I am sorry to say that Commissioner Moore, for some reason or other, assumed we were inviting him as a policymaker, or politician. We are not. At any rate, he may apparently have assumed the role of defender of policymakers. And when the staff invited him for a reappearance this month, he once more made clear his reluctance to appear. The general thrust of his comment was that he could not be assumed to be an objective interpreter and that we were, therefore, taking advantage of his dual capacity. This presumption, I repeat, is completely wrong.

A 11 In addition, we have asked the Bureau of Labor Statistics to send any one of their several expert technicians to this hearing. Mr. Moore was unavailable. We feel we should hear-and I believe the Congress has a right to hear from a competent person who can interpret the unemployment figures in an objective and technically competent way. That is all we ask and we have every right to make a request and have it honored.

Now, think of it. We asked for one, as I understand it, out of seven technicians, one to come before this committee which has the responsibility, as a bipartisan committee of the House and Senate, the responsibility with respect to recommending economic policy to Members of the Congress. And it appears that not one of these technicians is going to appear.

By way of background concerning this meeting, I would like to read the telegram I sent to Secretary Hodgson yesterday. This is

what I said:

In view of continued high unemployment, it is imperative that the administration adopt a policy of strong wage-price guidelines so that we may immediately pursue more stimulative fiscal-monetary policies to get unemployment down and get the economy moving ahead to rapid attainment of our growth potential.

One crucial factor in congressional and general public understanding of the economy is a full knowledge of what is happening to employment and unemployment. I believe it essential that the Labor Department technicians be made available to the Joint Economic Committee at its hearing tomorrow on the unemployment-employment situation.

This is what I wired Mr. Hodgson yesterday:

The Labor Department has been aware of the committee's position on this for the past 2 months. And it has also been informed that we believe the Congress should have access to the technicians' briefing just as soon as the information is available to the press.

For the past 2 weeks discussions have proceeded between our staff and that of the Labor Department, but

This is what I wired Mr. Hodgson

apparently you are not willing to cooperate.

I have just been informed that even if the April data are available to the press tomorrow morning at 10 a.m., the Labor Department will not provide this technical aid to the committee and the Congress before 1 p.m., the "reason" being that the technicians are needed to answer calls from the press. I heartily agree that the press receive prompt and timely explanations of unemployment developments. I deplore the fact that you are treating Congress as second-class citizens in this important matter. Indeed your reply to our request is insulting to the Congress and to this committee, and I respectfully request that you reverse your decision. If for any reason the employment-unemployment release is delayed past 10 a.m., we shall be ready to hear from your technicians at that later time. WILLIAM PROXMIRE, Chairman, Joint Economic Committee. Mr. Gordon, we are honored to have you present this morning appearing before us. We deeply appreciate your willingness to come.

As you know, your position, the position of your committee, on this matter, has become a matter of controversy and confusion, and we feel that the best man to clear this up is you. We are delighted to have you. Go right ahead in your own way.

STATEMENT OF R. A. GORDON, PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS,

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, CALIF.

Mr. GORDON. Thank you, Senator Proxmire. I will, with your permission, submit my prepared statement for the record. I will read a substantial part of it and try to summarize the rest. I shall skip the introductory paragraphs, sir, and begin with my substantive comments. Before going on, let me emphasize that I speak only for myself. I have not consulted the other former members of the so-called Gordon committee in preparing this statement.

I did, however, send to the other members of the committee a similar statement which I recently presented before the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and Government Information of the House Committee on Government Operations a subcommittee of which Congressman Moorhead is chairman-and those members of my committee who have thus far replied concurred strongly with the criticisms which I expressed before Congressman Moorhead's subcommittee. Indeed, virtually every economist with whom I have spoken about this matter has been critical of the administration's action in ending these technical press briefings. But, to repeat, I speak here only for myself.

