Word: gsa
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Recently, Mansure walked by the GSA building and was shocked at "the unsightly appearance caused by the lack of uniformity in the position of the Venetian blinds." To avoid offending the esthetic glances of tourists, he decreed that all Venetian blinds in his building would be arranged just so (halfway up in the daytime, all the way down at night), promised "periodic inspections . . . to assure compliance." Then he found that many Government workers were writing on only one side of paper. His next order: memos will be typed or printed on both sides. As every bureaucrat knows, writing on both...
...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...
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...
...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...
...McKay after the White House turned down the nomination of Marvin Nichols, a hydraulics and sewage engineer, and a Texas Democrat. Although he supported Ike in 1952, Nichols also served Harry Truman as nickel adviser to General Services Administrator Jess Larson, was deeply involved in the sticky affairs of GSA's big Nicaro nickel plant in Cuba. After the facts of the Nicaro mess were told in the June issue of FORTUNE, the White House turned thumbs down on Nichols' appointment...