Reorganizing the Executive Branch in the 20th Century: Landmark Commissions
Released: 2002-06-10T00:00:00

Introduction

The 20th century was rich in changes to the institutions and processes that together comprise theAmerican administrative state. This very richness of subject matter, however, calls for somegeneralizations to help explain the events and trends that occupied the attention of successiveCongresses, scholars, and generations of practitioners. In its effort to develop such statements ofgenerality this report will study the work and results of a number of commissions and other similarbodies that have had executive organization and reorganization as part of their mandate. Forpurposes of this report, these reorganization exercises are referred to collectively as "landmarkcommissions."

Viewing landmark commissions sequentially and exploring the philosophical norms andvalues guiding their work is only one of several possible approaches to the extensive subject ofexecutive branch organization in the recently completed century. The landmark commissionapproach clearly emphasizes institutional issues and will concentrate on structural changes resultingfrom the commissions' recommendations and subsequent implementation. It is recognized, however,that the term "reorganization" covers much more than structural changes. Laws may be passed toachieve policy or enforcement objectives and indirectly reorganize internal department and agencystructure in the process. This was certainly the case when Congress passed the Inspectors GeneralAct of 1978, an act that altered the internal structure of agencies and the behavior of agency officials. This broad definition of the term reorganization, however, will be largely avoided to facilitateattention to the successive landmark commissions as guideposts through this century ofadministrative management.

Context for discussion of landmark commissions in the 20th century is provided by a reviewand analysis of six crucial periods in the evolution of the organization of the executive branch ofgovernment:

the Founders and the political theory that informed their organizationaldecisions in 1789;

the interplay of the President and Congress in executive organizationalmanagement during the 19th century;

the Progressive Movement of the 20th century's first decades and its continuinglegacy;

the rise and decline of "orthodoxy" in organizational management of theexecutive branch;

the interregnum period (1972-1992) with its doctrinal heterodoxy;and

the emergence of a New Public Management paradigm and itscritics.

The selected landmark commissions of the recently completed century, beginning with theKeep Commission in 1905, are described and analyzed in chronological order. (1) In tracing the history of thesecommissions, the interplay of conflicting values appear with regularity. Should the principalsupervisor of the administrative agencies be the President, or Congress, or should the President andCongress be co-managers? Should commission recommendations serve to encourage administrativeintegration and centralization or the values of agency particularity and decentralization? Shouldcommission recommendations seek to give a greater or lesser role for government in the social andeconomic life of the Nation? Successive commission reports and recommendations provideevidence of the recurring nature of these and other related value issues.

With the advent of the 21st century, the question reasonably arises: Has the age ofreorganizational commissions passed? Or, is there a continuing need for periodic reviews andrealignments of the basic organizational structure of government?

In nearly every Congress, legislation is introduced to establish a commission with a broadmandate. The 106th Congress, the last Congress of the 20st century, proved to be no exception in thisrespect. Senator Fred Thompson, then chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee,introduced the "Government for the 21st Century Act" ( S. 2306 ). The legislation, whichdid not receive congressional action, sought to establish a nine-member Commission on GovernmentRestructuring and Reform appointed jointly by the President and congressional leadership. Thepurpose of the Commission was to study the entire government and make recommendations "toreduce the cost and increase the effectiveness of the Executive Branch." The Commission was tosubmit its recommendations on restructuring by December 1, 2002. A period of public commentwas to follow. Then, the Commission was to prepare a final report to Congress in a form that wouldpermit its recommendations to have been included in a single implementation bill and referred to theappropriate committees for consideration. An "expedited procedures" process for floor considerationand mandatory voting was included. As indicated, Congress chose not to act on the proposal.

Are reorganization panels now passÃ©? Or, is the time approaching when a newcomprehensive commission will be viewed as essential? Have the events since September 11, 2001changed the playing field for government organization and management? Is organizationalmanagement a separate field of study and endeavor, or should it be viewed as properly tied andsubordinate to the budgetary process, as some argue is presently the case? To what degree shoulddepartments and agencies be able to initiate organizational changes on their own authority or takethe lead with their oversight committees in Congress? Should organizational management beultimately placed under the purview of a central management agency which applies certain principles and general management laws across the board, with the burden of proof for exception resting onthe appealing agency? In short, what political, legal, and administrative values should prevail in the21st century? What can the experience of the landmark commissions of the 20th century tell us aboutwhat to expect as the nation continues down the path of democratic governance in the new century?

