From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: Interview with Chuck Bowsher, Comptroller General of the United States, 1981-1996
Description: Former Comptroller General Chuck Bowsher (1981-1996) shares his experiences leading GAO.

Released: December 2021

[ Question : ] How did you become interested in leading GAO?
	
[ Chuck Bowsher : ]   Well, that's a good question, and it's got an interesting story. I was playing golf out at Burning Tree on the second hole, and Mel Laird, who had been the Secretary of Defense who I'd worked for, came over and said, Chuck, I think you ought to or would you consider being the next Comptroller General?  And I said, what's wrong with Elmer Staats?  And he said, well, it's a 15 year term.  That's the first time I knew it was a term, you know, and Mel says it's a great job. It's an important job and everything like that. So I said, Sure, Mel, I'll be happy to consider.  And of course, I'd worked a lot with GAO, in the Navy when I was responsible in liaison with the GAO when I was at the Navy. We were the biggest customers.  I always said there was more GAO reports written about the Navy than any other government agency. And then during the ten years I was back with Arthur Andersen, there was two or three things that I worked very closely with. And that was in 1974 or five. I think it was. We decided to do a balance sheet and a statement of the federal government.  Just as a research project, and so I went to see Elmer and the head of OMB and everybody like that.  And they said they'd help and everything like that.  So we were able to do that.   And then what happened was that a few months after that why the New York City fiscal crisis happened and Bill Simon, who was Secretary of the Treasury, he got himself, because he was an old New Yorker. He'd been with Salomon Brothers.  He got himself kind of anointed by the President to be the lead person to watch over New York loan agreements.   
And so anyway, when he got briefing on the financials, he said it didn't make any sense.   I don't know whether they know what their financials look like. So we asked three firms to come in and tell him if they thought they could go up and see how their financials really were, New York City. We came with our little booklet and the other guys never had a chance because he said that if you can do the federal government, you can do that.  So anyway, I did the New York City.  I had 40 guys working up in the December of '45. No, of '85.  Oh wait, let me get it right. Of '75. '75. Yeah.  And so I worked on quite a few things, and then I was on the AICPA advisory board and I was responsible for interaction with GAO. So I had quite a good background.  
Well, no, it's like being President, Eleanor Roosevelt once said on Meet the Press.  The presidency has become so complicated. Nobody's prepared.  But the big thing is you got to have the growth capability to grow into it.  My background was quite good to become Comptroller General, but it wasn't anything compared to Elmer Staats.  He knew the whole government, being head of Bureau of the Budget.  But see, I had, I knew the Defense and National Security area very well, which is a big advantage.  Two, I had done some special assignments in my ten years back with Andersen for the Federal Reserve, the first audit of the Federal Reserve,  the Department of Interior hired us to review their financials.  So I had about five or six of the agencies that I had quite good background in and the other 10 to 15 I had to work hard and get up to speed on that.  But for somebody coming in from the outside, I probably had better than most people would have had.  

[ Question : ] What is it about GAO that attracted you to the position?

[ Bowsher : ]   Well, what attracted me is I figured that it was the auditors for the entire federal government.  And where I went back and I checked with Bob Moot.  He was a comptroller.   He was an old line career guy.  And they wanted at first they wanted me to come back and be Comptroller of Defense.  Not just...he said Chuck, go for the GAO job.  It's more important and it's the total government.  And he said, if you can get that one, I'd go for that one.  

[ Question : ] When you started at GAO, what did you think was working well?

