Chairman RIBICOFF. It is my feeling that Presidential condidates, members of the judiciary and Members of Congress should be treated exactly the same.

Mr. COHEN. I agree with you on the policy.

Chairman RIBICOFF. As a policy, I think it would be wrong for us to have one requirement for the President and Vice President. Another requirement for the members of the Cabinet, and another for the judiciary.

I think we all should have the same requirements, the same regulations.

Mr. COHEN. I quite agree with that.

One of the reasons we designed the form for the Presidential candidate, is that these candidates in fact view it as a kind of technical assistance program to be able to come up with a decent financial disclosure statement.

Chairman RIBICOFF. Common Cause would have no difficulty with a provision whereby in a category where a piece of property, or an asset does not have a ready market value, that you could either put market value, or acquisition costs?

Mr. COHEN. Right, or make it fit under the categories of amount. Chairman RIBICOFF. Senator Percy?

Senator PERCY. I would like, first of all, to thank you very much indeed, Mr. Cohen, for the very thoughtful statement that Common Cause has put together, and the details that you have gone through.

Do you have any idea, for coverage of the three branches of Government, how many people are involved-how many people would be required to file under the type of legislation that you support?

Mr. COHEN. About 15,000 people, are over the $30,000 category, it is about 127,000, I think, under the over $25,000 category.

Senator PERCY. Well, that is not an unmanageable number then. I wonder if you could comment, or have you thought about the blind trust route?

I think that Arthur Burns testified he had set up the blind trust. I went into one in 1970 and Mrs. Percy went into one in 1971. In looking back at it recently and our experience, it is terribly frustrating to never have the trustee able to discuss with the principal the investment policy other than in the broadest kind of terms.

It is hard to even intelligently talk about it and stick with the letter and spirit of that blind trust.

Second, it is very expensive. Trustees assume huge responsibilities, and the taxes are more expensive. Let me just say I am not so sure that I want to keep it. I don't know if it really is worth it.

Maybe disclosure is a lot easier, and yet I know it is such a gross thing to have to do. I don't know how Everett Dirksen used to feel about it, but is a blind trust in your judgment, if I decided to keep it, and others decided to keep it, like Arthur Burns, a good mechanism? Obviously, disclosure would break a blind trust and require every blind trust to be broken, and I think they were engaged in by people who really wanted to protect the public interest.

Mr. COHEN. No question about that, they were engaged by people who wanted to protect the public interest, and indeed, when some of us were struggling with this problem in earlier years, a blind trust was viewed as a perfectly reasonable appropriate way to handle it.

I think events compel us to change, they certainly do prospectively, and one of the things we are asking for in our various efforts of trying to improve the advice and consent process of this body, is that appointees make a public financial disclosure, in advance of confirmation, not only the committee, but so it is out on the table in a public manner, and that is because that kind of step becomes necessary when you have the kind of situations that we find every day in the newspaper, so I think a blind trust is really not the way to go.

I think disclosure is important, and I think there is some other aspects that are important, at least, as it relates to the Congress short of any divestiture, and that is a rule of abstention.

Now, where the conflict is precise, where it affects your committee work or the subject matter, and the rule of abstention I think is the only way that it can work.

I have struggled and thought of my colleagues, who discussed this up and down, what happens if you are going to vote against your own economic interests, and some members at times will do that, but we still think the rule of abstention will apply.

That cannot work on the executive branch, and I think we have to begin, once we have disclosure and see how it works, begin struggling, and we are trying to work out sensible policies of divestiture.

Senator PERCY. Another area has concerned me, and I have had to struggle with it. I supported the Case bill, and voted for it, and I support it today, but I cannot help but be concerned when I go over on the subway car, and see the number of Senators being followed by the Secret Service. Every time a Governor is down here, he is surrounded by his guards.

Every once in a while, I got one this weekend, the Secret Service delivers to me a threatening letter against my life by some nut, who, somehow, got it into his mind that I was the cause of all his troubles. I have also noticed there has been a rash of robberies and break-ins of Senators' homes.