Evolving Theoretical Foundations Of the Executive Branch

The commissions studied in this report contributed to the evolution of the executive branchof the federal government. Each was concerned principally, if not exclusively, with the organizationand management of the executive branch. The commissions were temporary bodies, normallyunassociated with the legislative institutions of government. They did not conduct their proceedingsin an apolitical environment, however, nor were they able to ignore the work and ideas of those whohad trod this path before. Most especially, these commissions were beholden to the Framers of theConstitution and to an early 20th century political movement, Progressivism. It is therefore necessaryto begin by studying the evolving theoretical foundations of the executive branch to fully understandthe role of landmark commissions.

The Federalist Creation

While the classical works on political theory and government were useful to the Framers indeveloping a coherent political philosophy upon which to construct a "democratic republic," (2) the reading of Montesquieu,Locke, and Blackstone was of little assistance or guidance in the weighty matters of organizing andadministering the executive powers of a new government. The Founders turned away from thebooks for guidance in organizational matters, and reflected instead upon their own experience intrying to wage the Revolutionary War against a global power, and in attempting to manage thenational confederation of states after the close of hostilities in 1781. (3) Their personal experiencesbecame the crucible for political thought. This was particularly true for Alexander Hamilton, whohad found his administrative experiences during the Confederational period to be extremelyfrustrating. (4)

It should be noted that while questions regarding how best to organize the executive branchwere raised at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the Constitution itself is nearly silent onorganizational matters. (5) The paucity of language in the Constitution respecting organizational matters should not beinterpreted, however, as either lack of interest or concern. Quite the contrary, there was a livelyconcern for organizational matters. There was recognition that the new government would fail if itwas unable to generate energy in the executive branch. In Federalist #70, Hamilton asserted:

Energy in the Executive is a leading character...of good government.... A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of government. A feebleexecution is but another phrase for a bad execution.... All men of sense will agree in the necessityof an energetic Executive.

The Framers, in defending the Constitution, emphasized both its innovative character and itsinstitutional continuity. Pre-eminent among the many innovative provisions of the Constitution wasthe creation of an independent presidency, the term independent meaning in this instance not beingdependent for selection or maintenance upon the legislature. The President was given a differentelectoral base from Congress and also several specific powers, such as the power to veto legislation,to protect itself from an overbearing Congress. It should not be forgotten that their fear was lessabout a too powerful President than about a too-dependent President, one who would be dominatedby Congress which controlled the money.

As for continuity, not only were the states kept intact geographically, but their authoritiesremained in large part unaltered. Even most laws of the Confederation, such as the NorthwestOrdinance of 1787, were retained. As one student of early administrative history observed: "Thecontinuity between the old and new systems was made plain by the fact both [John] Jay and [Henry]Knox, secretaries of Foreign Affairs and War, respectively, continued in their offices, withmodifications, under the new government." (6)

Reflecting upon the writings and decisions of the Framers with respect to the administrativeelements of the new government, one is struck by their willingness to break new ground. (7) Rarely in their discourse isthere reference to the prevailing administrative systems in Great Britain or France, the two majornation-states of the period. This is explained in part because the new government of the UnitedStates was created before (although just before) the French Revolution, and thus tended to reflectthe values of the 18th century Enlightenment, rather than the values of the 19th century socialrevolutionaries. More to the point, however, neither Great Britain nor France had "modern"administrative systems at the time. For the most part, their administrative systems were poorlyorganized and managed, and to a large extent corrupted by the widespread selling of offices ofstate. (8) In the case ofFrance, the largely feudal administrative structure would be swept away by the Revolution. (9)

Enlightenment philosophy stressed reason, and reason embraced scientific methodology. Alexander Hamilton, held by many to be the "father of public administration," was articulate in hisarguments that public administration was a "science" and that the United States could organize agovernment that was at once efficient and representative. (10) Writing in Federalist #9 , Hamilton states:

The science of politics, however, like most othersciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now wellunderstood, which were either not known at all or imperfectly known to the ancients. The regulardistribution of power into distinct departments; the introduction of legislative balances and checks;the institution of courts composed of judges holding their office during good behavior; therepresentation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their election: these are wholly newdiscoveries, or have made their principal progress toward perfection during moderntimes.

