In this message the President asks for an appropriation of $75,000 to continue the work he has already begun, that of revising departmental methods of doing business and of instituting a practical, commonsense system of accounting under which, or from which, it will be possible for administrative and legislative officials to learn, approximately at least, just what departments have done--to any date--and just what it has cost to do it, two items of information as appears from the message of the Chief Executive which neither his nor any previous administration has ever been able to learn, and is not _now_ able to learn with any considerable degree of dependable accuracy. As yet I have not learned whether the President obtained the $75,000 asked for. I hope he did. If Congress will appropriate $750,000 for the purpose the President names in his message, and sees to it that the money is judiciously and intelligently disbursed, it is the opinion of The Man on the Ladder that _not less than $100,000,000 annually would be saved in government expenditures_, or one hundred millions more of service, material, equipment, etc., delivered for the money now expended. Following is the essential part of the President’s message. The italics are the writer’s: _To the Senate and House of Representatives_: I ask that you include in the sundry civil bill an appropriation for $75,000 and a _reappropriation_ of the unexpended balance of the existing appropriation to enable me to continue my investigation _by members of the departments_ and by experts of the business methods now employed by the government, with a view to securing greater economy and efficiency in the dispatch of government business. The chief difficulty in securing economy and reform _is the lack of accurate information as to what the money of the government is now spent for_. Take the combined statement of the receipts and disbursements of the government for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1910--a report required by law, and the _only one_ purporting to give an analytical separation of the expenditures of the government. This shows that the expenditures for salaries for the year 1910 were $132,000,000 out of $950,000,000. As a matter of fact, the expenditures for personal services during that year _were more nearly $400,000,000_, as we have just learned by the inquiry now in progress under the authority given me by the last congress.