THE ADMINISTRATION: Tightened Security

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This week President Eisenhower issued a far-reaching executive order setting up new security requirements to insure "complete and unswerving loyalty" of federal employees. Effective May 27, the new order provides for security checks on all types of Government employees and a full-scale field investigation of applicants for "sensitive" positions, i.e., jobs concerned with classified information. Employees now in sensitive positions will be rechecked.

In one sweep, the President abolished the complex loyalty-security checks of the Truman Administration, including the top Loyalty Review Board. Eisenhower's new-order fixes final responsibility for employee security on department and agency heads. They, in turn, are to be advised by three-member panels chosen from outside their agencies, but they must still make the ultimate decisions.

Among factors to be investigated when checking on loyalty and reliability: ¶ Any deliberate misrepresentations, falsifications, or omissions of material facts. ¶Any criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, or sexual perversion. ¶Any adjudication of insanity, or treatment for serious mental or neurological disorder without satisfactory evidence of cure.

¶Any facts which furnish reason to believe that the individual may be subjected to coercion, influence, or pressure which may cause him to act contrary to the best interests of the national security. ¶Any acts of sabotage, espionage or treason.

¶Any sympathetic association with saboteurs, spies, traitors, anarchists or those who would overthrow the U.S. Government by unconstitutional means. ¶ Any advocacy of force to overthrow the U.S. Government. ¶Any intentional, unauthorized disclosure of security information by a federal employee.

Last week the Federal Subversive Activities Control Board, after 14 months of hearings and 14,413 pages of testimony, issued a massively documented report that 1) riddled the U.S. Communist Party's pretension that it is a free and loyal American organization, and 2) ordered the party to register forthwith as an agent of the Soviet Union. The Communists refused to register, promised to take their case to the courts.