seventy-five
per cent of their cost. It would at least seem good national policy to
sell ships today for the price we can contract for delivery a year or
two hence, thus making the government a reservoir for continuous
construction.

We could thus stabilize building industry to some degree and also bring
the American-owned fleet into better balance, if each time that the
government sold three or four emergency constructed cargo vessels it
gave an order for one ship of a better and faster type. This would make
reduction in our ship-building steadier and would give the country the
type of ships we need.

Our joint engineering committees have examined with a great deal of care
into the organization of and our expenditure on public works and
technical services. These committees have consistently and strongly
urged the appalling inefficiency in the government organization of these
matters. They report to you that the annual expenditure on such works
and services now amounts to over $250,000,000 per annum, and that they
are carried out today in nine different governmental departments. They
report that there is a great waste by lack of national policy of
cooerdination, in overlapping with different departments, in competition
with each other in the purchase of supplies and materials, and in the
support of many engineering staffs.

They recommend the solution that almost every civilized government has
long since adopted, that is, the cooerdination of these measures into one
department under which all such undertakings should be conducted and
controlled. As a measure practical to our government, they have
advocated that all such bureaus should be transferred to the Interior
Department, and all the bureaus not relating to those matters should be
transferred from the Interior to other departments. The Committee
concludes that no properly organized and directed saving in public works
can be made until such a re-grouping and consolidation is carried out,
and that all of the cheeseparing that normally goes on in the honest
effort of Congressional committees to control departmental expenditure
is but a tithe of that which could be effected if there were some
concentration of administration along the lines long since demonstrated
as necessary to the success of private business.

Another matter of government organization to which our engineers have
given adhesion is in the matter of the national budget. To minds charged
with the pr