Investigations: Company for Billie Sol

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If anyone had any doubt left that the sprawling, messy Department of Agriculture needs a thorough overhauling, it was dispelled last week. Billie Sol Estes may be the farm program's biggest bad boy to date, but it became obvious that he has plenty of company. So far. the FBI has used 452 special agents from 46 cities in its Estes investigation, at a cost of $236,200; congressional investigations are expected to cost another halfmillion. But scandal was piling on scandal with such regularity that the price to the taxpayer of investigating them all might yet become a scandal of sorts itself.

Almost Grateful. Appearing before Senator John McClellan's Investigations Subcommittee, beleaguered Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman seemed almost grateful for the week's first scandal. Though there to testify about Estes, he insisted on talking about a new discovery by the Government's General Accounting Office. In 1959 and 1960. the office had found, brokers licensed by the Agriculture Department to purchase surplus cotton for the Government and sell it on the open market had profited illegally by selling $400 million worth to themselves—at prices as much as $20 a bale below market. Cost to the Government: between $12 million and $15 million, by Agriculture's own estimates. Anxious to ease the Estes burden he has carried for weeks. Freeman pointed out that the scandal had taken place under the Eisenhower Administration, that his regime had stopped it, and that he was taking steps to recoup Government losses incurred by the illegal transactions.

As Freeman was trying to lay this burden on Republican doorsteps, another turned up in his lap: two more suspensions of minor Agriculture officials came to light. The men were office managers for the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service—the agency embroiled in Billie Sol's fraudulent cotton-allotment dealings. They were ousted in connection with $28,000 worth of illegal rice-allotment sales in Texas' Brazoria and Matagorda counties over the past three years. Both cotton and rice allotments are valuable, since without them farmers are subject to unprofitably stiff penalties for planting and marketing—but their sale is distinctly illegal. Smarting at the new scandal. Freeman turned the case over to the FBI. The big question: Will the rice scandal spread across the Texas coastal rice belt?