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288 decision, Surgeon General Raymond W. Bliss asked the Budget Officer of the Department of the Army, and the Office of the Chief of Engineers to have the language of the bill amended by omitting the authorization for the new hospital, reducing the amount authorized for planning from $850,000 to $600,000, and revising the language specifying Forest Glen as the location of the Institute building to read "Forest Glen or vicinity"— language which was deemed to be broad enough to apply to either the Army Medical Center on the Walter Reed reservation, the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Md., or the Forest Glen location.

The item in the enabling legislation which authorized the new Institute building was redrawn, leaving out the hospital feature and reducing, by $250,000, the amount authorized for plans of the smaller facility but, through some inadvertence or misunderstanding, leaving the Forest Glen designation unchanged. 2

With the legislation in this shape, it was decided to locate the new building on the Walter Reed reservation, and preliminary plans were undertaken by the architectural firm of Faulkner, Kingsbury, and Stenhouse, with the assistance of a planning group which included Brig. Gen. Raymond O. Dart and Col. A. L. Tynes, Chief of the Hospital Construction Branch of the Surgeon General's Office. To this group, there was added Maj. Colin F. Vorder Bruegge of the Medical Corps of the Army, who was transferred from Walter Reed General Hospital to serve as Assistant to the Director of the Institute, and his representative in matters pertaining to the new building. In this position Colonel (as he came to be) Vorder Bruegge rendered outstanding service. 3

Planning, perforce of a preliminary character, was started in October 1948, only a month before the Comptroller General ruled that the expenditures authorized by Public Law 626 could not be made in relation to any site other than Forest Glen. Nevertheless, progress was made in preliminary planning through the use of fiscal year 1947 funds which were available up to 30 June 1949, and by 1 June of that year, these plans had been approved by the Government agencies directly concerned— Chief of the Engineers and the Medical Department of the Army. 4