And then you have got the total increase which would allow 27 new positions which cost $171,000. Mr. DIXON. Right. NEW POSITIONS REQUESTED Senator MAGNUSON. Twenty-five are in the policing of the Wool, Fur, Textile, and Flammable Act. Now, can you get along without the 25? Mr. DIXON. It would be very difficult to get along without them, sir. Senator MAGNUSON. I know it would be difficult. Mr. DIXON. We only have 37 inspectors now. We brought those exhibits you have here to show you today, and this is a tremendous industry in the wool, fur, and textile fields. Senator MAGNUSON. Do you think you can get along without adding to your employment? Mr. DIXON. You mean curtail You Senator MAGNUSON. Keep you where you are. We have got to add all these other things because they are almost built into the costs. cannot help it. Mr. DIXON. Well, we would be in the same position we are in on antitrust, and our workload increases, and we know all we can do is promise we will do the best we can. Senator MAGNUSON. All right. Because this committee is still-and I think I speak for everyone here and those that are not here—still determined to keep the Federal employment level at the present level or less. Senator ALLOTT. Mr. Chairman, could I ask Senator MAGNUSON. Do I speak for all three of us? Senator MONRONEY. Yes. Senator ALLOTT. Yes. Could I ask a question? Senator MAGNUSON. The other-excuse me, off the record. (Discussion off the record.) SUMMATION OF PERSONNEL REQUIREMENTS Senator ALLOTT. This is along the lines of your questioning, Mr. Chairman. You now have 1,148 employees and you were authorized 1,178 last year. Mr. DIXON. 1,178; yes, sir. Mr. GLENDENING. The same for 2 years in a row. Senator ALLOTT. Yes, 1963 and 1964. How much money would it require to take care of the pay raises and the promotions and actually bring you back up to the 1,178? Mr. GLENDENING. All but the $171,000 that we asked for the new employees. Senator ALLOTT. All but the $171,000. Mr. GLENDENING. Yes, sir. Senator ALLOTT. Now, I would like to ask you another question. As you know, appropriations were passed very late last year. My recollection is that this committee did not get its bill until October. We passed it in the Senate some 30 days later. My recollection is November 13. It would be somewhere around that area, and we were 31-706-64-pt. 1——27 informed yesterday that the bill was enacted into law by the President on December 9. DATE OF RELEASE OR ALLOCATION. Now, I would like to ask you when did you get your release or allocations of money so that you could go ahead and operate under this appropriation for the balance of the 1964 year? Mr. GLENDENING. Treasury warrants were signed and approved approximately-within about 3 or 4 days after the President signed the bill. However, one of the things that hurt us, the thing that has caused us to have financial problems all this year is the fact that we were at our ceiling when we came into the fiscal year-we had 1,177 employees on July 1 as against an authorized strength of 1,178. During the period when we did not have appropriations, we had to let our staff go by attrition. We had to hold down all types of expenses in order just to pay salaries. But when we finally got our appropriation, by reason of having had the extra employees at the early part of the year, we had to maintain a lower rate all during the balance of the year to get through. Senator ALLOTT. Well, the reason I asked these questions, it is very obvious that I am concerned about the effect upon the agencies of the slowness of the appropriation bill. EFFECTS OF LATE APPROPRIATIONS. Mr. DIXON. Senator, on that point, may I interrupt just a minute? This is one of the biggest problems that faces me at the Commission, just what you are talking about. How do you hire-let us just make it simple. How do you hire secretaries? The young secretaries that come out of high school want a job and want to know where they are going to go to work in June. Now, I am short of secretaries right now, very much so, and we could not get our money by that time, but I cannot very well tell someone to come to work on July 1. We have to have money in hand to tell someone to come to work. Now, when you get the young attorneys, they get out of law school and take their bars, and they come down here usually in January and February, and I have a backlog of some of the finest talent in America willing to come to work for the Government, and I cannot promise them a job, and they-usually a man wants to know several months in advance. So actually under the way our moneys are being appropriated today, from a planning standpoint on personnel, I will tell you it is chaos. And I lose very fine talent this way. REASON FOR CUT IN PERSONNEL Senator ALLOTT. All right. Now, I do not quite understand one thing. Your appropriation for 1963 was $11,472,000. At the termination of the fiscal year you had on board 1,177 employees. Now, are you trying to say that the raises in personnel alone-well, if you only had $11,472,000 for the year, and you did hold up on your employees, why did you have to drop so many off? I do not understand it. Mr. GLENDENING. Because the cost of the employees was greater than the money that we finally received. We were held, you see, during the first 6 months' operation to lower funds and Senator MAGNUSON. No. You were held to what we appropriated last year. Mr. GLENDENING. Right, but Senator MAGNUSON. What do you mean by "lower"? That is a relative term, whether it is lower or higher. Mr. GLENDENING. But the appropriations for the previous year, taking into consideration the pay raises, would not have carried the 1,177 on a full-year basis, and we already had them on board. Senator MAGNUSON. You had to let a few people go to take care of the pay raise. Mr. GLENDENING. That is right. We had to absorb a considerable portion of