We cannot get out of our minds that at the time our home was broken into and our daughter was killed, that there was public disclosure that I was worth so much money. The gangs that do these things, the police and the FBI have tracked them down and have isolated it down to two or three different groups, each one were drugrelated groups. And each one of them had a methodical way of determining who had money and who had wealth. They had access to insurance records. You look at the city of New York, and the number of junkies out on the street, and they grab a newspaper, and can read a periodic disclosure of people having wealth. I would say for the most part, public officials, at least in the Congress, and I suppose others are well above average. They are reasonably successful people, and they have come here.

Are we going to intensify this concern? I must say it is a matter of real concern to our wives. Have you thought through that, and balanced it all out?

We are looking for what is in the public good, and we want to go that route, but I want to be certain that we just do not just rush into legislation without thinking about every single aspect of it, and then doing what we can to protect ourselves against it.

If you have the finances of these 15,000 people being disclosed, most of them are going to be down here in Washington, or have their homes

here. Their travel records are public knowledge, and we all know when we leave here on the weekends. If somebody has a financial disclosure of net worth that is listed, for example, a piece of property worth so many hundreds of thousands of dollars, are we just opening up members in public life who already are opened up to an awful lot of abuse, to real physical danger as well as their families? Have we thought through and balanced out the good that we are going to obtain against this problem? Is there any way you have thought about how we can protect that interest then if the general good says, as I have concluded today, that disclosure probably is the only route we can go? We have to take our chance on some of these other things, but is this something Common Cause has thought out?

Mr. COHEN. We have approached this from a balancing view, and I think that is evident by our response to the tax aspect.

I think there is no question that there was an inevitable conflict of values, not so much with the public asserting as such, but when we are dealing with spouse, independent children, I think the problem is that there is so clearly a community of interests, in the financial aspect, as opposed to the way we exercise free speech.

I mean, our spouses may give campaign contributions differently than from mine, mine may give it differently from the way I would do it, and the rest of us, and so I think there is a distinction there. I do think that, I think we in our own discussions, we are sensitive, at least we try to be sensitive to the problem you have raised.

We think on balance, that once you routinize disclosure, it becomes a custom; it's accepted, it prevents against abuses, and that what often happens now is that because disclosure is so chaotic, when someone makes an announcement in his campaign that he will disclose what he is doing, so we think the routinization is in part a protection, and we certainly think that this is something that the committee will obviously have to grapple with.

Senator PERCY. I am going to limit myself to one more question and yield to Senator Javits, and when we have the second go-round, I will come back on some other detailed questions. At this time my question relates to the distinction between public officials, public office holders, and government people, and then the line we draw between government and nongovernment, and the so-called private

sector.

Now, so far as I am concerned, you are about as public as I am. Your salary, if you receive a salary, is paid for by tax deducted

money.

Mr. COHEN. Not tax deducted money.

Senator PERCY. That is right. Common Cause is not.

Mr. COHEN. It is not tax deducted, but it is paid for by small contributions of members.

Senator PERCY. That is right. It is not deductible, but let us say you are a charitable foundation, it is deductible.

Are they public or not?

Labor unions are paid by the dues of the workers. I happen to think that the Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations probably has a duty to take a good hard look at the Teamsters Union.

In the interests of the Teamsters themselves, to see what is being done, once a person is an official of a labor union, or of a public stock

company, or goodness knows what else, is he in a position where he should be making public disclosure to stockholders and to union members? Where do we end this process? As Everett Dirksen said, over his dead body will he ever do this. Are we not going to put public officials in a secondary category and make second rate citizens out of them?

Is there another step that we will have to take to have full public disclosure by a lot of other people, and where do we stop then?

Mr. COHEN. Well, I think, I do not think we should enter into the private sector at this point, and I don't know there are some items where probably there are limits on what we should require, and I do not think they at least at this point go to the public financial disclosure in the private sector.

We have our own system of internal accountability, and we follow it. I do think a financial disclosure statement to the chairman of the Common Cause Finance Committee is proper, and we do that, but I do not think this is the time to move into the private sector.

