The Pittsburgh Press (October 23, 1944)
‘Spend, waste’ hit by Bricker
GOP candidate assails New Deal
Cheyenne, Wyoming (UP) –
Ohio Governor John W. Bricker, assuring that there was a vital need for greater control over the spending of taxpayers’ money, today demanded extension and strengthening of the pre-audit functions of the General Accounting Office.
Arriving from Laramie, where he made his first rear-platform talk in Wyoming, the GOP vice-presidential nominee said that this reform could not be attained by “an administration drunk with power.” It could be done, he said, by Thomas E. Dewey as President and a Republican Congress.
New Deal assailed
Tracing the legislative reforms in public financing, Mr. Bricker accused the New Deal of “constantly” trying to “rob Congress of its control over government spending.”
He cited, as one example, the responsibility of the General Accounting Office to pre-audit expenditures “to make sure that money is spent as Congress intended.” This power, he explained, extended to the administrative agencies.
Mr. Bricker said:
This was too much for a New Deal… It has always been a policy [with the New Deal] of spend, waste, borrow and tax. And so, the New Deal attempted to abolish the independent pre-audit functions of the General Accounting Office… by transferring these functions to the Treasury Department, and hence subject to the President’s control.
In the Reorganization Act of 1939, Mr. Bricker pointed out, Congress “retained the independent pre-audit functions of the General Accounting Office intact.”
He said:
There is a vital need in Washington for greater control over the spending of taxpayers’ money. This will not be done by an administration drunk with power and bent upon making another Reichstag and rubberstamp out of our Congress.
From Cheyenne, Mr. Bricker will carry his campaign into Colorado with rear-platform talks at Greeley and Brighton. He delivers his main Colorado speech tonight in Denver.