Before I go on to elaborate on my reasons for believing that the administration's action in this matter was clearly wrong, I want to get the record straight on another but related matter. In his press conference on March 19, 1971, when he announced that the technical press briefings were being terminated, Secretary of Labor Hodgson cited the report of the so-called "Gordon committee," as if there were something in that report to justify the action being taken. I wish to state here for the record, as strongly as I can, that there is nothing, and I repeat nothing, in our report that could conceivably be interpreted as supporting the cessation of these technical press briefings in the form in which they have been conducted. With your permission, I should like to elaborate briefly.

I now quote the official release, issued by the Office of the White House Press Secretary, as to what Secretary Hodgson said on March 19 in falling back on the report of the "Gordon committee" to support the decision to terminate the technical press briefings. And here I reproduce Secretary Hodgson's words as given in the White House press release.

Secretary Hodgson said:

We have been examining how we might further insure the credibility and integrity of our statistical releases. We went back and examined the report of the Gordon committee, that was appointed by President Kennedy in 1962, on this.

One of the things that they recommended there was that sharp lines should be drawn between the release of statistics and their accompanying explanations and analysis. We felt it would be desirable just to draw a sharp line between the release of these statistics with the explanations, the written explanations, that go along with them, and the comments on policy implications on the other.

60-174-71-pt. 1-5

The Secretary, in the second paragraph from his statement, which I have read above, says that we recommended that a sharp line should be drawn between the release of the statisties, on the one hand, and "their accompanying explanations and analysis." As you can see what we actually did was to associate the accompanying explanation and analysis with the release of the data, and to draw a sharp line between the explanation and analysis which go with the release of the data, on one hand, and, on the other, the policy-oriented comment which those responsible for policy might quite properly make. We intended the explanation and analysis to go with the press release, and the technical press conference in the past has helped to provide such explanation and analysis.

What we said on page 213 of our report reinforces this interpretation. We repeated our recommendation that a sharp line be drawn between the release of the statistics and their accompanying explanations and analysis, on the one hand, and comments on the policy implications, on the other. Then the committee added:

The technical explanations and analysis are properly the function of the professional staff of the statistical agencies responsible for collecting and processing the data. The professional staff also has an obligation to offer analytical, interpretive comments that will assist the users of the data to assess the significance of the changes recorded by the figures.

I hope I have made my point. There is nothing in the report of the "Gordon committee" to suggest the desirability of doing away with the technical press briefings. The reverse is the case.

I shall now consider the positive reasons advanced for terminating the press briefings. The Department of Labor press release on March 19 and Secretary Hodgson gave three reasons for eliminating the technical press briefings: (1) Speeding up release of the data, (2) consistency with the practice in releasing other official data (which are not accompanied by press briefings), and (3) "to avoid any awkwardness that can occur and has occasionally occurred to our professional staff from having to respond to inquiries that call for a policy response.” Let us consider these reasons in turn. First, speeding up release of the data. I have done some checking on this, and my original impression is confirmed that abolishing the press briefings will not accelerate the release of the data on employment and unemployment. I have no information about the Consumer Price Index, the press briefings for which were also ended in March. When the Joint Economic Committee held hearings on April 2, the day on which the employment figures were first issued under the new rules, the press release was issued at 10 a.m. The text of the release was not completed. I believe,

until some time during the evening of April 1. Had a press briefing been permitted, it would have taken place on the morning of April 2, just as under the old schedule.

The second reason offered by the Secretary of Labor was uniformity of procedure. The release of other data are not accompanied by press conferences. Why press briefings in this case? I see no virtue in uniformity for its own sake. The first sentence at the beginning of our report reads:

It has been said that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate is—at least in its political implications-the most important single statistic published by the Federal Government.

There is a good deal of truth in this statement-never more so than when unemployment has reached an unacceptably high level, as in recent months. And here I insert into my statement that I believe that the administration has demonstrated the truth of its statement in its recent behavior. Our committee also warned against exclusive attention being paid to the overall rate. Much is to be learned about the current situation from careful analysis of the data for different parts of the labor force. All this suggests to me that there is a real need for a press briefing at which the technical experts can elaborate on the press release and answer questions that will help the public better to understand the objective facts about the current situation in the various segments of the national labor market.