[ Bowsher : ]   Well, I thought the GAO had evolved quite well over the years, and that's important for any organization.  If you think about it, when they came out of Treasury, they were checking vouchers while the guys didn't even have a college education.  They were just checking vouchers.  And then when World War Two came along, the vouchers arrived by the box car.  So Lindsay Warren, who is a congressman by background, but a very talented guy and Roosevelt's eventual choice to be Comptroller General.  He figured out we had to do it a little differently.  And so what he did is he hired some CPAs and one of the professors from the University of Illinois who I knew quite well, Breen.   And then they started to audit literally what was happening and then check maybe some of the vouchers.   But it was more getting to be a financial audit, maybe like a CPA firm.  And when Ike put in his Comptroller General, which was Campbell, he was a CPA, he was the only CPA Ike ever knew.  He was treasurer of Columbia University. And he really turned it into like a CPA firm, you know?  Yeah. So it was evolving. And then Elmer Staats comes along and goes after this program auditing on the theory that, you know, checking the books and the financials  okay, but if you're wasting money on a big, major weapon or something like that, that might be more interesting and even better to report to Congress than the other, so.  So when I came in, I wanted to build on top of what GAO was doing.  And I thought that it was one organization that had evolved. A lot of other organizations, both in the private sector and the government, they just get stale.  They just do what they've always done.  And pretty soon it's obsolete.
[ Question : ] Can you talk about some of the key changes you made to the agency and its structure and processes?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   Well, the first thing I did was not make any changes for a year.  I accepted the idea that there was a lot of talented people here.  And one thing I learned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy when I went in there was some people at the beginning who had great ideas for me weren't so good later on after I knew the place better.   So I thought it was a 15 year term.   I'm just going to keep it going like it is in that, I really appreciated and I was very impressed with Milt Socolar who was the acting Comptroller General and had been the head of the legal department.  So I anointed him to be my deputy.  And here's an interesting story, and that is that if you think about it, there's only two Presidential appointments, there's the Comptroller General and there's the Deputy.  OK. I've been there about four months and I get a call from the White House and we found your deputy and I said, Really? Who's that?  They said, Tony Hope.   And I said, I know Tony Hope. He's Bob Hope's son.  And they said, oh yeah, that's right.   And I knew Tony Hope really wasn't that strong.  You know, he was a CPA.  But so I explained to him that, you know, I've got a really good person over here.   Maybe you could get a nice job for Tony.  And so they said, Well, no, no, no.  And I knew Bob Hope.   So this is the Reagan administration.   So Bob Hope was talking to Reagan, you know, and saying, my son.  And he was an adopted boy of the Hopes.  But anyway, I kind of pushed that back for a while and then they kept coming back to me, see?  And so anyway, I talked to Mel Laird and Mel went over to the White House and talked to Ed Meese and a few people and said, look, Chuck's got a really experienced guy there.  They're working well together. Why don't you get Tony another job?  So that's what, then what I didn't do, and Milt was OK with this.  I never sent it up for a presidential appointment.  In other words, he was the deputy.  He was never a presidential appointment in that race.  I think that's what it's been ever since.   I think so. Yeah, after that year, I made quite a few changes because I had a good feel for the operation by that time.  And that is, I wanted to get the quality of the reports done better. Not that they were bad before.  But there was no standardization to them.  And some people would write a 200 page report, others would write a 50 page report.  And the guys that did their 200 page thought they had a better report because it was 150 more pages, which wasn't true at all.  And so I brought some experts in from New York and by this time Cleve Corlett had joined me.  And Cleve was also saying, you know, a lot people don't read these GAO reports.  They're just too big and luminous.  So with the expertise, we got it down to where we were going to have a ten page or less executive summary.  We're going to have 50 pages or less total report unless really exceptional.  You know, we could go more, but there'd be an exception.  We changed the color of the... everything like that. And then I set up a quality control review where I made a I made some people assistant attorney generals, assistant comptroller generals without ever going to the Congress to get their approval.  So one was in charge of reports.   And one was in charge of operations.  And then underneath, I realigned some of the divisions and I made those guys all assistant comptroller generals.  So when they dealt with the Congress or the press or something like that, they had a proper title.  So yeah, it used to be a light blue, just like North Carolina's blue.  And it had something to do with Lindsay Warren being from, I think, South Carolina or something like that.  But anyway, we went to the darker blue. That's right. 
And then see what I did then, during those things. I felt we needed to do a better job in recruiting and training and promotion.  Because that was the Arthur Andersen model. In other words, most of the big accounting firms were from Britain and Scotland.  Price Waterhouse, Peat Marwick Mitchell. Coopers.  They were all British firms that came to New York to watch the investments of their people's money. Arthur Andersen and Ernst & Ernst, were two American firms, Arthur Andersen was a professor at Northwestern, and he thought that his graduates were not really being treated too well when they went with the CPA firms.  And it was because the model was, in England, they didn't hire college graduates, they hired high school guys.  They got an apprentice program. Kind of like that, see?  And the universities in this country had these business schools and they had an accounting major and things like that.  So anyway, he bought a little CPA firm in Chicago and started out in 1913.  Well, when the great stock market crash came in the thirties, he wasn't very big.   But the other firms had made a lot of mistakes in the accounting for the public utility industry.  So all of a sudden, the big New York banks started giving Andersen quite a bit of business, especially in utilities and things like that.  So anyway, he was quite a farsighted person.  Then he died in '47 and there was kind of a struggle over who was going to be the next managing partner. New York thought it should be one of theirs because they were in New York.  But there's more partners in Chicago, so they anointed Leonard Spacek, who was only 37 years old, who turned out to be a genius, practically. Great leader.  And so anyway, he put the emphasis on recruiting, training and promotion.  Just what I mean by the time I got there, it was working well.  So, you know, I had the model.   And so I put an emphasis and I hired a woman by the name of Frances Garcia, who had been at Arthur Andersen, and she'd had an appointment here for a while in government.  But she came in to be my recruiting and she knew how to do it.  In other words we selected 50.  We went to the best. See, during the Lindsay Warren, they didn't think they could recruit at Harvard and University of Chicago and Stanford and places like that because it was paying just government salaries and work wasn't that interesting and that.  But they got some very good people, especially out of some of those small, Catholic colleges.  
But anyway, what we wanted was to go to the best.  And so we figured out of 50 colleges, and the Arthur Andersen model was, you assign it to a couple of partners there, which I assigned him to a couple of our leaders for Duke and for University of Virginia and Northwestern and all that.  And their job was to be in touch with the school.  And if they needed speakers, if they needed... So pretty soon, people got to know GAO.  See, we also put together a video of our people testifying before Congress on important issues.  So we'd show that the night before and it turned it around overnight.  In other words, we had all kinds of doubt. And then the training.  Andersen was really great at that.   And I have an identical twin brother and he went with IBM and he came up the usual way, the salespeople and but he ended up being head of all education and training in IBM.  So I had some good advisors on how to make the training better.  
And then the promotion thing was, you don't promote by seniority.  I saw that at the Pentagon, and I couldn't change that over there.  Because I was only there for three and a half years.  But when I came here, I decided that we're going to promote by merit and we started that and especially to promote into the Senior Executive Service by merit.  And just to be blunt about it,   by seniority, it was all white men getting promoted.  And we had just started in an era of having women and people of color, and some of them were very talented.  So that began the conversion, you might say, to a more diverse GAO.  

