Word: gsa
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...General Services Administration has been plagued by 25 years of bad habits, and we're undoing them." So declares Vincent Alto, the GSA's special counsel, who since May has been investigating charges of theft, kickbacks and mismanagement by agency employees that are costing the Government at least $166 million a year. Alto's probe is expected to produce within a few weeks indictments against scores of GSA employees and Government suppliers. Last week the investigation won the strong backing of Jimmy Carter and led to the firing of Robert Griffin, 61, the agency's No. 2 executive...
...GSA, which spends $5 billion a year to provide Government workers with offices, supplies and motor vehicles, has been a haven for political hacks since its creation 29 years ago. Florida Democrat Lawton Chiles, whose Senate subcommittee on federal spending practices has also been investigating the agency, calls it "a graveyard for job seekers with political connections that Administrations couldn't put somewhere else...
...investigations of the GSA began to heat up when a Washington-area contractor, Robert Lowry, agreed to testify about fraud in return for immunity from prosecution. He told Chiles' subcommittee last month how GSA building managers authorized payments for millions of dollars of maintenance work that was never performed in exchange for cash payoffs, free vacations and contractor supplied prostitutes. Lowry told investigators of a contract for painting 40 miles of pipes inside the walls of a Veterans Administration building in Washington. Said he: "To find the pipes, you would have to take the plaster walls down...
...should the balance be struck? The court never answered. Instead, it found an "additional unique element that was neither advanced by the parties nor given appropriate consideration by the courts below." That "element" was the 1974 Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, under which the GSA took custody of Nixon's presidential papers and recordings in order to preserve them for public access. By empowering the GSA to set the terms for that access, wrote Powell, Congress took the tapes decision out of the courts' hands...
...Nixon, his first in a case concerning the White House tapes. In 1973 he had failed to keep the tapes from the Watergate probers, and in 1977 he had unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of the Presidential Recordings Act. Still, the battle for the tapes is far from over. The GSA's attempts to set rules for public access promise to bog down in further litigation. Only one thing is for sure: no Nixon recordings are likely to be seen rising on the pop charts any time soon...