The important point to recognize is that the Framers believed that it was possible to createa rational and democratically accountable administrative structure. They believed that there wereprinciples of organization that ought to be followed and that deviation from these principles shouldrequire the promoters to meet a higher standard of proof. The role of historical and legal precedentin the evolution of the federal executive establishment came into play during the very first Congress. Much that takes place today in the field of organizational management can be traced back in originto the first years of the Republic.

One of the first orders of business for the new Congress in 1789 was the establishment ofexecutive departments. Three "organic" statutes were passed creating three great departments;Treasury, State, and War. (11) A fourth department, a Department of Home Affairs, wasconsidered and abandoned with the functions likely to have resided in that department being assignedto the other three departments. All the particular functions of the newly created executive branch,save that of managing the federal government's legal affairs, and delivering the mails were entrustedto these departments.

The decision to establish a unitary administrative structure under the President, a muchadmired innovation at the time, was intended by the Federalists to complement their morecomprehensive theory of government. Leonard D. White, an administrative historian, commentedon this theory:

The Federalists did not fear administrativepower. To the contrary, they had a deadly fear of governmental impotence. The interests which theycherished had suffered deeply from lack of a government which could govern, and the need forpower was, in their minds, not subject to debate. The Federalists were not, however, in favor ofirresponsible power; they did not propose an American copy of an arbitrary kind from whose controlthey had recently won independence. (12)

The first potential challenge to the Federalist theory of organization management arose fromthe election of Thomas Jefferson, a man suspicious of energetic government. Jefferson's theory oforganization began at the local level with emphasis on the citizen as participant in governmentalaffairs. There was a romantic element in Jefferson's political thought that tended to view goodgovernment as utilitarian and minimalist. He believed in rotation-in-office to guard against the"degeneracy of public servants" and that governmental service should be "drudgery and forsubsistence only." For Hamilton, on the other hand, government should be a catalyst for great things. Freedom required strength and national purpose. As Lynton K. Caldwell would observe: "Hamiltonis our great teacher of the organization and administration of public power; Jefferson our chiefexpositor of its control." (13) As it turned out, Jefferson was not inclined to dismantle whatorganization was in place, nor to alter its fundamental character.

Organizational Management in the 19th Century

Although the main lines of Federalist organization and managerial philosophy remainedgenerally in place through 1829, the institutional presidency gradually declined vis-a-vis theCongress. (14) Congressbegan to assert its authority over executive agencies more energetically with each passing decade,although this had minimal consequences in terms of organizational structure.

The Federalist concept of an integrated executive branch under the President retained itspersuasiveness throughout the 19th century. Prior to 1860, only four permanent "detached agencies"were created: the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the Botanic Garden, and theGovernment Printing Office. When the federal government assumed additional functions, thesefunctions were usually assigned to existing departments, or to new departments created for thatpurpose, such as the Department of the Interior in 1849.

The first substantial break with Federalist departmentalism did not occur until the creationof the Civil Service Commission in 1883 and the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. (15) This break fromdepartmentalism was associated in many respects with the newly triumphant civil service reformmovement, which sought to cleanse administration of partisan politics by introducing the meritpersonnel system. (16)

The final two decades of the nineteenth century were years when rapid industrialization wasstraining the capacity of the government, which still reflected in many respects a simpler, more ruralperiod of national life. Regulation was being demanded for industries, transportation, and urban life. Government institutions required new cadres of trained, professional personnel, not simply politicalpatronage appointees. In his review of this period, Stephen Skowronek suggests:

Generally speaking, the expansion of nationalcapacity in America around the turn of the century was a response to industrialism. The constructionof a centralized bureaucratic apparatus was championed as the best way to maintain order during thisperiod of upheaval in economic, social, and international affairs. Viewed at this level, the Americanexperience fits a general pattern of institutional development and rationalization in publicadministration. (17)

Congress was able to exercise leverage over administrative affairs through its control of thepurse strings and through its authority to initiate investigations. With respect to the latter authority,Congress had made official inquiries into events and activities since 1789. In the final third of the19th century, however, Congress expanded its investigatory activities to include managementissues. (18) Twocongressional inquiries into the conduct and activities of executive departments stand out as thecentury closed. A Select Committee of the Senate, chaired by Francis Cockrell of Missouri,conducted an investigation of executive agencies to determine why they were so slow in acting andapparently costing so much. (50th Cong., 1st sess., S.Rept. 507, 1888). With a similar objective, ajoint commission of both Houses was established in 1893 (the Dockery-Cockrell Commission),chaired by Senator Cockrell and Representative Alexander Dockery, which issued a report on thelaws managing each department (53rd Cong., 1st sess., H. Rept. 49, 1893). A number of laws alteringthe "business methods" of agencies were enacted as a direct result of the commission's work.

