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By mid-November most arguments were threshed out, and the bureau examiners went upstairs to defend their figures before the Director's Review, presided over by Hughes's deputy, Percival Brundage (ex-senior partner of the Price Waterhouse accounting firm). Some half-dozen times Hughes snapped the latest batch of approved budgets into a notebook, and took them to Gettysburg for presidential approval. When the President would give "his O.K., Hughes would write the agency head what is called an "allowance letter," stating the presidential-approved figure. Only six budgetary points went over his head to the President, and these included the controversial programs for foreign aid, agriculture relief and defense (which Ike always decides personally anyway).
Caught by Cotter Pins. Washington has been something of a jolt for the man who has spent a lifetime in the symmetrical, sense-making world of banking. In auditing Defense Department expenses, for example, he learned that a few expensive, unnecessary items had to stay in the budget because they affected the home folks of Congressmen or Senators with critical votes to cast on the whole budget. He had to learn to jump at a growl from the members of the House Appropriations Committee. Only last week, while his head was swimming with the billions of the new budget, old John Taber, ranking Republican on the committee, confronted him with a packet of individually wrapped cotter pins and washers and demanded an explanation for such flagrant waste.
Part of the Budget Bureau's job is to clear all proposed legislation before the executive agencies submit it to Congress; this not only allows the bureau to shortstop any requests for new spending, but ensures the President that nobody is proposing legislation contrary to his announced policies. (The Budget Bureau keeps a card file of presidential opinion on all subjects, even compiled one on Adlai Stevenson in 1952 for use had he won.)
In 1953 Joe Dodge flagged the President that TVA was asking for money for a new steam plant at Fulton, Tenn. This was a fresh challenge to Eisenhower's resolve to keep government out of business if private industry could do the job as well. Dodge hired Adolphe H. Wenzell, vice president of the First Boston Corp. (investment bankers), to suggest ways of getting the plant built without tapping the budget. The now celebrated Dixon-Yates contract (TIME, Aug. 2, 1954 et seq.) was the result.