[ Question : ] Can you talk about the source of some of the new divisions you established in the early '80s?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   Well, the sources were that we just got a group of the leadership around me and I said, you know, the lineup you got here was done 20 or 30 years ago and you got four divisions at Defense. I've been at Defense.  I know Defense is Defense.  And so you should have different programs, but you should have one leader at Defense.  So we consolidated four and made the Defense Department   the biggest by far, you know. And the accounting and that, that was one big major area.  And then I said, now let's see the rest, you know, and we carved it up.  And so we ended up with six or seven divisions that were more aligned with the government at that point in time.  Oh, and establishing the Chief Economist.  I thought that was important.   And that was a very small group.  Technology was just coming in.  I tell you this story and that is one of the things I did when I first became Comptroller General, I made an effort to go around to all the regions.  And when I got to Boston, they were just moving into a new building called the Tip O'Neill, a federal government building.  And they had the usual big room of all the typists, see?  Just like Arthur Andersen and everybody like that. And two years later, the Mac showed up, the computer showed up and, you know, in five years, there was no typing pool anymore.  And so the technology was moving so fast.  I figured we had to have an emphasis and a group there. Yeah.  And of course, coming out of the Andersen Consulting, I was used to having really top notch computer people. Yeah.  

[ Question : ] How did the Office of Special Investigations come to be?
      
[ Bowsher : ]   That was not my idea.  That was Congressman Jack Brooks, and he was the chairman of the Government Ops Committee and had long been chairman, so he had quite a bit of influence, you might say.  And he said, look, we have the Inspector General and we have two areas.  The fraud area for any of the real investigation and then the accounting and all the other programs. How come GAO doesn't have an investigation, see, and I wasn't too keen on setting it up because I thought the inspector generals could do that  and I didn't want to turn it into a police force, you know where the GAO arrives and my God, here's the police force, you know?  But anyway, I finally talked them into letting us do it on a very small basis, and we really were lucky.   We hired a guy from Treasury who understood the difference, and I think he'd been with the FBI initially, but he was very good and he wrote good reports like that.  So that got off to a good start.   But I give Jack Brooks full credit.  
       
[ Question : ] Why do you consider your action in the Savings and Loan Crisis to be the highest point of your GAO career?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   Well, it's because if you think back to 1929, we had this stock market crash and then we had all the banks going out and pretty soon we were in the Great Depression.  OK, then Roosevelt put in a few basic reforms like deposit insurance and splitting up the banking into commercial banks and investment banks.  So the commercial banks took money in, paid you 3% and loaned it out at 6%, but they didn't take a lot of risk.  And so we didn't have any banks failing, see.  And so all of a sudden they created this new one called the S&L, and the S&L was highly restrained, see.  But then what happened was, is that when Reagan came into power, so did some of the members of Congress.  They got the Senate.  I think the year he won the presidency and Garn-St. Germain legislation, that's right.  Garn was a Republican, and St. Germain was still the Democrat in the House like that.  They passed some new laws reducing the restrictions, you might say, on the S&L industry.  And in the old days, S&L could only loan out money, mostly mortgages to homeowners in a certain area, even like in Chicago.  You'd have somebody that has this area, then another area and then another area, see?  Highly restricted, while the Garn-St. Germain took that all away.  If you wanted to send a loan to some country club in Memphis, Tennessee you could do that.   Well, a few of the S&Ls got out of control.  And of course, you had a dip at that time. See?  And so anyway, the S&L industry was all of a sudden in big trouble, and we were the auditors for FSLIC.  And what we saw was that it was about $50 million in the FSLIC account, all of sudden with $40, all of a sudden with $30, $20. Because you were having to pay off for the S&Ls that were going under.  
So we reported to the Congress, we were the first ones to report.  This is a big problem coming.  And so they say the S&L lobbyist said, Oh no, don't worry.  But it soon came at a pretty strong pace and we had the Congress had to vote $50 million addition into the thing every six months for a couple of years.  Well, by that time they were damn scared.  And so anyway, they asked us, we were the monitors like, you know, in '08, '09 the Treasury set up a separate monitor, but in the S&L crisis, it was GAO.  And then I was on a lot of the Sunday talk shows explaining what was happening how, and it's happening and everything like that.  And there was a guy that came to be head of FSLIC, that you understood, and he was a CPA by background.  Stephen was his name.   So we worked very closely together.  But anyway, it put us in a very high profile role on one of the most important issues for the next three or four years in the country. Yeah.  
[ Chuck Young : ]   I remember how that ended the Congress bailout thing. 
[ Bowsher : ] They did. They closed a lot of them.  And then they bailed out.  They moved the assets to another S&L and it would facilitate a new consolidation.  But a thousand S&Ls closed.  If my number is right, I'm not sure about that.  But it was a very big number of S&Ls and a couple of big ones here in Washington, D.C.  Yeah.  