The principal significance for administrative history of these two late 19th centurycommissions, however, lies not in their substantive results, but rather in their attitudes towards theinstitutionalized presidency and its relationship to the departments and agencies. Neither inquirydiscussed the presidential office, nor what role that office might be expected to play in theimprovement of the conduct of the executive branch.

While the new governmental reform movement enjoyed its first major victories at themunicipal level, its ideals had an impact upon the national government as well, in part becauseCongress was finding it more difficult and less rewarding to manage federal agencies directly. AsPeri Arnold suggests: "[C]ongressional leaders assumed that only the legislature could imposechanges in administrative practices. But Congress was too unfocused for the task of administrativereform; there were always more pressing issues for the members, and Congress' interests inadministration are necessarily episodic...." (19) Thus, Congress was increasingly sympathetic to the idea ofdelegating some of its managerial and regulatory authority to the President and executive agencies.

The problem, however, was that the institutionalized presidency was unable to substantiallyenhance either its political or managerial leverage over the executive establishment. The Presidenthad virtually no staff, no budgetary authority over agencies, and few general management lawsthrough which the agencies could be supervised collectively. (20) The situation was ripe forchange.

Progressivism and Its Values

The new century ushered in new opportunities for American Presidents to exert theirleadership skills. Governmental institutions were growing rapidly, not only in size, but in theirresource requirements. The executive branch needed new forms of management and a skilledmanager, and the President was looked upon to furnish this leadership

Progressives believed that progress was not only possible, but virtually inevitable if certainsound principles were followed. The first of the two capstone principles was that politics andadministration could and should be separated. Although some scholars attribute this intellectualconcept to Woodrow Wilson, (21) most writing cites a small book by Frank J. Goodnow, Politicsand Administration (1900), with bringing the purported distinction to scholarly consciousness. Goodnow argued: "Politics has to do with the policies and expressions of state will," whereasadministration "has to do with the execution of these policies." (22) This dichotomy led to theproposition that it is the function of the legislative branch to form policy ("will of the state") and ofthe executive branch to implement the policy. The executive branch, properly organized andmanaged, would administer the policies in an impartial and apolitical manner. (23)

The second capstone principle distinguishing the Progressive era was the belief that theadministration of government agencies and programs was subject to principles of "scientificmanagement." The idea that public sector administration could be made "scientific" was first andmost notably promoted by Frederick W. Taylor who wrote on the "one best way" to manage amanufacturing activity in his 1911 book, The Principles of Scientific Management . (24) Although he wasspecifically concerned with managing the work process in a private factory, he was convinced, aswere his followers, that the principles of scientific management were applicable to publicadministration as well. (25)

Under the banner of Progressivism, the doctrines of "scientific management" were promotedfor application in the executive branch. With respect to organizational management, Progressives,by and large, favored four "reforms": (1) reorganization of the executive branch into functionaldepartments and agencies; (2) promotion of the President's authority to manage a unified executivebranch; (3) introduction of an executive budget; and (4) development of a "neutrally competent"management class for agency leadership. Given the particular focus of this study and the limitedspace, we can discuss only elements (1) and (2) of the general Progressive philosophy: the need fora functionally based, integrated executive branch structure and the evolution of the managerialpresidency. (26)

Scientific management was influential not so much because of its specialized procedures asfor the fundamental idea it fostered, namely, the perfectibility of human institutions. (27) Properly constructed andmanaged institutions, it was believed, could overcome many of the structural inadequacies ofcongressionally mandated programs. There was a self-assurance among reformers and publicadministrationists that they could administer anything. Managers could and would ultimatelytriumph over the alleged ineptness and venality of politicians. Managers were to be the elite in thisscientifically ordered world of the future, and the President would be the Chief Manager of arevitalized national government. The Chief Manager must base his overall managerial strategy ona comprehensive plan, and for this plan to be implemented there must be an integrated executivebranch organization with strict lines of responsibility and accountability to him. Thus, the struggleto increase the President's managerial capacity began.

