Separating the Hash

Not many top Washington officials are as meticulous as General Services Administrator Edmund F. Mansure. He carefully separates the meat from the potatoes before he eats a plate of beef hash. In similar fashion he has separated the nation's $1 billion annual housekeeping bill into such components as paper clips, office desks and procurement forms, thereby saved the Government $150 million last year. But not all of Mansure's orders have made dollar-saving sense.

Recently, Mansure walked by the GSA building and was shocked at "the unsightly appearance caused by the lack of uniformity in the position of the Venetian blinds." To avoid offending the esthetic glances of tourists, he decreed that all Venetian blinds in his building would be arranged just so (halfway up in the daytime, all the way down at night), promised "periodic inspections . . . to assure compliance." Then he found that many Government workers were writing on only one side of paper. His next order: memos will be typed or printed on both sides. As every bureaucrat knows, writing on both sides does save paper. But as everyone else knows, this makes the writing on either side almost illegible. Later, to clear up a foggy point, Mansure decreed: "Over" will be written at the bottom of the page when both sides are used.

Last week Mansure cast a baleful eye on leaky water faucets and warned: "A dripping faucet [wastes] 30-c- a month." Wastebaskets also caught his eye. Wrote Mansure: "When papers have missed the wastebasket and desks are littered, the cleaning operation takes as much as 75% more time per unit cleaned." His newest order: "Keep your desk neat, and your aim at the wastebasket true."

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