testing by National Bureau of Standards Director George Kimball Burgess. On Burgess's death in 1932, Briggs was nominated by US President Herbert C. Hoover to Burgess as director of the National Bureau of Standards. However, none of Hoover's nominations were acted on by the US Congress before he left office. After Franklin D. Roosevelt took office as president in 1933 he was pressed to name "a good Democrat" as director of the National Bureau of Standards. Roosevelt, not wishing to make a patronage appointment, replied, "I haven't the slightest idea whether Briggs is a Republican or a Democrat; all I know is that he is the best qualified man for the job." Briggs took over the Bureau during difficult times. It was the height of the depression and his first task was to reduce costs 50%. He managed to save the jobs of about 2/3 of the career employees by putting many on part-time employment and transferring others to the American Standards Association while they continued their work at the bureau. He emphasized doing work with direct economic impact and got money from the Works Progress Administration to hire unemployed mathematicians to develop math tables. Due to Briggs outstanding persuasive powers, he managed to get Congress to increase its appropriation for the Bureau in 1935, and many of the employees that were let go were re-hired. Uranium Committee (1939–1941) In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt called on Briggs, by then aged 65, to head the Advisory Committee on Uranium to investigate the fission of uranium, as a result of the Einstein–Szilárd letter. Even though Roosevelt had sanctioned a project, progress was slow and was not directed exclusively towards military applications. Eugene Wigner said that "We often felt as though we were swimming in syrup". Boris Pregel said "It is wonder that after so many blunders and mistakes anything was accomplished at all". Leó Szilárd believed that the project was delayed for a least a year by the short-sightedness and sluggishness of the authorities. At the time Briggs was not well and was due to undergo a serious operation. He was unable to take the energetic action that was often needed. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom German refugees Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls under professor Marcus Oliphant made a breakthrough, indicating that it would be possible to make a bomb from purified U-235. From June 1940, copies of British progress reports were