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Show Though Officially Dead OPA Still Carries 15,000 On Payroll As far as production is concerned con-cerned the OPA is i dead duck. Anyone who has tr.e inclination can walk into the huge office building hou.sin; the deceased pjice control agency and find hundreds of employees wandering wander-ing around tha corridors, sipping cokes or hot coffee, chatting about this and that, reading everything from comic books to "How To Train Fleas" a copy of which was found on one supervisor's su-pervisor's desk opened to page 22. Ask the average American and he will tell you that the OPA is finished, non-existent. It is unfortunate un-fortunate that every taxpayer in the United States cannot have a ring-side seat at the House Appropriations Ap-propriations Committee hearings and learn the facts of life as they relate to Federal bureaucracy. bureauc-racy. Among the scores of tricks and cheap subterfuge engaged in by the OPA'ers to extend their tenure ten-ure on the government payroll, Rep. John Taber (R. N. Y.) and his colleagues have uncovered an intra-agency employment service ser-vice established by the OPA hierarchy hi-erarchy for the purpose of securing secur-ing jobs for those economists, lawyers and researchers who to date have been unable to secure employment at the fancy government govern-ment rates to which they have been accustomed. This exclusive OPA employment service is staffed by some of the top-priced personnel in the agency who have thus contrived to remain on the payroll until the last gasp of its appropriation. It has also been noted that the job-hunters are using the government frank to send out their job applications as well as enclosing self-addressed franks for reply. Another costly boondoggle is the OPA's recent establishment of the "Office of Public Records" a device well-known to Washington Wash-ington observers for drawing out the liquidation process of an agency. ag-ency. Slowly, but surely, every high-priced economist in the OPA will get himself an assignment assign-ment from the "Office of Public Records" and then proceed to make it so complex and intricate that its accomplishment will run from weeks to months to years. . For example: The National Industrial In-dustrial Recovery Administra- tion, one of the first New Deal agencies, was declared unconstitutional uncon-stitutional in March, 1936, but it was not until January, 1944 that the last NRA employee left the payroll of its public records division, which was a haven for inefficient and indolent government govern-ment employees until the war agencies offered greener pastures. pas-tures. The nucleus of the OPA hierarchy is similar to that of the NRA. These economists, lawyers, administrators and advisers ad-visers are older, more bureaucratic bureau-cratic and sluggish than they were 10 ears ago, but they cling with undiminished tenacity to the Federal payroll. Congressman Taber, who has been trying to educate his more naive colleagues -as to what is going on right under their noses, demanded the OPA employment records on January 15, 1947. The reluctant bureaucrats took their lime in getting the information informa-tion to him and obviously tried to soften their figures but try as they would they could not hide the fact that the "inactive" OPA still has on its payroll over 15,000 employees, 5.000 of whom receive over $4,000 per annum. In the Washington office of-fice alone, there arc 914 persons receiving over $4,000 a year and averaging $6,336 per year per employee. |