The New Man at FEO

When William Simon was named to create the Federal Energy Office last December, his job was staggering but at least sharply defined: to cope with a full-blown crisis of menacing proportions. Now that he is leaving to become Secretary of the Treasury, his deputy and successor as FEO chief, John Crittenden Sawhill, faces a more complex and subtle challenge.

Sawhill must persuade the public that it still needs to conserve energy even though the energy crisis is over (last week he suggested that air conditioners be set at 78DEG to 80DEG this summer and that men not wear neckties at work). He must also put together a new policy that will free the U.S. of its dependence on foreign oil. Moreover, there is a need to make administrative sense of an agency that has been too busy fighting fires to pull itself together. Meanwhile he will have to fight bureaucratic battles against people who want to trim away the sweeping power that Simon enjoyed; some staffers at the White House and Office of Management and Budget, for instance, want to phase out the FEO's fuel-allocation program. And Sawhill will have to do all this at the age of 37, after a mere 13 months of Government service.

If the task fazes Sawhill, he scarcely shows it. One of his top priorities will be the daunting job of putting some content into "Project Independence," a slogan for an as yet unformed program to give the U.S. some degree of energy self-sufficiency by 1980. Immediately after being named FEO chief, he pledged to have a final blueprint for the project on President Nixon's desk by Nov. 1. He readily admits that morale among the FEO's more than 2,000 employees plunged when the Arab oil embargo was lifted in March and the agency lost the crisis spotlight. Says Sawhill: "It shook out the malcontents, but the right people have stayed and now we are getting good at our job." He pledges to improve the administration of the agency, a job that he and Simon consciously ignored during the crisis.

Administration is Sawhill's forte. A native of Baltimore, he earned a Ph.D. in economics, finance and management from New York University, where he later taught and served as an assistant dean. In business, he had a swift rise; in less than nine years at Commercial Credit Co.--broken by a year and a half at McKinsey & Co., a management consulting firm--he worked up to a senior vice-presidency worth nearly $100,000 a year and was expected to become president. But he wanted to get into public service, and when he was recruited by the Office of Management and Budget in April 1973, he not only cheerfully took a $60,000 salary cut but also changed his voting registration from Democrat to Republican. Seven months later, Simon chose him as deputy FEO chief.

Outwardly professorial in manner, Sawhill is, like Simon, a long-hours man who has won a reputation for being sensitive in dealing with Congress and his staff. Like Simon also, he shows independence. Last winter he publicly contradicted a prematurely optimistic statement about the energy crisis by President Nixon in the State of the Union speech. An irate phone call from Nixon's press secretary, Ronald Ziegler, failed to change his stand.

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