[ Question : ] You were outspoken about government financial management - can you talk about the importance of your accomplishments in that area?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   Yeah, why they were important was that when you had the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, see everything was in Treasury, Alexander Hamilton had put the budget and the auditing, the accounting, everything that had a dollar sign was in Treasury, and Teddy Roosevelt came along and said, when he was Governor of New York, the budget guy reported directly to him.  He didn't go through the Treasury or the finance office or anything like that.  So he started a movement working with some influential, influential members of the Senate.  To have the Budget Bureau come out of the bureau, out of the Treasury and report to the President. And while they were debating that, some of the senators said, well, maybe we should have the auditors come out too, and they can report directly to Congress because they'll tell us how the money was spent.  Teddy is going to have more influence on how the money gets set up and approved, but how is it really spent?  That's the auditors.  So they created this concept of a GAO in that, in that legislation.  And then much to everybody's surprise, when they got it passed, Wilson vetoed it and he was very sick from a stroke and everything like that.  And some people think the doctor or his wife wrote the veto but hadn't written it or read it.  I think it was somebody else might have been doing the writing, but it was Wilson.  And one of the things he objected to was a 15 year term. See?  
So anyway, what happened then was that when Harding came in, Dawes was his budget director, but he didn't report to him, see, Dawes was very famous.  He had been the logistics guy for World War One.  See, he later went on to be Vice President.  And so he thought, you know, Teddy Roosevelt, had a good idea.  
So anyway, they changed the 15 year term, eliminate, not eliminate to take it to ask some GAO...  All right, let me get this straight.  If a comptroller general doesn't do the right thing, the original legislation said a concurrent resolution by the Congress, he could be removed.  The newer ones said it had to include the President's signature see, but they passed that.  So then what happened was the auditors all came over and started this new thing called the GAO but they didn't really issue a financial report at the end of the year.  And that's the way it was when I got there.   And John Glenn now is a big advocate of this, where Jack Brooks had been the advocate for the things.  John Glenn was the chairman of the Senate Affairs Committee.   You know, he said, you know, I was in the private sector after I went to the Moon and...he didn't go to the moon, after he circled the Earth.  And he said, we always have a financial statement and it's audited.  So why shouldn't the federal government have it?  And I said, that's a good question.   And I showed him my little booklet on the federal government, see?  And he said, this is what we should have, see? Well, a lot of people didn't want that.  And so we didn't get it immediately.  And then what happened was that Jim Baker, who had been Chief of Staff under Reagan, got to be Treasury Secretary under Bush one, and he brought Darman along with him.  And then eventually Darman became head of OMB.  But they were very close.  
And I got a call one day from Darman saying, Chuck, we think we are going to have to do something better to get control of the budget because see, the budget was out of control because of the supply side economics that Reagan had bought into.  When you think about it, when Reagan came in, the debt of the government was less than a trillion.  When George Bush left at the end of twelve years, it was 4 trillion.  We can handle 4 trillion, but that was a hell of an increase as far as percentage-wise.  And so I used to go over once a year.   And tell Baker and Darman, the Treasury, it's not working, you know?  Yeah. And they would say to me, well, you're right, we know you're right. But we got other things like a tax bill and things like that to worry about, you know?  But anyway, out of the blue Darman calls me and says, you know, Bush is going to win re-election.  We thought we'd better get our finances in order for this last year to look like we're doing something.  So that's what they did.  And they passed the Chief Financial Officers Act.  One big mistake, I think, and that is Darman wanted to be the Chief Financial Officer when he shouldn't be.  He's the Budget Director and I said it should be the Secretary of Treasury and Glenn agreed with me.  But he said Darman is not going to support the bill unless he gets to be CFO.  So he's CFO. And all his successors are CFO.  I still think someday the Treasury Secretary should be the CFO.  
[ Chuck Young : ]   It's an important legacy, the legislation right?  
[ Bowsher : ]   Yeah, it was one of the major pieces of legislation that I was involved in.  And then I got it all set up with the Accounting Standards Board.  I even got in the private sector, you know, they had the FASB.  I got the GASB for all the state and local government and that really spread all over the country.  And of course, having it done in New York City, I can explain to them why it would be a good thing to have because that was a requirement for New York City was they have an annual financial report at the end of the year and have an audit committee and everything like that.  
[ Chuck Young : ]   Well, you also developed the very successful report GAO still continues to issue every two years, the High Risk List.  
[ Bowsher : ]   Yes. 
[ Chuck Young : ]   Brings attention to federal areas vulnerable to waste fraud abuse.  
[ Bowsher : ]   Yeah. Yeah.  
[ Chuck Young : ]   What are your views on the importance of the High Risk List?  
[ Bowsher : ]   Well, I think it's very important because, you know, when you issue a couple of hundred GAO reports and you have everybody testifying, not only GAO, but a lot of people and everything like that, why sometimes it's hard for the  public in the country or the members of Congress to know what's the high risk areas.  In other words, what are the really high risk areas that we should be worried about?   What was interesting is when they would change administration.  The next administration loved this report because right away they had a bath, you might say, as what were some of the problems?  So I thought that was very important and that was a GAO initiative.  And Glenn supported that again. Yeah.  
       
