Mr. PHILLIPS. Are you accounting now for all employees, or do you borrow some from some other agency? Mr. GARTSIDE. We are accounting for all employees, except, as I have explained in the past, occasionally there will be a job out in the grounds which will require heavy equipment, where the Park people will do that for the Executive Mansion and Grounds, such as landscaping and tree surgery, for instance, or an occasional shop job that We are not equipped to handle. INCREASE IN PERSONNEL Mr. PHILLIPS. I see you are asking for an assistant housekeeper. Mr. GARTSIDE. Yes, sir. Mr. PHILLIPS. Yet, the last 2 years, when you came before this committee, there was so little to do that the housekeeper was on an involuntary vacation. So, now she needs an assistant? Mr. GARTSIDE. We figure we must have a housekeeper there at least 16 hours a day, and the only way you can get a 24-hour-a-day bousekeeper would be to marry her, because certainly we cannot get anybody to work on that basis. AUTHORITY TO INCREASE SALARIES Mr. PHILLIPS. You have just handed me a copy of Public Law 270 of the Eighty-second Congress. I read from section 2: Authority is hereby granted to the President of the United States (2) in their discretion meaning that group to grant additional compensation at rates not to exceed those prevailingand so forth. What is there that is mandatory about the authority granted at the discretion of the President to raise salaries if he desires to do so? Mr. GARTSIDE. If I may clarify that, he already had that authority. The authority he did not have was to incur a deficiency, and that is what you have granted him-authority to expend his appropriation at a rate that is designed to require a supplemental estimate. Mr. PHILLIPS. You mean, in spite of the fact the Appropriations Committee and the Comptroller General have a very hard and fast le that no deficiency may be created, the President of the United States now has the right in his own office to create a deficiency? Mr. GARTSIDE. The right was given him in Public Law 207. If you will read a few more lines there, it says "without regard to secthe" so-and-so of the United States Code, which is the antideficiency law. You have granted him that authority, and that was the only thority he needed. He already had authority, and you left it up to discretion, and he exercised that authority so that these particular employees would not be discriminated against. Mr. THOMAS. Thank you, gentlemen, very much. A happy new Tar to both of you. MONDAY, JANUARY 14, 1952. FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION WITNESSES STEPHEN J. SPINGARN, COMMISSIONER D. C. DANIEL, SECRETARY AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR CORWIN D. EDWARDS, DIRECTOR, BUREAU OF INDUSTRIAL ECO- JOSEPH S. WRIGHT, ASSISTANT GENERAL COUNSEL IN CHARGE OF COMPLIANCE HENRY MILLER, ASSISTANT GENERAL COUNSEL AND CHAIRMAN OF PLANNING COUNCIL EVERETT MACINTYRE, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR AND CHIEF, DIVISION OF INVESTIGATION AND LITIGATION, BUREAU OF ANTIMONOPOLY WILLIAM P. GLENDENING, JR., ASSISTANT SECRETARY AND CHIEF, DIVISION OF BUDGET AND FINANCE Mr. THOMAS. The committee will please come to order. We have with us this morning the gentlemen from the Federal Trade Commission. It is nice to see with us Commissioner Spingarn; Mr. Daniel, secretary and executive director; Mr. Sheehy, Director of the Beau of Antimonopoly; Mr. Whiteley, Director of the Bureau of Antideceptive Practices; Mr. Horton, Director of the Bureau of Industry Cooperation; Mr. Edwards, Director of the Bureau of Industrial Economics; Mr. Wright, assistant general counsel; Mr. Mer, assistant general counsel; Mr. MacIntyre, Assistant Director and Chief of the Division of Investigation and Litigation in the Bureau of Antimonopoly, and furthermore our old friend Mr. Glendening, assistant secretary and Chief of Budget and Finance. Mr. Commissioner, if you or any of your staff have a statement for us we would be delighted to hear from you. GENERAL STATEMENT Mr. SPINGARN. Yes, sir, Mr. Chairman, I have a statement here. I would like to say first that I am pinch-hitting for the Chairman who, unfortunately, has a virus infection and cannot be here. He wanted to be here with you, but he did not want to bring his infection with him to the committee, so he has delegated me. I am here on rather short notice. We put a statement together over the week end, since we had expected to be called later in the month, and I hope if the statement is not as polished as it might be that the committee will make some reasonable allowance for that. I am going to hit the high spots of this statement, Mr. Chairman, and try not to make it too long, and to summarize where I can and I request, if it is all right, that the full statement be put in as though I actually read it all. Mr. THOMAS. That is all right; take all the time you want. REQUESTED APPROPRIATION FOR 1953 Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, the Bureau of the Budget in the estimates which are before you has recommended for the Federal Trade Commission an appropriation of $4,367,000 for the fiscal year 1953. The