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Last February Alabama's Lister Hill charged in the Senate that Wenzell's firm, the First Boston Corp., stood to make a profit from handling Dixon-Yates financing. The Kefauver committee dredged up the fact that Wenzell had asked Rowland Hughes if his Budget Bureau work presented a conflict of interest. When Hughes was summoned, he replied vaguely that he had told Wenzell to check with First Boston and Joe Dodge. Non-politician Hughes was jolted to his eyeteeth to discover that he was suddenly a major target in the all-out Democratic attack on the Dixon-Yates contract. Rattled by the committee's questions, he suffered lapses of memory on vital points, and left a bad impression. He was at his most lucid when he said: "We may have made mistakes, the Lord knows, but there was nothing phony or dishonest or any conspiracy with anybody as far as any dealings that we had . . . Now today, with all that I know now, I certainly would have done differently."
Calculated Confusion. The forces of politics, and the planned inefficiency of a system of checks and balances, will always partially sabotage any U.S. budget program. To these old problems, modern government has added a new and perhaps greater trouble for the top budgetmakers: the experts in the bureaus know so much more about the technical details than any Budget Director or President or Congressman can ever hope to know that the discussion of specific appropriations is always loaded in favor of the bureaucrats. Honestly and inevitably, each bureaucrat, convinced of the importance of his own work, tends to maximize his estimates. The advocacy representing the Government's parts is more powerful than that which speaks for the whole. That is one reason why many Government functions continue to grow and others hold their own even in an administration whose top leaders believe that Government should shrink.
Joe Dodge and Rowland Hughes probably have come as close as is presently possible to fusing business efficiency with the myriad and disparate bureaus and functions of the U.S. Government. Again it was Charlie Dawes, the man with the first word on the budget, who also had the last word on the paradoxes that might arise when a department of orderliness tries to operate in a government of calculated confusion. "Much as we love the President," he adjured his fellow budgeteers, "if Congress, in its omnipotence over appropriations, passed a law that garbage should be put on the White House steps, it would be our regrettable duty, as a bureau, in an impartial, non-political and nonpartisan way, to advise the Executive and Congress on how the largest amount of garbage could be spread in the most inexpensive and economical manner.