[ Question : ] Why did congressional requests for reports increase from 40% to over 70% of GAO's work over your term?
      
[ Bowsher : ]   Well, what brought about it was a greater relationship between those program directors and the committees.  And once they heard what we thought was important.  Lots of times they'd say, I'd like to request that, see?  And it was good that they liked the request because that meant we were going to have a testimony, you know? So that was something that I thought worked out very well. Yeah.  

[ Question : ] Did that bring about more support for, and interest in the agency?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   No question about it.  Yes, absolutely.   And it also brought a lot more press coverage because with more hearings, you get more press coverage.  And then I don't know whether you have this as a question, but at one point we changed.  Another change we made to the report is we put the name of the person who headed up that job in the back with their telephone number, and the press didn't have to call the Public Affairs Office like they do in practically every government agency, they could go directly to there.  And of course, we told everybody, if you got a problem, get a hold of Cleve.  But we don't want everybody there.   And one time I was on an airplane long after I was GAO and left GAO and there was a guy from the Chicago Tribune next to me, and he said, Boy, what do you do for a living?  And he said, and I said, Well, I'm a CPA and I'm on a lot of boards.  And he said that name is familiar.  And I said, well I was Comptroller General.   That's where it's from.   He said, Bowsher, yeah, you were Comptroller General.  He said we used to love those reports because he said if it was an interesting story we'd just call the head guy and he'd tell us what the key things were.  When you're promoting people into the senior executive service, you can't just promote somebody that knows how to write a good report.  He's got to be able to communicate a good report both to Congress, to the press and everybody else, and not everybody that majors in accounting or a few other disciplines have that skill.  And but it's important.  	 

[ Question : ] Can you talk about the implications of hosting the INTOSAI Congress in 1992, and the benefits of working with GAO's international counterparts?

[ Bowsher : ]   Well, you know, that was a surprise to me.  I had no idea there was anything called INTOSAI.  And in my first year there, I got to know a little more about it, didn't spend a lot of time on it.  Then I went out to the Philippines, they were hosting it that year and I saw the other auditors general and I saw how they all were.  And Elmer had become a leader in it.  He had the magazine.  He would host anybody that came to Washington and, you know.  And so I thought it'd take me quite a while before I would have the same respect as Elmer did because, you know, his background and everything like that.  But just being the Comptroller General from the United States, I immediately was accepted as a leader and everything like that.  And so anyway, when I got done with that trip and that visit, I said to myself, My God, this is important because one, you get to know what's  happening around the world and we spend a lot of money around the world.  Two, I could call any auditor general and find out what's happening in Pakistan.  And as one guy once said to me next to the CIA, you have the best network, Chuck, in the world.  And he was right.   He was asked and then what happened is a lot of them kept coming here to Washington to see how we did our work.  And then there was another thing that was fascinating, and that is, I thought quite a few of them came because their children were in universities in America.  And so this way they could see their children, see that, and stop by and see us.  And I suspect write it off, you know? Yeah, yeah.  

[ Question : ] How did you prepare GAO to deal with downsizing in the '90s, and what was the impact of it?

[ Bowsher : ]   Well, that was a terrible thing that happened, and I give Newt Gingrich full credit for being such a dumb guy to reduce the size of GAO. GAO was 5,200 when I got there and I worked with Vic Fazio, he was a congressman from California and a guy by the name of Lewis.  They were both from California, one Republican, one Democrat.  And I said, if you just give me stability, I will run you a great GAO organization.  But if you keep cutting me up, down, and so anyway, we had a system where I would always request 100 more seats, empty spaces and they'd go to the floor and say, GAO is doing a terrific job, but we don't think you need 100.  We're going to ask them to be a little more efficient like that.  And so we got 50, we stayed at 50 to 100 for 13 years.  
Then this goofy Newt Gingrich came in and he had run against what he called a billion dollar Congress.  And that was the budget of the legislative branch.  So he was going to cut it big time if he got there, well he won.  And then he started to say to all the chairman of the committee, we're going to cut your staffs.  And they said, No, no, no, no, we just got the power, my friend.  So then he looked around and saw that there was GAO, the CBO, the Library of Congress and a scientific advisory group that was in the ledger.  And so he without ever calling or consulting, he announces to the world he's going to cut the GAO in half.  And luckily, I've been there for 13 years.  I had a lot of friends on the hill.   And so we prevented that from happening.  But our compromise was we would go down over a few years and then I thought going down was a huge mistake.  I still think it is because if you look at Price Waterhouse in New York, they got 5,000 people there for the city of New York in their area and we got what do we got now?  3500 or something like that. For the whole federal government.  The whole nation, you know. 3100.  Yeah, ridiculous.  
       
