“BOGSAT” (also “bogsat”) stands for “Bunch of Guys Sitting Around a Table.” Waldemar A. Nielsen coined the term in September 1961, during the President Kennedy administration, as a jocular explanation about how decisions were being made.
 
“BOGSATT” (“Bunch of Guys Sitting Around The Table”) is an alternate form that’s been used since at least the 1980s.
   
 
Google Books
Hatchet Jobs and Hardball:
The Oxford dictionary of American political slang
By Grant Barrett
Oxford: Oxford University Press
2004
Pg. 62:
BOGSTAT n. [bunch of guys sitting around a table] policy or decision making by a small group of associates. Joc. Also BOGSATT.
1961 New York Times (Sept. 24) E8:
Waldemar A. Nielsen…coined the word “bogsat” to have some fun with his friends on the White House staff.
1984 New York Times (Feb. 9) 29:
Dan Fenn, special assistant to President John F. Kennedy, [asserted] that each President was reduced to choosing his team by a process he calls “BOGSAT”—“a bunch of guys sitting around a table.”
1986 New York Times (June 11) 14:
He concluded that it really was no more than BOGSATT…“Bunch of guys sitting around the table,” said [Congressman Les] Aspin, an old Pentagon hand with a penchant for acronyms.
     
24 September 1961, New York (NY) Times, “Psychological Warfare: Kennedy’s New Board Will Continue the Search For the Best Way to Counter Moscow” by Joseph A. Loftus, pg. E8:
Waldemar A. Nielsen, who helped write the Sprague report, while on leave from the Ford Foundation, coined the word “bogsat” to have some fun with his friends on the White House staff. Bogsat means “bunch of guys sitting around a table.”
 
12 May 1963, Appleton (WI) Post-Crescent, “BOGSAT Is Abolished,” pg. 20, col. 1:
Ever hear of BOGSAT?
 
Yes, it is a federal agency, albeit a rather informal one. It stands for “Bunch of Guys Sitting Around a Table.”
 
BOGSAT was in the news recently. It seems this is the method the federal government used until recently to recruit top officials forthe national establishment. A bunch of White House guys sat around a table thinking up names of people who might be prospects for federal appointments.
   
New York (NY) Times   
BRIEFING; Acronymic Opining
By WAYNY KING AND IRVIN MOLOTSKY
Published: June 11, 1986
At a breakfast meeting with reporters yesterday, Representative Les Aspin, Democrat of Wisconsin, mused over what he called the Reagan Administration’s ‘‘mind-boggling’’ process of making foreign policy. He concluded that it really was no more than Bogsatt. Huh? ‘‘Bunch of guys sitting around the table,’’ said Mr. Aspin, an old Pentagon hand with a penchant for acronyms.
 
New York (NY) Times
THE BOGSAT METHOD
Published: January 15, 1989
Helene von Damm’s description of how Ronald Reagan formed his Cabinet read like a Doonesbury comic strip (’‘Out of the Kitchen, Into the Cabinet,’’ Nov. 27). In my headhunter days, we called it the Bogsat method - a Bunch of Guys Seated Around a Table, peddling those they knew best to the leader of the free world. ‘‘What about . . .?’’ ‘‘Someone threw out . . .’’ ‘‘Someone mentioned. . . .’’
 
Absent a sea change, Bopsat (persons now replaces the word “guys”) will remain the preferred method used to recruit top executives in public and private bureaucracies.
ROBERT HUDDLESTON
Mercersburg, Pa.
 
New York (NY) Times
Waldemar Nielsen, Expert on Philanthropy, Dies at 88
By WOLFGANG SAXON
Published: November 4, 2005
Waldemar Nielsen, an influential and widely recognized expert on the workings of charitable foundations who wrote exhaustive, critical analyses of America’s foremost philanthropies, their goals and their methods, died on Wednesday in New York, where he lived. He was 88.