Over the past few years a number of researchers in mathematical programming became very interested in the method of the Augmented Lagrangian to solve the nonlinear programming problem. The main reason being that the Augmented Lagrangian approach overcomes the ill-conditioning problem and the slow convergence of the penalty methods. The purpose of this paper is to present a new method of solving the nonlinear programming problem, which has similar characteristics to the Augmented Lagrangian method. The original nonlinear programming problem is transformed into the minimization of a leastpth objective function which under certain conditions has the same optimum as the original problem. Convergence and rate of convergence of the new method is also proved. Furthermore numerical results are presented which illustrate the usefulness of the new approach to nonlinear programming.