, sir.

Mr. RANKIN. And you think Senate bill 1627 or House bill 5232, either one, would meet your requirements?

Mr. MAY. I think that insofar as the specific purposes that I have in mind, that either of those two bills would carry them out.

Mr. RANKIN. And the Senate bill has already passed the Senate? Mr. MAY. Yes. I think that whatever we want could be done under these two bills. I do not say that there are not other things that may not be at issue, with which I am not concerned, but the things with which we are concerned are taken care of by these bills. Mr. LELAND FORD. May I ask a question there, Mr. Chairman? The CHAIRMAN. Go ahead.

Mr. LELAND FORD. The essential difference between S. 1627 and H. R. 5232 is this-and correct me if I am wrong; that one, House bill 5232 cuts out the President's authority, but it is granted to him in the other, and it changes the penalty from a felony to a misdemeanor

in that it changes it from a fine of $500 to $1,000 in one instance, and 6 months to 2 years in the other.

Mr. RANKIN. You mean the House bill does.

I

Mr. LELAND FORD. Yes. This 5139 is something of a rehash of the question of reapportionment, and those things have been settled. don't think they ought to be brought in here.

The CHAIRMAN. The reason I put that in was this, the Senate has stricken out all after the enacting clause in the bill we passed on the 18th of February, and they have been playing football with it ever since, and feeling that it was the action of the House and this committee that the method of equal proportions should be substituted for that of major fractions, as long as we are going to proceed to amend the act of 1939, and the Senate is going to act on that bill further, we ought to put it in and hand it right back to them.

Mr. LELAND FORD. This is complicated enough as it is. But are there not two different things? One is to give the information out, and the other is the old question of reapportionment. Don't you think we ought to separate those things, and leave this entirely on the basis of granting these people this information, or not?

The CHAIRMAN. You must remember that in either of these bills. you are amending the act for the taking of the census and apportioning the Congressmen on the census.

Mr. RANKIN. The gentleman has reconvinced me that House bill 5232 should be passed instead of the Senate bill, for this reason; a mandatory bill is necessary, and if there is a violation, then a small fine, for a misdemeanor, will be effective on the small corporation or the little individual, but the larger ones will require a bigger club. So I think if we pass the Senate bill, we ought to put in the penalty provided in the House bill.

Mr. LELAND FORD. All you would have to do with the Senate bill is to change those laws.

Mr. KRAMER. In other words, if you are going to put teeth in the law, be sure to put some sharp teeth in.

Mr. RANKIN. Put teeth in there that we know will be just as effective on the big ones as on the little ones. Do you agree with that?

Mr. MAY. I hadn't thought about it, Mr. Rankin, but it sounds very logical to me.

Mr. LELAND FORD. That same purpose could be accomplished in the Senate bill 1627, if you want to change that. But I think we ought to separate the two principles. One is reapportionment, and the other is this thing we are discussing here.

Mr. RANKIN. I haven't put reapportionment in my bill.
Mr. LELAND FORD. Let me finish. It is in 5139.

Mr. RANKIN. I understand that, but we are talking about the other two bills now. Let me say to the gentleman from California that if you are going to have either priorities or allotments, you are going to have to have this information. You simply cannot make it effective unless you have legislation of this kind.

Mr. LELAND FORD. Your bill, 5232, isn't much different. I wouldn't cry very loud about either of them. That is the only difference between the two bills, and one is as acceptable as the other.

Mr. RANKIN. If you pass the Senate bill I want to insert that clause. I want it just as effective on the big ones as the little ones.

The CHAIRMAN. Of course some of these questions with respect to penalties and the merits of the two bills would be for us to take up in executive session when we come to report the bill out.

Mr. ALLEN. I just want to ask Mr. May one question. The sole objective, Mr. May, of this bill is to further the national defense program?

Mr. MAY. Our sole objective in asking for this kind of service, that as I understand it will be granted through this bill, from my best understanding and reading and study of it, is to get more and better information for defense.

Mr. ALLEN. In other words, the request to the Bureau came from the O. P. M.?

Mr. MAY. The request, not for this bill, but the request for the service came from O. P. M. The particular form in which the bill is drafted was not a request from the O. P. M., but we asked, "Can we get the service?", and this bill was drafted as a bill which would give us the service, and when we read the bill we thought, and we now take the position, it will give us the service.

Mr. ALLEN. Yes.

Mr. RANKIN. Will the gentleman yield for just one suggestion? I want to show one phase of the value of this bill. We are having trouble getting allotments of material for rural electrification, yet we are hearing on the other hand that the big utilities, big monopolies, have been gathering this material and holding it and have it packed away in their warehouses in every section of the country. This bill will get that information, is that right?

Mr. MAY. Yes. We are resolved to get that information, and it is a big tabulating job for which we would have to build a huge computing organization to process-unless the Census is empowered to get it for us.

Mr. ALLEN. It is my understanding that the information you get as the result of this bill will enable the O. P. M. to further farm out to small concerns portions of the defense program.

Mr. MAY. One of our very important motives in wanting the Census to act in this way is that we believe through Census data better than any other source we can locate the smaller firms, and a greater variety of firms capable of doing the defense job.

Mr. ALLEN. Many of us are much concerned about protecting our small concerns as much as possible, because after this is over, we are going to need them.

