This is the third of three novellettes by "Mark Phillips", a pseudonym of Gordon Randall Garrett and Laurence Mark Janifer, following the paranormal adventures of FBI agent Kenneth J. Malone in the 1970s. The series goes: Brain Twister, The Impossibles, Supermind, and each builds on events, characters and phenomena introduced in the earlier work, so reading in sequence is worthwhile. (All three are in Project Gutenberg, so that should be easy!) The long-suffering Malone keeps getting assigned to the wacky cases that nobody else can get to the bottom of, falling to whacks on the head and for gorgeous girls as he ploughs through them. All three are light, breezy, humorous gumshoe-meets-unexplained-phenomena yarns, and well worth a read.

In this last installment, Burris assigns Malone to the strange case of inefficiency in government -- not that there's anything strange about government inefficiency, but congressscritters are trying to hush up inefficiency that isn't their fault instead of getting free publicity out of it.

It was serialized as Occasion for Disaster in Analog Science Fact∩Fiction November 1960-February 1961, and in Analog Science Fact∩Fiction (UK) March-June 1961.

Occasion for Disaster was expanded to Supermind.