corresponding amount appropriated and anticipated for the Commission for the fiscal year 1952 is $4,314,400, which included a supplemental appropriation of $100,000 for part of the year 1952 to start the work of enforcing the new corporate antimerger law approved December 29, 1950. Although the present estimate is $52,600 above the 1952 figure in order to put on an annual basis a supplemental appropriation of $100,000 we received for the last 8 months of fiscal 1952 to enforce the Ántimerger Act, such represents no increase for operations of the Commission over 1952. On the contrary the total sum in the budget estimate for 1953 is approximately $89,000 below the level of operations authorized by Congress for the present fiscal year. The reduction is accounted for by the fact that certain additional costs are required to be absorbed in 1953; namely, the cost of within-grade promotions and the adjustments required to be absorbed under the new annual-leave law. Furthermore, new duties will devolve upon us in 1953 under the new Fur Products Labeling Act which becomes effective August 8, 1952, and for the enforcement of which no funds were added into the estimate. FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION FUNCTIONS Now, I think that you are all familiar with the general functions of the Commission. Our general purpose, of course, is to prevent our free-enterprise system from being stifled by monopoly or corrupted by unfair and deceptive trade practices, Congress, on the recommendation of President Wilson in 1914, set up the Commission after 24 years' experience with the Sherman Act showed that breaking up monopolies after they were once formed was only a part of the answer: that it was something like trying to make eggs out of an omelet, and that you had to hit at them before they actually became too intrenched. So, the Commission was set up for the purpose of attempting to prevent the formation of monopolies, to strike at those practices which showed that they would lead to monopoly if continued long enough. I want to say in all frankness that our critics say we have not been an outstanding success. Even our friends say we have not done all we should have done or might have done. I think the truth is somewhere in between. We have done the best that we could with the Weapons at our command. The Federal Trade Commission, despite the fact that it has been given, in many respects, the biggest assignment of any of the regulatory commissions of the Government, has been at or near the bottom of the heap as far as appropriations are concerned. The ICC, the Federal Communications Commission, and the SEC have regularly gotten considerably larger appropriations than we have, although they only cover special areas and we cover substantially the whole field. I think it is worth noting that there has been an increase in economie concentration since the Trade Commission was formed, according to figures prepared by another Government agency. As an example of that, back in 1909 before we were formed the 200 largest Lonfinancial corporations in this country had about 33 percent of all of the assets of such corporations, and in 1929 the same group had about 48 percent of the total assets. In 1933 they had about 55 percent. Unfortunately, those particular figures do not continue beyond that point, but I think it is reasonable to believe that during World War II and under the new pressures that exist today there are influences pushing us toward greater economic concentraton. During the war or during a defense-mobilization period,, there are Important pressures in that direction. It is hard for small business get contracts. The natural tendency is for those to go to the figer firms, and the same thing is true of critical materials. The larger competitors find it easier to get contracts and materials and accelerated tax amortization, and so forth. While the Government Es been making vigorous efforts to resist these pressures, the fact of the matter remains that the pressures continue. It is particularly mportant, I think, in a period like this, which is unprecedented in the whole history of the United States, a defense-mobilization period without an end in sight, that we maintain our defenses against otopoly power alert and strong. Otherwise, we may win the le against foreign totalitarianism only to find that we have pped, without ever being aware of it, into some form of domestic Waltarianism. Remember, that for all we know this particular od of mobilization may last the rest of our generation, the rest of rifetimes. A brief summary of the Commission functions may be stated as To promote free and fair competition in interstate commerce he interest of the public through prevention of price-fixing agreemeats, boycotts, combinations in restraint of trade, misrepresentation conduct of business, other unfair methods of competition, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices (Federal Trade Commission Act ? To safeguard the consuming public by preventing the dissemion of false or deceptive advertisements of food, drugs, cosmetics, and devices (Federal Trade Commission Act, secs. 12 through 15). |