Mr. MAY. I think that is true, and I am interested in the same thing from the opposite angle. I am very firmly convinced we will not be able to make munitions we should make unless we greatly broaden the base of the firms working on munitions.

Mr. ALLEN. The representation has been made to me that this bill might hurt small concerns rather than help them, because it would change the biennial census to a quinquennial census, and therefore the small concerns would not have the benefit of the information every 2 years like they have now. Do you think spreading the time out from 2 years to 5 years would have a tendency to hurt the small concerns?

Mr. MAY. My honest opinion on that is this, sir; I doubt very much whether there is any differentiation there between small con

cerns and big concerns. I think there are many people who are honestly concerned about breaking the 2-year series and changing it from a 2-year series to a 5-year series. On that, whether there will be any real loss or not, will depend upon the intelligence with which this whole program is operated. I think that it is perfectly true that in the course of defense operations you will gather a great deal of the information currently and much more often than it is gathered even in the 2-year periods, and if the Census gathers that and tabulates it so that it is available, a great deal of the information that is now available to big and small firms in the biennial census could be made available at much shorter intervals, and much sooner than it would even under the biennials. Secondly, I think there are certain things now covered under the biennial censuses that may not be called for directly in terms of the current defense reports jobs, and it is my understanding at least that the Census would still have the authorityI would like to ask Mr. Capt whether that is not true-would still have the authority, let us say, to get employment figures or any other particular figures that were left out of the current reporting. If it were thought that there was a really important need for those figures, they could get those on special tabulations, with the current information asked for under defense, but it would not be an overlapping as the ordinary biennial census would. So whether or not there would be any loss to any concerns, big or little, I do not think there is any differentiation between them

Mr. ALLEN. Some small concerns have indicated to me a desire to keep the biennial census.

Mr. MAY. The marketing services, I think, are the ones most concerned, the people who use this information and sell it around.

Mr. ALLEN. In any event, it is a part of our defense effort?

Mr. MAY. I think it is a part of our defense effort, and I think it can be managed intelligently so that there will be more information rather than less information at the end of the period.

The CHAIRMAN. Now, Mr. May, so far as the all-out defense effort is concerned, the defense office of Production Management is only interested in getting the statistics you would like to have made available.

Mr. MAY. That is exactly right, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. Of course, the proposed House resolution, 213, passed out by this committee and the House, would give you all that the Census Bureau already possesses, and would give you everything you want.

Mr. MAY. No, sir; our counsel believes that under the bill to which you refer I think I am right in this-there would be no mandatory authority. It would be done simply on a voluntary basis.

Mr. MARKS. Our feeling about joint resoultion 213 is that it does effectively enable the O. P. M. to get the material which the Census now has, but which is withheld from us because believed confidential under existing law, but our further feeling is that it fails to go far enough in giving the Bureau of the Census mandatory power to collect additional data which, as Mr. May has pointed out, needs to be collected during the emergency for the defense program. The CHAIRMAN. Well, that is true.

Mr. MARKS. That is the feature in 213 which does not go far enough.

The CHAIRMAN. That is true, but the objective in getting 213 passed was to give you the available information now, pending action on the controversial measures that are involved in this bill. Of course, the Defense Office of Production Management had no conception of having their desires become involved in a controversy as to whether or not a census should be taken every 2 or 5 years. When you came here to Washington, I question whether any of you knew the periodic periods or the times at which they gathered this data.

Mr. MAY. I think some of us knew then, because we had been working with that kind of material on the outside, that it is perfectly true that our specific interest was not in that kind of an issue at all, and is not at the moment.

The CHAIRMAN. The enactment of these bills, the provisions under these bills, is absolutely necessary to continue gathering statistical data at periodic intervals and make them available to you. When Mr. O'Neill came to my office he gave me an instance of only having something like 18 firms in which he was interested in gathering statistics, and the Census Bureau told him there were 118, and they could not tell him who they were.

Mr. MAY. That is right.

The CHAIRMAN. I said, "If that is what you want, the simplest and shortest cut is to get a simple resolution here directing the Census Bureau to give you that information.' That was the purpose of the

resolution.

Mr. MAY. There is no question in our mind that that kind of permission on the part of Census is needed. We want that kind of information from the Census, and we think it would be useful in defense. There is a further story, that we believe it would be extremely valuable and even necessary, to have certain information for defense collected on a mandatory basis rather than on a voluntary basis, and we believe it would be desirable to have a suitable agency of the Government collect it.

Mr. LELAND FORD. Isn't this bill mandatory under section (b), page 2, where it says, "The Director of Census is authorized, when directed," to get this information or other statistical information authorized by law? He could collect it under this, couldn't he?

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.

Mr. MAY. I believe it is mandatory in that it goes back to the current act, and ties it in with the authority they would have under the act.

The CHAIRMAN. It would do that. Now, Mr. May, when Mr. O'Neill had you come up to my office you also told me that it was represented to you that by adopting this particular method there would be economy effected aggregating $1,000,000 in the collection and compilation of that statistical data. What information do you have on that subject for the benefit of the committee members here? Mr. MAY. The point as I understand it is this, sir; that we were told by the Bureau of the Census that it had the funds that would have been used in this year to collect the biennial census; and that if they did not have to collect the biennial census as such during this particular year that those funds could be used under the legislation to collect the current information. That sounded to me like a saving, and I was interested in it because we then could have had the benefit