Imperial Valley Press

Repercussions of the recent Henry Wallace-Jesse Jones fight are apt to be bouncing around in administrative circles for many moons to come.

First off, you may expect some sort of a face-lifting operation to save the vice president's face. The White House administrative assistants and Budget Bureau experts who presumably wrote the executive order divorcing Mr. Wallace from his beloved Board of Economic Warfare are now reportedly going around wondering how they really could have been so cruel to Henry who is, after all, No. 2 man in the New Deal. Early reaction was that Henry had been ditched. That sentiment is changing now. Henry must be made to look good.

Secondly, it is going to take months to effect the reorganization of the Wallace and Jones government agencies which the executive order so glibly shuffled about. So vast and so complicated have these multi-billion dollar government agencies become that there are few people even in government who know what they are doing.

COLLOSSAL COMPLICATIONS

The foreign operations of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation subsidiaries, for instance, are unbelievably colossal, and all bound up with domestic operations in the same commodities. Switching control and management of these corporations is the equivalent of a series of international big business deals which would take private industry months and months to negotiate. Frankly, some of the government executives charged with the responsibility of making these reorganizations don't know how they are to be effected.

To get some conception of what this order means, it is necessary to invent a parallel. Imagine, then, that one of the big corporations like General Electric or General Motors were ordered to transfer all their foreign business to another company overnight. This switching around of government agencies is a bigger deal by far than both the two examples would be, together, for the reason that the RFC subsidiary operations are in the cases of some 50 items monopoly trading rights. Involved are such things as the purchase of Cuba's entire sugar crop, import of all wool from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa for distribution to both the United Kingdom and the United States, the import of all strategic materials from Russia, and so on and so on and so on.

Third. Congress is going to have a look at all these goings on. Sen. Harry Flood Byrd's committee on the reduction of non-essential federal expenditures has previously indicated a desire to look over RFC operations. The President's order transferring the foreign part of this show to the new Office of Economic Warfare under Leo. T. Crowley specifying that RFC should continue to finance them until OEW could get its own appropriations from Congress simply means that this whole business will have to be opened up and some of it is so fantastic that it will not bear scrutiny because of the tremendous multi-million dollar losses which it necessarily involves.

STATE DEPARTMENT TAKES OVER

Fourth, and most important of all, the reshuffling of these government operations was a tremendous victory for Secretary Cordell Hull and the State Department, by reason of the fact that the policy making on all non-military foreign operations of all government agencies is now to be managed by the State Department and hereafter all loose ends are to be tied together through the foreign service officers of the State Department.

Secretary Hull has been preparing for this step for a long time. Two years ago, almost without notice, a new Board of Economic Operations was created in the State Department under Assistant Secretary Dean Acheson. Some time later, the Department established a new post, Counselor of Embassy for Economic Affairs. First appointments to this new position were made in the Latin American capitals. Extension of Board of Economic Operations to other countries means simply that the State Department is going to be boss. Also it means that Foreign Service officers of the State Department can no longer be just diplomats. From here on they will have to be business men as well.