New Dog

Set up under the Budget & Accounting Act of 1921 was the office of the Comptroller General, with twofold duty of okaying Government expenditures before they are made and auditing them afterwards.* First recipient of this 15-year appointment was crusty Republican John R. McCarl, whose term did not end until 1936. So crusty was "General" McCarl that long before the New Deal spenders became his greatest antagonists, he was famed as "The Watchdog of the Treasury." Since 1933, Franklin Roosevelt has twice tried, twice failed to draw the Comptroller General's teeth through Reorganization.

Unable to do anything about the office, the President last week did the next best thing by picking an incumbent to his taste. To replace Acting Comptroller Richard Nash Elliott, an Indiana Republican almost as snappish as Mr. McCarl, Mr. Roosevelt bestowed a full appointment on jovial, jowly Democrat Frederick Herbert Brown of New Hampshire, who lost his Senate seat last November. Now 59, he will receive $10,000 a year until he is 70.

Fred Brown's continued stay in Washington will assure that city's baseball team of one of its steadiest customers. Fred Brown has followed baseball ever since he left Dartmouth in sophomore year (1901) to join the Boston Braves. A sore arm in his second season forced him out of baseball, into law and politics, but never out of the grandstand.

Fred Brown's appointment was promptly confirmed by his old Senate colleagues. Friends of the new Comptroller, a loyal New Dealer despite his long ballpark friendship with John Nance Garner, thought he would earnestly try to compose the General Accounting Office's present squabbles with the Treasury, TVA, and other Government agencies. But if a Republican administration comes into office in the next ten years, Fred Brown may become a watchdog in earnest.

*Published last month by the Yale University Press was the first full-dress critical study of The Comptroller General by Assistant Professor Harvey C. Mansfield of Yale. Conclusions: that the Comptroller has become a law unto himself, imposed "nearly intolerable" conditions on operating establishments under his control, that his status and duties should be reconsidered by Congress.

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