[ Question : ] Can you talk about the major renovations to the GAO building that you oversaw?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   When I got there...well, go back to when they built the building.  It was 19 early fifties and they put asbestos in all the piping and ducts and everything like that.  Yeah, because like they did that in the wartime, in the ships and things like that, because it was asbestos and would keep fires from spreading.  So what they didn't know is asbestos would deteriorate and become a lung problem for people.  When I got there, they took me down to where the lawyers were and they'd say, look, I'm going home tonight and my desk is clean.  I'd like you to come down tomorrow morning when I arrive and you'll see white powder all over this desk.  And so having had the navy job I was very familiar with asbestos on the ships because the Navy was starting to wise up to it.  So anyway, I found a guy through the Navy who was an expert in this area and had been a career navy guy.  But he had formed a firm and I had him come over and he said, Oh God, you got to do something about it, he said. This is awful.  So then one of my top guys said we ought to give up the building, but there is a problem with that because then you're in a GSA rented building.  And sometimes, yeah, they don't maintain it too well.  Sometimes they want you to move like the SEC's moved about four or five times since that.  So I talked with Dick Brown, who is a terrific guy.  He was our budget officer, but he also was kind of in charge of the building stuff.  And he agreed with me.   And then we went over and saw the Congress and they agreed with us.  So we decided we'd take the asbestos out floor by floor.  That's what the Navy guy recommended.  
And then as long as we were doing that, then we would put in proper offices because see the building was built for those voucher checking guys, desk to desk.  I wanted to look like Arthur Andersen and Price Waterhouse.  So that's why I got the architects to design.  Also what I found when I first got there is that any time anybody moved, they would bring in carpenters and they changed...so there wasn't 3 offices alike, and I said, no, what you do is you have an office for a certain level thing, a little bigger for the next one.  Some conference rooms and everything like that.  And so that became our model.  And then Jack Brooks came along and said, while you're doing this, why don't you put in one of these physical education or athletic areas, he said. That's the rage now.   And also something for the children.  It's going to be more women.  And with Jack Brooks' support, I quickly adopted that.  
And so that was all part of the renovation.  And I really do believe, I give Dick Brown all the credit in the world.  He got the money through the appropriations and he worked with the contractors.  And you know, the interesting thing was that our general contractors had to be the Corps of Engineers.  And when they saw what the finished product looked like, they moved in.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics had been in their space and they had to leave because we were doing the renovation and the Corps of Engineers just bumped them out.  And so that was a tribute to how well we did that building.  

[ Question : ] What did you do to recruit and retain a first-rate workforce?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   Well, what I wanted to do was I wanted to hire the best and the brightest.  I talked to you about how we did that with Frances Garcia's leadership.  Then we wanted to have good training and because a lot of organizations don't train their people well and my twin brother was especially keen on this because IBM did a terrific job training that people in there.  So I just kind of raised that with everybody, and everybody thought it was a good idea and see, we were getting terrific people.  And I think you are today still getting top notch people.  
      
[ Question : ] Can you talk about a memorable audit report?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   The derivatives report is really one of the great reports we ever issued, which was totally ignored until the crisis came in '08 - '09.  And that was because JPMorgan and a few of the big banks put on a really big campaign to say, look, don't worry about that GAO report.  Derivatives, there's nothing worrisome about that, see?   The Columbia University Journalism School did a program after everything fell apart.  That really, a lot of people have never read it, but they describe how well that GAO alerted everybody to the problem and how nobody did anything about the problem because the lobbyists from the big banks and everybody else worked so hard.  But of course, it...all blew up because AIG and a lot of those outfits had derivatives as really part of the problem, and I give the Chicago office a lot of credit.  They were the ones that took the lead on that report because the Board of Trade was out there and things like that.  And so that became what I thought was one of our most important...When we testified on that, there was guys from Scotland even flew in to hear the testimony.  We had 50,000 requests for the report after we testified, see? It had to be in the early nineties.  
       