I think you have a problem, Senator Percy, of wanting to be able to attract people to public service, and there was a lot said about financial disclosure, removing people from public service.

We have had some experience, and some very sweeping legislation, far more sweeping than this legislation, and the States of Washington, Oregon, and California, and people do not resign, but if you did, and in the State of Washington, only one resigned, and 275 States elected officials, out of 378 county officials only 2 resigned, out of 7,500 public officials affected by this in California, only 50 resigned.

There is another aspect hardly ever written about, Governor McCall, when he was Governor of Oregon, really in response to a suggestion made by Common Cause, he requested people to serve on certain commissions, voluntary commissions, all of them were bound by the financial disclosure and conflict of interest laws.

This helped Governor McCall make the appointment for a wider range of people than he otherwise would have been able to, and there were just loads of volunteers of people who were willing to serve, so I think we ought to start with the public sector, and in this sense, I think as Senator Dirksen said about the Civil Rights Act, the time for this has come, I think really applies to this, and I think that belief from the public sector could begin to set a standard that others might follow, but that people up to, and that would be a healthy event. Senator PERCY. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent at this point in the record, that it be left open, for a few days, so that Mr. Cohen could just double check that figure of 15,000.

Chairman RIBICOFF. Without objection, that will be done. Senator PERCY. At the time the Mansfield amendment passed, which required that employees over $20,000 would have to file, GAO estimated 312,000 Federal employees would be required to file.

I think it is quite important that we know how big a task we are taking on, and if the 15,000 is the correct figure, then that is a manageable figure.

Mr. COHEN. I used two figures, one for the people over $30,000, and the other for the people over $25,000.

Chairman RIBICOFF. If we have that for the record, I think it would help.

[The information submitted by Common Cause follows:]

It has been very difficult to get an exact number of employees covered at various salary levels. The figures I referred to during my testimony, however, were taken from research prepared by the General Accounting Office in July 1974, at congressional request. The GAO figures are as follows:

Federal Employees earning $25,000 or GS-15 level or above-approximately 127,000.

Federal Employees earning $30,000 or GS-16 level or above-approximately 15,000.

Senator JAVITS. Thank you very much, Mr. Cohen.

I have myself followed a practice of extensive disclosure not including the blind trust, although I do have a small family trust.

I could not do it anyhow, because it is not in my control, and I found that very satisfactory, but I am a little bit disturbed by your reference to the rule of abstention for this reason, take a little trust like ours. It is small, but it is important to us.

We have public securities. We may have 1,000 shares or 500 shares of that, but it has no direct, significant impact whatever.

I really do not feel in good conscience that I can deprive the people of my State, of my vote, on major public questions. Let us say, I have 1,000 shares of Cities Service, which I may have added over 30 years to this trust.

It is ridiculous for me to abstain from voting on energy policy, and it would be very unfair to the people of my State.

It also would be very unfair to say that a public official cannot own 1,000 shares of Cities Service.

What do you think about that?

Mr. COHEN. Well, Senator, if I told you, I neglected to do one thing, if I may, and if the record could show at the right spot, I neglected to introduce my colleagues, Mike Cole on my right, who is our legislative director, and Ann McBride, our principal lobbyist on the issue and who has helped us tremendously on this financial disclosure issue, and the two of them, along with John Gardner, others that we have had extensive discussions on the very points that you have raised, the conflict between a constituency and its legitimate concerns, and the question of when you are abstain.

When I said abstention, Senator, but I did not say, perhaps what I should have said, is that you have to develop ground rules and criteria around abstention.

I think committee work is different from floor work. I have tried to allude to that, when I said the conflict ought to be direct, and that probably raises more questions than it answers, but I think we have to figure out some kind of a rule, and a rule that people can understand, and begin to apply, in a more even candid way.

Senator JAVITS. Well, just to give a practical experience, I have no tension about this thing at all.

I have voted on all kinds of things. I do not know how they do or do not affect any particular security, but I have never asked for an abstention, and I do believe thoroughly in disclosure, and I have gone to great pains to make disclosures of all kinds, of anything which might conceivably be personal.