White House Press Release

309 IMMEDIATE RELEASE JULY 2, 1948 MEMORANDUM OF DISAPPROVAL I am withholding my approval from H. R. 4590, a bill "For the relief of Mrs. Loraine Thomsen." The bill would authorize and direct the Federal Security Administrator to extend the benefits of the Federal Employees' Compensation Act to Mrs. Thomsen "as if such Administrator had found that the death of her husband, Immanual H. Thomsen, on Decem- ber 5, 1946, had been the result of a personal injury sustained while in the performance of his duty as an employee of the Navy Department." It appears from the records of the Bureau of Employees' Compensation of the Federal Security Agency that Mr. Thomsen, a Navy Department employee at the naval ammunition depot situated at Hastings, Nebraska, suddenly fell dead while sweeping crushed rock with a push broom at his place of employment. A claim for compensa- tion for death under the Federal Employees' Compensation Act was filed by his widow, Mrs. Thomsen, who attributed the cause of her husband's death to the effects of excessive strain and exhaustion said to have been suffered by the decedent during the month of October in the performance of his duties. The Bureau of Employees' Compensation submitted the evi- dence to a well-known heart specialist for an opinion as to the ceuse of death, who concluded: "It is quite obvious from going over the medical report that Mr. Thomsen died as a result of arteriosclerotic heart disease involving the coronary arteries. These findings are substantiated at the time of the autopsy on Mr. Thomsen. This is a natural disease, the course of which is well known. I have carefully gone over the documents in reference to the alleged precipating injury and it seems to me that there is insufficient evidence to point to the fact that this patient was sub- jected to any serious or unusual form of physical endeavor that was sufficiently close to the onset of the fatal attack to have any bearing on the course of a natural disease. I feel quite certain that death occurred purely as a result of the natural courses of his particular disease, namely, that of sclerosis of the coronary arteries that supply the heart muscle with blood. I do not believe that there is any validity in this claim as to the alleged injury being responsible for Mr. Thomsen's death, but that he died rather as a result of natural processes of a well-known disease." After careful investigation and upon the basis of all the evidence before it, the Bureau of Employees' Compensation denied the claim for death benefits on the ground that the decedent's death "did not result from personal injury sustained while in the perform- ance of duty, or from disease proximately caused by his employment," as the Act requires. Mrs. Thomsen, if she believed that the action of the Bureau was erroneous, had the right to appeal therefrom to the Employees' Compensation Appeals Board established within the Federal Security Agency under the provisions of Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1946, as a quasi-judicial tribunal independent of the Bureau, but she failed to avail herself of that right. The bill thus runs counter to the salutary principle, recognized in the rules of the Subcommittee on Claims of the House Committee on the Judiciary itself, that a claimant ought to be required to exhaust all available administrative remedies before seeking a review elsewhere. In effect, the bill amounts to a legislative review and reversal of a determination which has been made by the agency duly (OVER)