Reorganization of executive agencies and functions as a systematic tool of governance wasa major component of the multi-faceted Progressive philosophy. The first President to espouse the"reorganization" strategy for Progressivism was Theodore Roosevelt. "President TheodoreRoosevelt, unlike McKinley," Herbert Emmerich averred, "had firm views on presidentialmanagement. He was the undoubted originator of the concept of reorganization as a continuing needfor administrative management and as an executive responsibility." (28)

Theodore Roosevelt, the embodiment of Progressivism, believed that a corollary of ScientificManagement was the view that there was "one best way" to organize the executive branch, and thatthe prerogative to reorganize should rest with the President and his departmental secretaries. He wasable to put this view into law with the passage of the 1903 Act creating the Department ofCommerce and Labor which authorized the President "... by order in writing, to transfer to the newdepartment any unit engaged in statistical or scientific work, together with their duties and authority"(32 Stat. 827). The authority to transfer would then be an Executive Order rather than a statute. Roosevelt subsequently asked Congress, unsuccessfully, for broad reorganization authority. (29) Later Presidents wouldpress with greater success for general reorganization authority.

Progressives believed in information, analysis and experts. There was a working assumptionin much of their writings and activities that if one could somehow seat reasonable people around atable, give them plenty of information on a problem or subject, there would be a high probability ofagreement among the participants. Thus, the idea of "commissions" came into vogue. Ideally,commissions would consist of "experts" but, if necessary, include some political leaders as well. Thepoint was, however, that a commission was less likely to be subject to political pressures andshort-term perspectives than a regular legislative committee. Commissions would meet, hire expertassistance, define the problem, review the facts, and make recommendations for change to thePresident, to Congress, or to both. The use of advisory commissions became popular during theProgressive era and remains so to this day.

Progressives wanted the American political system and their government to become bothefficient and politically accountable. The leaders of American commerce wanted a government thatcould support the emerging business culture and thus a "good government" alliance was formedconsisting of business leaders, top academics, and social reformers. It was a fragile alliance at bestwhich enjoyed ascendency for less than two decades ending with America's entry into World WarI. (30) But much wasaccomplished by this alliance and 80 years later its influence is still felt.

In the field of organizational design and management, the Progressive values emphasizedpresidential administrative leadership, hierarchical structure and an integrated executive branch. These values still have appeal as a philosophical norm, even though the administrative history of thepost World War II period is largely a chronicle of rejection of these values in practice. Whereas,Presidents once viewed organizational management as the key to administrative leadership, todaythe tendency by Presidents is arguably to view the design and organizational structures as simply a minor and negotiable element in the larger political equation. The absence of a consensus as tothe principles or doctrines that should guide the process of organizational design and management,coupled with a decline in central management agencies of the U.S. government, (31) has resulted in a highlyfragmented political environment. The present situation finds, in the view of some, that agencies,their interest group constituencies, and relevant congressional committees (the fabled "iron triangle") have become the principal initiators and arbiters in organizational design and management. (32)

Rise and Decline of Orthodoxy

The study of landmark commissions is, in large measure, the story of the rise and decline ofan idea. The idea began with the Federalists, was reasserted by the civil service reform movementof the 1880s, refined by the Progressives, and culminated in the reports of the Brownlow Committeeand Hoover Commissions in the period immediately before and after World War II. The idea thatgenerated all this activity was the belief that management, particularly the organizational designaspect of management, was subject to certain theoretical premises applicable throughout the federalgovernment and government in general.

Writing at mid-century, Wallace Sayre described the prevailing premises of organizationalmanagement:

Organization theory was stated in 'scientificmanagement' terms; that is, it was seen largely as a problem in organization technology--thenecessities of hierarchy, the uses of staff agencies, a limited span of control, subdivision of work bysuch 'scientific' principles as purpose, process, place, or clientele. The executive budget wasemphasized as an instrument of rationality, of coordination, planning, and control.... A 'neutral' or'impartial' career service was required to insure competence, expertise, rationality. (33)

These principles acquired the status of received truth, thus becoming what is referred to eventoday as the "orthodox theory" public administration. The most refined statement of these principlesis to be found in the 1937 essay by Luther Gulick, "Notes on the Theory of Organization," which wasan edited work that accompanied the Report of the President's Committee on AdministrativeManagement (Brownlow Committee) submitted to President Franklin Roosevelt on January 1,1937. (34) The BrownlowCommittee report was described by Sayre "as the high noon of orthodoxy in public administrationtheory in the United States." (35)

