Company for Billie Sol

If anyone had any doubt left that the sprawling, messy Department of Agriculture needs a thorough overhauling, it was dispelled last week. Billie Sol Estes may be the farm program's biggest bad boy to date, but it became obvious that he has plenty of company. So far. the FBI has used 452 special agents from 46 cities in its Estes investigation, at a cost of $236,200; congressional investigations are expected to cost another halfmillion. But scandal was piling on scandal with such regularity that the price to the taxpayer of investigating them all might yet become a scandal of sorts itself.

Almost Grateful. Appearing before Senator John McClellan's Investigations Subcommittee, beleaguered Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman seemed almost grateful for the week's first scandal. Though there to testify about Estes, he insisted on talking about a new discovery by the Government's General Accounting Office. In 1959 and 1960. the office had found, brokers licensed by the Agriculture Department to purchase surplus cotton for the Government and sell it on the open market had profited illegally by selling $400 million worth to themselves--at prices as much as $20 a bale below market. Cost to the Government: between $12 million and $15 million, by Agriculture's own estimates. Anxious to ease the Estes burden he has carried for weeks. Freeman pointed out that the scandal had taken place under the Eisenhower Administration, that his regime had stopped it, and that he was taking steps to recoup Government losses incurred by the illegal transactions.

As Freeman was trying to lay this burden on Republican doorsteps, another turned up in his lap: two more suspensions of minor Agriculture officials came to light. The men were office managers for the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service--the agency embroiled in Billie Sol's fraudulent cotton-allotment dealings. They were ousted in connection with $28,000 worth of illegal rice-allotment sales in Texas' Brazoria and Matagorda counties over the past three years. Both cotton and rice allotments are valuable, since without them farmers are subject to unprofitably stiff penalties for planting and marketing--but their sale is distinctly illegal. Smarting at the new scandal. Freeman turned the case over to the FBI. The big question: Will the rice scandal spread across the Texas coastal rice belt?

"Put Up or Shut Up!" While the FBI went to work. Freeman came under fire for an investigation conducted by his own department. South Dakota's crusty Republican Senator Karl Mundt, a member of the McClellan committee, complained that an Agriculture Department check of his correspondence with the department had inspired Democrats in his home state to ask Freeman for evidence of any connection between Mundt and Billie Sol. Growled Mundt to Minnesotan Freeman: "In the plain Midwestern language that we both understand. I ask you to put up or shut up! If you have any evidence, bring it out on the record and don't give it to a favored newsman." Freeman shrugged off the complaint: "There was no reason we shouldn't have conducted such a survey. You had prejudged this case and brought politics into it." Then Mundt and Nebraska's Senator Carl Curtis, also on the committee, demanded--and got--promises from Freeman that the Agriculture Department will not discriminate against farmers in their states because of the Senators' roles in the Estes investigation.

All of this was hard enough on Freeman, but there was more to come. Just before the hearings ended for the week, two Agriculture Department employees from Oklahoma's Mclntosh County admitted to pocketing $1,640.80 from an Estes agent for helping to arrange cotton-allotment transfers from Oklahoma to Texas. They submitted resignations--but Freeman immediately suspended them, bringing to twelve the number of Agriculture employees he has let go or reprimanded because of links with Estes. All along, Freeman has insisted that doing business with Estes has not cost the Government a dollar. That somewhat misses the point. The real tragedy of the Billie Sol Estes affair is that he was able to corrupt so many Agriculture Department employees. The two suspended Oklahomans were small potatoes, but the potato digging is not nearly over yet. And ol' Billie Sol himself is yet to be heard from.

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