GOVERNMENT: Good Housekeeper

In the three months since he left his Chicago textile company to take on the world’s biggest housekeeping job, General Cervices Administrator Edmund F. Mansure, 52, has found so many ways to save the Government money that he is becoming almost as legendary an economizer as was parsimonious Cal Coolidge. Mansure is so meticulous that when eating beef hash, he separates the meat from the potatoes. Unlike most bureaucrats who throw away paper clips, Mansure keeps his until he has a big enough pile to turn over to his secretary. Aware that time is also money, he saves it with staff warnings: “Observe the three Bs—be brief be bright and be gone. On all communications to me and to our staff, observe the fourth B—boil it down.”

What Mansure has been boiling down is Government fat. Last week saw two typical Mansurian economies. To provide the new Foreign Economic Policy Commission with new office furniture would have cost $17,400. Instead, he moved the agency into the space of the liquidated Wage Stabilization Board. Cost: $6.092. Mansure also produced a new procurement form which does in six pages and for about $5 worth of paper work what used to take as many as 35 pages and $10 worth of paper work.

Start at Home. Mansure found plenty of room to start economizing in his own department, which manages more than 5,000 Government buildings, buys $430 million worth of supplies yearly for federal agencies, stores enough records to fill seven Pentagon buildings, and maintains the nation’s $4 billion stockpile of critical defense materials, including feathers, sapphires, opium, castor oil and manganese. Mansure, whose agency buys $60 million worth of office supplies yearly, has already gone a long way toward trimming waste by standardizing purchases. Where GSA formerly bought 25 different chair styles, it now buys only one; instead of ten grades of paper clips, it buys four, eight steel desk types instead of 54, three kinds of toilet tissue instead of 13.

As the general landlord for all other agencies, Mansure has cracked down on wasteful habits all over Washington. By installing a motor pool, he cut the number of cars used by his own agency from 36 to eight. He also persuaded Small Business Administrator William Mitchell, who rates a $1,400 sedan, to use a $365 secondhand Mercury instead.

Sort the Trash. Mansure has even found treasure in the Government’s trash baskets. GSA housekeepers, in the first six months of this year, swept up 9,000 tons of wastepaper and sold it for $104,343, compared to a Democratic take of $54,219 for a similar period last year. The reason: instead of wasting paper by heaving it all into one basket, GSA trashmen now sort the scrap into eight piles graded according to recovery value. Thus old income-tax records bring $60 a ton, engineering maps $90, and corrugated containers $20, while mixed scrap formerly brought a meager $9 a ton.

Mansure has added to the take by a strenuous campaign to clean out old Government files. Result: for the first time in federal history, the Government two months ago began throwing away old files faster than it filled new ones. Such space saving has enabled Mansure to cut the Government’s leased office and warehouse space 10%, and he expects to lop off another 7% before next July. A by-Droduct of the housecleaning is that GSA last year bought 96,000 file cabinets at $60 apiece. This year it will need only 8,000 new ones.