The Daily Alaska empire., 1932-03-23
Bureaus Can Never Die.
(New York Times.)

Collecting to certain items in the agricultural appropriation bill Senator McKellar reviewed sar- donicay certain achievements of bureaucracy in the Department of Agriculture. Tn 1919 a Massachusetts man found in his sweet corn. So Senator Lodge introduced bill authorizing the appropriation of S10000 to investigate, and possible to exterm- mate, the European corn-borer. Such were the modest beginnings of the Corn Borer Bureau. Corn borers are mighty few, but ninety-two men are em- ployed in the well-paid task of looking for them. Representative Fish told MT McKellar that last Summer the department sent ninety-six corn-borer hunters into his district. They stayed there all through the season They found no borers. The annual cost of the ahs army of seekers has been from $75000O to $1,000,000 a year This year the sum asked was $795 000 The House cut it down to $295 O00 for the fiscal year 1885, and the Senate Committee Appropriations has approved the cut. But if there are no corn-borers, why are there so many official students and eradicators of them?
 To ban and destroy the Mediterranean fruit-fly, discovered in the fruit between California and Florida several years ago." the Government has spent S6 710O0O One of the departments bulletins con- fesses that living man has ever seen in this country a living Mediterranean fruit-fly:
 The bureau round a dead one one time,
 and they have him in glass case in the
 bureau.
 When the search for this Mrs Harris of the insect world at its hottest a friend of MT. McKellars automobiling in Florida was stopped and his car searched seventeen times. Such was the
  friend had reason to tremble There was a bottle of liquor in the car Since 1907 nearly $12,000,000 has been devoted to putting the brown-tail and gypsy moths out of business Senator Kean says there are none left in New Jersey. There are still few in Massachusetts Possibly there are preserves of them. The most effective work against them has been done by the States. Starting small, the bureau has grown larger and larger No doubt it will be still rejoicing in it's pay envelopes hun dred years hence.
 It takes the clerks of two bureaus at about $400, 900 a year to look after the Japanese and the Asiatic beetle The first appropriation in 1916 was only $10O00 or S20000. The Mexican fruit-worm has never crossed the border. There is bureau at about s125,OOo year to keep him out. Most of this goes for salaries at Washington. This year there is an appropriation of $200000 for bureau which deals with "taxonomy and interrelation of insects" imports and exchanges of useful insects and so on. This is a notable bureau. In twenty two years it has never made report. But here is special joy
 The Barberry Bureau for the eradication
 of the barberry bush created because a
 bug flew from field onto a barberry
 bush and then flew back to the corn, and
 it might destroy the corn; and yet we have
 made every year since 1918 with
 two possible exceptions, than we ever
 made before Even so, in those fourteen
 years we have spent $4 086 for the pur-
 pose of eradicating barberry bushes, and the
 bureau does not know which are the good
 and which the bad
 There are twenty-nine bureaus in the Depart ment of Agriculture. They immortal. They can't be abolished When times get better there will be more.