Consumer Chic

According to the Federal Register, the job calls for someone to "review existing mechanisms of consumer input, thruput and output" as part of a plan to "confirm and reinforce the [State] Department's sensitivity to consumer rights ... with respect to the maintenance and expansion of an international dialogue and awareness."

If that all sounds like an onput (as a Washington Post editorial suggested), it is not. And it had all better be perfectly clear to Joan Braden, 49, mother of eight and wife of Syndicated Columnist Tom Braden, because she is now being paid $37,800 per annum to make sense out of it.

Mrs. Braden is the new consumer-affairs coordinator for the State Department, under a program being established by President Ford. Eventually there will be 17 such coordinators--one each for all eleven Cabinet departments and six agencies. The program is Ford's riposte to a consumer-protection agency that Congress wants to establish and the President plans to veto. Other consumer posts had been set up without attracting attention. Then the State Department announced Mrs. Braden's appointment and Washington went into a tizzy.

Close Friends. Her credentials are acceptable. She is a graduate of Northwestern, where she studied economics, has worked for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and has done magazine writing. But none of this makes her a consumer specialist. In fact, her best-known specialty is throwing chic dinners at her $250,000 Chevy Chase, Md., home, often attended by such close friends as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller (who once lent her husband more than $180,000 to help purchase a small paper in California). Could these two luminaries have helped her get the job? No, says Joan Braden, who insists that she never talked to Kissinger or Rockefeller about the job.

She was sure she would appreciate the salary. In his recent book, Eight Is Enough, her husband wrote: "I am broke, and I am nearly always broke." Said Mrs. Braden: "We need the money. I'm not ashamed of that at all." Still, some observers thought the appointment was another case of the Washington Establishment looking after its own.

More troubling to some critics was the definition of the job. According to a Ralph Nader organization, Public Citizen, "the ridiculous and arcane bureaucratic language used in the preparation of the [State Department] report comes closer to parody than serious Government proposal." Mrs. Braden admits to being somewhat vague about her duties ("I've only been here since Friday," she said last week, after her first days on the job). Most probably, she will attempt to apply her clear-as-mud mandate to such matters as wheat sales, export taxes and passports. But even some State Department officials concede that in their domain consumer concerns are abstract at best and entrenched bureaucrats will probably resist consumerist encroachments on their powers.

This week Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, Commerce Secretary Rogers Morton and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Carla Hills will hit the road to explain the Ford idea. There will be nine open meetings throughout the country and three sessions in Washington, D.C. But all this input may not be enough to clear up the mystery of just what a consumer coordinator is supposed to output. Lamented one Ford official: "It's not the easiest program in the world to explain."

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