the pay raise. Senator MAGNUSON. But you were not held to anything lower. You were held to the level of the appropriations in the previous year. Mr. GLENDENING. That is right. But that would not carry that many people. Senator MAGNUSON. Of course it would not. In some cases that was deliberate. Mr. GLENDENING. It was moneywise, not personnelwise. Senator MAGNUSON. That was deliberate. You got along fine, didn't you? Mr. GLENDENING. No. I could not say that we have. Senator MAGNUSON. Well, you have got a statement here you are doing great work down there. Mr. DIXON. Senator, we could get along with whatever Congress is going to give us. Senator MAGNUSON. You are going to have to get along. Mr. DIXON. If you give us $12 million, we will give you, we hope, a $12 million job. But we start facing a mighty big job and mighty big problems. Senator ALLOTT. This is a 14-percent raise in 2 years. Mr. GLENDENING. But at the same time it is not in personnel. Senator MAGNUSON. I think sometimes 8 people can do the same job as 10 people if they want to do it. PROBLEMS OF AGENCY Mr. DIXON. I wish someone would teach me how to do it. You have given us one of the biggest law shops in the Government. We have 500 attorneys, and I have 2 men on a merger case and opposing them might be a dozen and my man might get $9,000 and they get a million dollars. Senator MAGNUSON. That sharpens his wits. Mr. DIXON. Make a fine lawyer out of him. Senator MONRONEY. If you have got 500 lawyers, how many investigators do you have? INVESTIGATORS Mr. DIXON. You mean investigators like-some of our attorneys serve as Mr. GLENDENING. We have only about 35 investigators as such. Mr. DIXON. We have some 200 attorney-investigators in the field. They call them that. I call them attorneys. TIME REQUIRED TO PROCESS COMPLAINTS Senator MONRONEY. They go out and look at the complaints received. In other words, it seems on one or two cases where complaints have been made, it seems to take about 2 years on a very simple matter of what is inside a mattress; for example, false advertising claims, and I guess you can understand why an investigator, and then consideration of that matter by the Commission Mr. DIXON. This is what is bothering me. I am getting frustrated myself. I feel like an old woman. I am always looking behind myself. We sat down at the Commission table going through the Wheeler-Lea side of our work talking about hundreds of cases more than 2 years old, 1 year old, and going back-you talk about frustration. You get a case up to a point to be ready, and you have to run it through another eye of the needle to go look for experts to testify, and by the time you get them, the evidence is too old. You have to come back over here and look again. You talk about a losing gamethis is it. And I think that this management of this kind of thing is very disheartening sometimes. Your question is very well put, Senator. The only answer I can give you is that we have only so much; we are so thin that I have priorities inside priorities. I am smart enough to know when a priority ought to be set up, but I get too many of these things sometimes. BACKLOG OF CASES Senator MONRONEY. What is the estimate of backlog of cases? Mr. DIXON. Two years. Senator MONRONEY. For a case filed today, it would take 2 years before it would Mr. DIXON. I want to tell you this is not altogether true. Yesterday or the day before we heard a case under our new system that we started 2 or 3 years ago, and we were hearing it within 1 year, and we could have decided it from the bench, but we decided it in due course, and we made it within 1 year. I tell you we ought to have one of those flags flving around. E for excellent. Senator MAGNUSON. Excellent award. Mr. DIXON. The first nine cases I heard when I came to the Commission-I do not know whether that is a fair number-the first group I heard I started noting the time the complaint had been filed and how much time elapsed and how many days of hearings had elapsed, and they averaged 3 years, and many of those first cases had only 6 or 8 or 9 days hearings but it took 3 years to get it to us. Senator MAGNUSON. That is the problem. The staff. Not you people. When you get a case up in front of the Commission, you fellows decide it with pretty good dispatch, but the staff has got more cobwebs to get through before it gets up to you, and the web gets greater and greater, and you get too much information. It is like reading the morning newspaper. When you are all through with it, you have read 50,000 words, and you only remember 5. HEARING EXAMINERS Mr. DIXON. I noticed a question that Senator Hruska asked me. One of them has to do with the number of hearing examiners, how many hearing examiners we have and how many cases we have. Do they have less than that? And I tell you in advance they have got less, and I am proud of it because when I came here I had about 15 hearing examiners, and I begged for more money. I said if we are going to have any delay, let us not have it while getting ready to try. Let us have a hearing examiner waiting, and we rearranged ourselves so those hearing examiners would not have alibies or anything except to go to work and have a constant trial and get it over with. And we are in that position now and we are getting current to where if we cannot lead, if we cannot guide, if we cannot straighten out by negotiation or something, we want to save our strength that you give us for the recalcitrant that wants a trial, and we want to give it to him and get it over with. Senator MAGNUSON. It just reminds me of what a fine job we have been doing on the money we gave him last year. Senator MONRONEY. Thank you, Mr. Díxon, members of the Commission, committee, and the staff. (Whereupon, at 10:05 a.m., Friday, April 24, 1964, the subcommittee was recessed, to reconvene Wednesday, April 29, 1964, at 8:30 a.m.) |