Senator Lee Metcalf and Rep. John Melcher (both D., Mont.) have proposed legislation to require Senate confirmation of the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), beginning with President Nixon’s new choice, Roy L. Ash, whose problems continue to mount. Ash comes to the White House from Litton Industries, where as president he presided over huge surface-ship contracts with the Navy. A Navy procurement expert criticized the appointment of Ash to OMB and was promptly demoted. Now it has been revealed that last summer (while Ash was still at Litton) Vice Admiral Hyman G. Rick- over wrote a memorandum accusing Litton of “misrepresentation, if not fraud” in trying to blame the Navy for cost overruns on three nuclear submarines. Litton says the Navy should cough up $37 million more. The Rick- over memorandum says that no more than $7 million “can be justified.” The Washington Post has weighed in with a long report attempting to link Ash to “irregular practices” that cost the Air Force millions of dollars in the Fifties. According to the Post, Ash, then a senior executive at the Hughes Aircraft Division of Hughes Tool Co., may have been directly involved in sending doctored financial statements to the Air Force concerning weapons-control systems. A number of Hughes CPAs resigned to protest the practices.
■ The Navy, plagued by cost overruns from its shipbuilding and aircraft contractors, has had some in-house overruns. In the last three fiscal years the Navy has spent $127.6 million more than authorized by Congress. The law stipulates fines and prison terms for “willfully” doing that, but the Department of Defense has assured Congress that nobody in the Navy knew what was happening.
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