What's Wrong?

Like a black sheep son, the tangle of surplus property was back on the front pages again last week. The anti-administration New York Sun was telling horrendous and undocumented tales of graft and inefficiency (sample: an unnamed War Assets Administration salesman sold $120 worth of property, collected $15,000 for expenses). In Washington, five Congressional committees were trying to find out what was wrong.

One man who thought he knew what was wrong was Louis Broido, executive vice president of Manhattan's Gimbel Bros., which has sold more surplus property than any other U.S. retailer. On the basis of this, Broido told the Senate's Mead Committee: all consumer-type surpluses should be sold through big city department stores. Under his plan, surpluses would be sold in the stores, the cash going to WAA. To do the job right, the cumbersome system of priorities for veterans, local governments, educational institutions should be scrapped.

Unwieldy Law. But, as Broido knew, the priority system was put into the badly drawn Surplus Property Act by vote-conscious Congressmen, would probably stay there. Said Broido of the hodgepodge act: "You could be the smartest merchant in the world, Old Man Original Macy or Gimbel himself, and you couldn't do a very good job . . . with this legislation."

Lieut. General E. B. Gregory, WAA administrator who had done a conscientious job administering a bad law, agreed with Broido. Priorities had held up the disposal of some surpluses as long as six months. General Gregory also liked Broido's plan for department store sales. But he did not know whether WAA had the right to use that system.

Unwieldy Inventories. And there were other troubles. Getting the services to declare items surplus was still a problem. Example: the Army had 25,000 almost-new passenger cars rusting and rotting in an Atlanta depot. When this hoard was publicized, the Army reluctantly gave up only 7,000 of them, and they were the worst of the lot.

WAA was also wrestling with the artificial division of surpluses into capital and consumer goods. Identical items might be classified differently, warehoused thousands of miles apart, described in Army or Navy nomenclature no civilian buyer could understand.

But the basic trouble was political. With every politico wanting some surplus articles, or thinking he wanted them, for schools and cities back home, no one was getting much of anything. Out of the $15 billions in declared surpluses, only $2.3 billion had been sold, and the Government got only $942 million in cash. And the investigations going on seemed to do more harm than good. Said General Gregory: "All this pressure from Congress and its various committees had made WAA a little timid about doing anything drastic."

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