Criticism of the orthodox principles of organization was heard from academicians evenduring the period when the principles enjoyed their widest support among political and governmentalleaders. As early as 1946, behaviorists were labeling the principles of organization as mere"proverbs." The problem, they alleged, was not so much that these proverbs were devoid of wisdom,but that the prevailing doctrine was inadequate to help one pick the right proverb from the wrongone. (36) What wasneeded to establish a proper theory of organizational and administrative management was thedevelopment of precise language determined by scientifically based research. Behaviorists,according to skeptics, have been trying unsuccessfully for over half a century now to come up witha comprehensive theory of governmental organization to replace the "principles" theydebunked. (37)

The consequence of these assaults on traditional public administration principles oforganizing governmental institutions has been to de-legitimate them in academic circles and to alesser degree among practitioners. Public administrators appear to be embarrassed to openly avowthe "orthodox" organizational principles, lest they be accused of political naÃ¯vetÃ©. The retreat frompublic law experience and orthodox organizational principles proved to be an invitation to thosepromoting a new, comprehensive management style, called "entrepreneurial management," a subjectto be discussed more fully elsewhere in the report.

On a practical level, a break occurred in the 1960s between the academics, who tended toabandon orthodox organizational principles and language, and political leaders who, although theyfelt little constraint against breaking orthodox organizational principles in designing agencies andprograms, still felt compelled to use the orthodox rhetoric. Even today, most political leaders justifyreorganization proposals on the grounds of improving "economy and efficiency," "streamlininggovernment," "reducing overlap and duplication" and other such phrases which suggest the savingsof money as the primary motive for making organizational decisions. (38) The last landmarkcommission study to reassert the orthodox principles, albeit with reservations, was the Ash Councilreport of 1971 to President Nixon. (39)

Heterodoxy: Deconstructing the State

In the two decades following the Ash Council report, no one theory or doctrine of publicmanagement gained consensus status. Whereas before 1970, most reorganization proposalsemanating from commissions reporting to the President, or Congress, or both, emphasized the needfor more presidential leadership, integrated departments, hierarchical leadership, budgetaryaccountability, and personnel system interchangeability, this ceased to be the case. The next twolandmark commissions, President Carter's Presidential Reorganization Project (PRP)(1977-79) andPresident Reagan's Grace Commission (1984-85), specifically disavowed orthodox organizationalmanagement principles, and by implication, government organizational theory altogether. As PeriArnold observed, they also shared an anti-government, populist bias in their thinking.

Beginning with Carter, and continuing throughthe presidency of Ronald Reagan and into the Clinton Administration, administrative reorganizationand reforms have become expressions of populist concerns about government's size, cost, andperformance.... Now reform's purpose was to make government fit the expectations of the electoratethat was increasingly hostile to big government. In effect, administrative reform was abandoningone presidential political project regarding administration for another. It is now a tool to negotiatethe President's role vis-Ã -vis administration in an environment of discontent about government andskepticism about its activities. (40)

With respect to the PRP (1977-79), President Carter's chief reorganization planner, HarrisonWellford, "forthrightly denied that any overall principles, theory, or view of organization,administration, or the governmental system guided the planning operation." (41) The PRP believed that thebest management concepts came "from the bottom up, not from the top down." Good managementwas based on pragmatism, not doctrine. Let a thousand ideas flourish.

The Administration of Ronald Reagan continued the populist thrust of the Carter years withits Grace Commission that announced at the outset that its report would not discuss "the origins,premises, or methodologies of their studies ... because we do not want to risk losing even one readerwho might be turned away from having to wade through such preliminary material." (42) The Carter and Reaganreorganization exercises rejected the orthodox concept of a strong institutional presidency, optinginstead for the stronger political presidency then in academic vogue. (43) As the 1980s progressed,an intellectual vacuum emerged, with no comprehensive organizational management counter theorybeing presented to replace the orthodox principles now in disfavor. Insofar as there was coherenceto the Carter and Reagan reorganization exercises, it was a general movement toward deconstructingthe state.

New Public Management: Entrepreneurs Versus Constitutionalists

While the Carter and Reagan Administrations were not subtle in their populist distrust ofgovernment, and felt little need to posit a comprehensive administrative theory upon which to basetheir actions, the new Clinton Administration (1993-2001) decided to achieve similar ends with anew strategy. They would "reinvent government" toward the end of making it both smaller and moreconcerned with "performance." (44) A bit of historical background is useful at this point.