Now as to the third reason for dropping the press conferences-to "avoid the awkwardness of subjecting the professional staff" of the BLS to questions "with policy implications." There undoubtedly has been an "awkwardness" involved here, but, so far as I know, it is not one from which the technical staff has asked to be relieved. Assistant Commissioner Harold Goldstein and his colleagues have handled this problem in admirable fashion. When real problems have arisen, as in the last few months, it is not because Mr. Goldstein has ventured to make policy-oriented statements but because some persons in policy positions have tried to interpret the data in a way that ran counter to Mr. Goldstein's technical analysis of the data. If Mr. Goldstein, in his press conference in February, referred to a decline in the national unemployment rate of 0.2 percentage point as being, on technical grounds, "marginally significant" and Secretary Hodgson considered it to have "great significance," I can understand why the administration would have preferred that that particular press conference had not taken place. A similar conflict in interpretation occurred also in connection with the press briefings in December and in March. In all three of these cases the technical people in BLS were on solid ground in their interpretation of the figures. And, Mr. Chairman, if I may interpolate, I find in the Washington Post this morning a report on the accelerated rise in the wholesale price index last month and the following statement by the Secretary of the Treasury:

"I don't think we should pay much attention to it."

Namely, a five-tenths of a percentage point increase seasonally adjusted in the wholesale price index.

If the figures had been the other way around, as Secretary Hodgson did on an earlier occasion, with a two-tenths of a percentage point of change, decrease, in the unemployment rate, he might have found it highly significant.

All this demonstrates to me the need to continue these press conferences, not to eliminate them.

The administration has stated that the technical staff will be available to answer questions from the press on technical matters. Secretary Hodgson, in a personal letter, has informed me that there will be "a minimum interval of at least 1 hour after BLS figures are released before an administration official makes any comment on their policy implications." In the hour, reporters can seek such clarification and amplifications as they wish, but, to mention only one point, they each lose the opportunity to benefit from the questions asked by others and from the entire discussion at the press conference.

I understand that on the day of the first press release of the labor force data under the new rules, BLS had four staff persons manning telephones to answer questions-only two of whom could have been Mr. Goldstein and Mr. Howard Stambler, who have been in charge of the press briefings in the past and who are undoubtedly the most expert in answering questions and avoiding policy-oriented answers. This procedure seems to me a pretty poor substitute for the press briefing. And I wonder how the administration is going to check on whether any policy-oriented answers are given over the telephone. I sincerely hope no monitoring is being planned.

I cannot help but comment on the timing of this action. The national unemployment rate moved up from 3.5 percent in December 1969, to 6.2 percent in December 1970. It has remained in the neighborhood of 6 percent since December, and the new figure of 6.1 for April is still at that level. During these months of relatively high unemployment, which obviously creates difficult policy problems for the administration, there have been several cases in which statements by those in policy positions conflicted with technical interpretations that came out of the press briefings. It is difficult to believe that the timing of the decision to eliminate the technical press conference was not influenced by these developments. Indeed, at his March 19 press conference, Secretary Hodgson was moved to say: "Probably the timing of this thing does have an unfortunate look to it. ****" It certainly does to me. I wonder if I am unfair in suggesting that the administration has in effect announced by this action that it wants to be free to minimize bad news and to maximize good news without any interference from its own technical experts who know most about the facts.

Senator Proxmire, I have a short second section of the prepared statement which deals with the current economic situation and my policy suggestions, and I don't know whether you want me to go ahead with that or to talk first about the action with respect to the press briefings.

Chairman PROXMIRE. Why don't you go ahead with it because I think it is most appropriate. I have had a chance to see it and I think it is good to have your views on this.

Mr. GORDON. Well, I will simply summarize that part of the prepared statement in the interest of time.

I share the general view that the administration's figure of $1,065 billion for GNP for 1971 is too high. It is more likely to be in the neighborhood of $1,050 billion.