replace the wartime Manhattan Project. As a Republican, Bacher was easily confirmed by the Senate members of the United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy by an 8–0 vote. As he was the only one of the five commissioners who was a scientist—an important factor in his decision to accept the post—he played a leading role in the selection of the Atomic Energy Commission's influential General Advisory Committee to which nine scientists were appointed: James Conant, Lee DuBridge, Enrico Fermi, Robert Oppenheimer, Isidor Isaac Rabi, Hartley Rowe, Glenn Seaborg, Cyril Stanley Smith and Hood Worthington. Bacher and fellow commissioner Sumner Pike began with an inspection of Los Alamos and the Hanford Site, and conducted an inventory of the fissionable material at Los Alamos with Norris Bradbury, who had succeeded Oppenheimer as its director. He found that only nine atomic bombs had been built in 1946; only four would be in 1947, primarily due to production problems with the reactors at Hanford. These problems were on their way to resolution when Bacher observed the Operation Sandstone nuclear tests at Enewetak Atoll in 1948 as the Atomic Energy Commission's representative. Bacher's original two-year term would have expired on January 1, 1949, but President Harry Truman convinced him to stay on. Bacher resigned in May 1949, and this time the President was unable to dissuade him. Bacher wished to return to academia, but Robert Wilson was now the head of Cornell's Laboratory for Nuclear Studies, and Bacher felt that it would be awkward working for someone who was one of his group leaders at Los Alamos. He therefore accepted an offer from Lee DuBridge of the chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy at Caltech. However the work at the Atomic Energy Commission was not so easily left behind. Senator Bourke Hickenlooper charged the commission with mismanagement, specifically cost overruns at Hanford, awarding a scholarship to a communist, and the loss of of uranium from the Argonne National Laboratory. Bacher felt obligated to return to Washington to testify on Lilienthal's behalf before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Another crisis broke in September 1949 when the Air Force picked up signs of the Soviet Union's RDS-1 nuclear test. Bacher joined Oppenheimer, Parsons, General Hoyt Vandenberg, the Atomic Energy Commissioners and a British delegation under William Penney to discuss what to do. The recent devaluation of the British pound had already