[ Question : ]   Can you talk about your efforts to increase diversity at GAO?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   This was all part of the civil rights movement and the nation because when I left Arthur Andersen, they were all white male too, and they were starting to hire and I was involved because I knew some good black graduates from the University of Chicago and things like that.  And the women, you know, when I was an accounting major at the University of Illinois, we had two women in the accounting major program.  Three years later, one of the women that was in the program won the Gold Medal for the highest mark in the CPA exam.  And none of them got any offers from the big accounting firms.  And that so I was aware of the problem and I was aware that there is a lot of talent among the women and they were coming more and more.  They were rising in the numbers of the business schools, the law schools and medical schools and things like that.  So that was an easy change that everybody agreed with at GAO, and it was slow going at first. But now I think you got half the staff is women and a good proportion of people of color. Yeah. 
       
[ Question : ] Is there any other accomplishment that you are most proud of?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   Well, I think I'm particularly proud of the way our people eventually became so good at not only writing the report but presenting the report.  See, we went up to some 200 to 300 hearings a year.  You have to check that number, but it's in that range, I think.  And when Elmer Staats took over, it was 15 a year.  And he bumped it up to 75 or 80 or something like that.  But the only way you could do that is when you delegated it down to those 30.  And see the big thing in the private auditing firms is once you partner, you can sign the partner's name.  The senior partner in charge of Chicago doesn't run out and sign the name of everything.  And so that was the model, you might say.  And I was so pleased because some of my people really became outstanding and they were on Meet the Press in the morning and...Meet the Press, but also the Today show in the morning and everything like that.  And of course, Cleve Corlett was terrific as a press guy.  He had been with Chafee in Church on the Senate side.  And so he knew the Congress.   He knew the people in the journalism world.  He had been with AP, his first job, you know. And he was terrific. 
       
[ Question : ] Is there anything you would like to have done differently?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   I suspect maybe when I look back, I think that we maybe should have moved a lot faster on some of the emerging issues.  We moved faster than...everybody else thought we were moving fast.  But the truth of the matter is you have to evolve.  You know, a lot of organizations go out of business in the nonprofit area, in the business world.  Because they don't evolve.  And just to give you this statistic, when I joined Andersen in '56 and I made partner in '67 I had about 20 different clients, maybe 25.  They're all gone, but two, Walgreens and the Catholic Church. See?  So that just shows how the world changes in the business world.  Then if you look at the health care area today, yeah, I go to the Mayo Clinic.  We have the greatest medical centers in the world, but we have some of the poorest medical centers in the world.  And one of the reason we have some of the poorest is that those are hospitals and doctors that don't want to change, you know, so I think you really have to evolve and maybe we could have done it even faster. 
       
[ Question : ] How did you make change happen and help the agency evolve?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   I worked with, I figured out who were the leaders and who were the thinkers that wanted to make change.  And I worked very closely with them and I promoted them.  And so pretty soon we were working as a team, which was important because that's the way the Arthur Andersen people worked and...and change wasn't hard.  I never changed anything unless I got agreement with people.  In other words, I never came in and says, Look, I know how to do this is how we're going to do it.  I said, this is how it has been done.  Let's pull together four or five of us here and think it through. Yeah.  

[ Question : ] What have you been doing in your life since your Comptroller General term?

[ Bowsher : ]   Well, that's very interesting, because I thought I'd go on a few boards because that's what Elmer did.   And so I got invited on four or five, six. But it was slow going because they had decided all of a sudden that too many old guys were on the boards of the big corporation and everything like that.  And see, I was 65   going on 66 when I retired in that, so.  But once you get on some, then they see you as the chairman of the audit committee. Pretty soon that and anyway, I ended up serving on 25 boards, ten corporate, ten nonprofits and five universities in the next 25 years, next 20 years. Yeah.  And so it was a marvelous career and I really became quite wealthy.  So when I left Andersen to become Comptroller General, I was making $265,000 and I went down to $65,000 see?  And so I had a lot of partners say, what are you doing?  I had a twin brother that said, what are you doing? You know?  But I always figured if you did a good job, there would be a future out there in that.  And you know, when I left the Navy job, I always remember this Admiral Rickover came to see me.   And I don't know if you know the history of Admiral Rickover here, but practically everybody does.  He built the nuclear navy, the nuclear submarines.  But he was a miserable little character.  And so anyway, he had a mixed audience in the Pentagon let me tell you but everybody respected him, the same with the Congress.  And so he came to me and he said to me, why are you leaving?  And I said, well, you know, I've got two children and I got to get enough money to send them to college.  Now, the truth of the matter is I was a Democrat from Chicago and I had got wind of the fact that if Nixon won again, he wasn't going to...all the Democrats were gone, see?  So I figured I might go first.  And Chafee was leaving, so anyway, that was my real reason. But I told him this, you know, and he said, oh, come on, he said a guy of your ability, you're never going to have to worry about money, you know?  And I thought he was just trying to con me into staying, but he was right, you know, he was right. Yeah.  
       
