WASHINGTON — When the Senate Democratic Policy Committee asked the head of a business organization advocating an overhaul of Social Security to testify at a hearing last week, the members expected him to take the White House line.
They didn't know he would also take the White House editing.
In e-mailing his testimony to the Democratic panel, the organization's chief, Derrick A. Max, inadvertently included editing comments made by an associate commissioner of Social Security on loan to the White House.
Democrats, crying foul, have asked for an investigation. Max has responded that the Social Security official, Andrew G. Biggs, is one of his closest friends and that the changes he made were largely grammatical and technical.
"The real scandal here is that after 15 years of using Microsoft Word, I don't know how to turn off 'track changes,' " Max said.
Max is executive director of two business-oriented groups working to build support for Bush's proposed overhaul of Social Security. One, the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, is housed at the National Assn. of Manufacturers. The other, the Coalition for the Modernization and Protection of America's Social Security, is affiliated with the Business Roundtable. Both groups describe themselves as nonpartisan.
A White House spokesman said the administration welcomed Max's quest for accuracy and saw no problem with an official providing a review of the testimony.
But Democrats and their allies in organized labor said they were outraged to see White House fingerprints on congressional testimony presented by an ostensibly independent group.
Sen. Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, chairman of the Democratic Policy Committee, wrote the Social Security commissioner on Wednesday, asking for an investigation. He said the activities violated statutes requiring the Social Security Administration to be "nonpolitical and nonpartisan."
William Patterson, an AFL-CIO official who has opposed the president's plan and the businesses that back it, said that the editing "confirms the corruption" of the campaign to create private investment accounts into which workers could contribute a portion of their Social Security tax.
The editing changes were revealed because Max used his word-processing program's "track changes" function, which shows additions, deletions and comments made to a document and identifies the author of the change.