[ Question : ] How would you like your time as Comptroller General to be remembered?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   Yeah, I would like to be remembered is that we avowed and modernized, and I think when Elmer was there, GAO was already the top national auditing organization in the world.  Some improved watching us, but I think we were without question, we were the number one when I left there.  So I carried on what Elmer had achieved and I think we helped a lot.  Like when China sent their, they sent 15 people over here all wearing their Mao uniform to figure out how they do it.  You know, they stayed for weeks.   We gave them all kinds of paper and everything like that.  And the fascinating thing now is sometimes when they come, I host them here for lunch and things like that.  They look like they stopped in Bond Street in London.  And they all speak English.  Some of them went to American universities.  In that first 15, nobody spoke English, you know, so I'm really impressed about how China has moved.  And in the auditing, we were their mentor.  And same with when the Berlin Wall went down.  I was invited to Hungary and I went to Berlin because they were going to hold the INTOSAI meeting there.  And honest to God I was treated like a rock star or Hollywood star, we came down on the boat from Vienna and we docked and they announced that everybody should stay seated until Mr. Bowsher and Mrs. Bowsher   got off the boat. We had a band.  They had flowers.  They had everything.  And I was on national TV and everything like that because they wanted to recreate the audit function, which they had before the communists took over.  And we worked with Hungary and Poland, all those countries, and that was a big contribution by GAO.  And also, I was very proud of how I selected the people.  I think the GAO team, when I left there was just first rate, you know, and I'm talking about the top 50. Yeah. 
       
[ Question : ] Is there anything else we didn't talk about that you'd like to mention?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   Yeah, there is one thing I want to say, can I say?  And that is that in the Bowsher book and even today, I mention a few people, but there really was a lot of dedicated people at GAO that made it great.  And so it wasn't Chuck Bowsher alone, by any stretch of the imagination.  Yeah, and see, I had watched at the Navy.  In other words, think of how many people graduate from the Naval Academy every year, other people graduate from Notre Dame and schools like that and ROTC.  Then they have an OCS.   They have the best of the cream of the crop. Right, OK.  They jokingly, when they graduate from the Naval Academy,  they kind of try to see which five might be at full admirals 30 or 40 years they get.  They never guess right.  But the Navy works very hard at promoting by merit and getting top notch people because in time of war, that's crucial.  
       
[ Question : ] How did GAO employees respond to your emphasis on merit-based promotion?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   For one thing, the good people and the younger people took ownership.  Natwar Gandhi, who you probably know was the CFO of the district and he worked for me for 15 years.  He's a real talent.   And he says he just wrote his book.   He said he came to America with seven dollars in his pocket, leaving the family behind.  He got a job. He was an accounting major in India.  So he got a job teaching at a fairly modest school in the south, got the University of Pittsburgh.  Then he heard about GAO, and he came down just to do a special thing, and he liked GAO.  So he got hired and he rose to be one of my top guys.  He was terrific.  And then when the District got into trouble for about the third time, I was gone by then but they brought him in to be CFO like that?  Well, in his book, he says, If Chuck Bowsher hadn't become a Comptroller General, I never had any idea I'd get in the senior executive service, you know?  And so those guys really appreciate it.  I suspect a few that didn't make it, uh, weren't quite as, uh, quite as complimentary, let's put it that way. Yeah.   
       
[ Question : ] Can you talk about how you worked with various advisory boards and committees?
       
[ Bowsher : ]   Yeah, they were very effective.  I inherited it was from Elmer and started them.  And of course, some of the people were about Elmer's age, and so some of them retired from the board before I even got there or just shortly thereafter.  So I had the opportunity to bring in some new talent.  But the advisory board, when we finished bringing in new talent, it looked like a cabinet out of power.  In other words, I had the Secretary of Defense, that was Laird.  I had Elliot Richardson. I had... I'm sure I had six or seven former cabinet officers.  I had Admiral Peet from the Navy, Admiral Kent Lee, and they knew a lot about major weapons systems like airplanes and missiles and things like that.  And what I would use them for, they'd meet twice a year.  But what I'd use them for sometimes if we were doing a report on the B-2 bomber, I'd send them to see Admiral Kent Lee.  We were then pretty soon when they were doing maybe the next one.  They didn't wait for me.  They went to Admiral Kent Lee and got advice.  Also, he had Jimmy Weinberg on the board and he was the older brother to John Weinberg, who was the Goldman Sachs guy.  So and then I had a great friend at Lazard Brothers, so we had Wall Street.  We had we really had a terrific team.  And then we'd meet twice a year.  And I'd always have a great speaker.  Like I had Clark Clifford one time speak on the transition because he had run the Kennedy transition.  And I remember Jimmy Weinberg saying to me, you know, I serve in a lot of boards.  But he said the one I never miss is this one because you're working on the biggest issues and you've got such interesting...Yeah.  So that and eventually, as I say, my people got to where they call those guys up. And yeah, now the education was a very talented group, too.  And they also helped in recruiting.  In other words, there was a guy from Stanford University.  He even brought in his class when he came to visit Washington.  GAO was a stop.  See? Well, needless to say, when we went to Stanford...Uh, we had a lot of people turn out.  He'd tell us which ones were the best.  And so that was a very good team and a guy from Princeton Professor Bressler.  He was a leader who loved being the leader of that group. Yeah, yeah.