Beginning in the immediate post World War II period, several strands of economic literatureemerged arguing a case for the superiority of the market over governmentally planned and managedeconomies, then dominant throughout the world. One strand consciously assumed the mantle of"public choice" theory. At its heart, public choice theory rests on the premise that political as wellas economic behavior is based on rational, self-serving maximization of material income or thesatisfaction derived therefrom. (45)

The political impact of this premise has been extraordinary. By the mid-1980s, it had sweptmany nations to varying degrees, including the United States, and contributed its share to thecollapse of the communist world and to centralized government planning and management generally. Planned economies fell from favor. Free market advocates pushed a variety of related conceptsinternationally, many with profound implications for government management. (46) A New PublicManagement (NPM) paradigm (model) emerged in the early 1990s and rapidly gained internationalcurrency through its dissemination, if not uncritical support, by the Organization for EconomicCooperation and Development (OECD). (47) The underlying premise of the NPM is that the governmentaland private sectors are alike in their essentials and subject to the same generic managementprinciples. Promoters of NPM ("entrepreneurs") rely on literature, propositions, and practices thatstrive for convergence of the governmental and private sectors. (48) The acceptance of theconvergence model of public management worldwide has been both rapid and in some instancesdisruptive. (49)

The American variation on the New Public Management (NPM) was the "reinventinggovernment" exercise, led principally by Vice President Al Gore. The reinventors largely rejectedthe language of public choice, however, preferring instead that of business schools: entrepreneursaccept the underlying premise that the government and private sectors are fundamentally alike andsubject to most of the same economically derived behavioral norms. (50) In the private sector theprincipal, if not exclusive, objective is results, and this principle, in their view, should be applied tothe governmental sector as well. Thus, the first principle of the 1993 National Performance Review(NPR) Report reads: "Effective entrepreneurial governments cast aside red tape, shifting fromsystems in which people are accountable for following rules to systems in which they are accountablefor achieving results." (51)

This shift toward results over legal process as the primary value in government managementis a statement about political power as well as administrative management. Vice President Goreindicated as much in 1993 when he stated: "CEOs--from the White House to agency heads--mustensure that everyone understands that power will never flow through the old channels again." (52) The NPR vision was tobreak down the barriers between the sectors and create a society of government/private partnerships. The partnerships, ideally, would be largely autonomous bodies run by managers under contract tomeet negotiated performance standards. The entrepreneurs argue that managers should bederegulated, given freedom from congressional "micro-management" (53) and less supervision by thePresident and his central managerial agencies. Since the goal is greater managerial autonomy, thereis relatively little interest in organization per se , or in the legal theories that encourage politicalaccountability for agencies and officers.

Critics (often self-identified as constitutionalists) challenged the fundamental philosophicalbasis of the entrepreneurial management paradigm arguing, among other things, that it tends tosubvert the intentions of the Constitution and is anti-democratic in thrust, if not intention. Constitutionalists view the government and private sectors as distinct in character, with thedistinctions founded in law. The distinguishing characteristic of governmental management,contrasted to private management, is that government actions must have their basis in public law,not in the financial interests of private entrepreneurs or in the fiduciary concerns of corporatemanagers. (54) Thefrequently criticized hierarchical structure found in the executive branch is designed more to ensureaccountability for managerial action; promoting control over employee is secondary. In this view,the value of accountability to political leadership and the importance of due process indecisionmaking trumps the premium placed on performance and results. However, it is less aquestion of pursuing one value at the expense of the other than it is a matter of precedence in theevent of conflict.

According to the constitutionalists, the fundamental purpose of governmental managementis to implement the laws passed by Congress, laws that may be wise or less-wise, not necessarily tomaximize performance (however it is defined and measured) or to satisfy "customers." Whilepolitical accountability and effective performance are generally compatible objectives, when thesevalues come into conflict, the democratic values of legal process and political accountability takeprecedence over the unquestioned entrepreneurial values of efficiency and results.

The century closed with this debate between the entrepreneurs and constitutionalists over thefuture direction of public administration. The debate is not over arcane issues of little long-termconsequence, but rather it concerns fundamental issues of democratic governance.

This study of landmark commissions is intended to provide an overview of the ideas,institutions, and people who shaped the contemporary organization of the United States government. The executive branch is not the result of random political actions. Nor is it a construct of a singlemoment, set in stone to last the ages. Rather, it is a product of several basic theoretical conceptsintended to create a structure that permits and enhances the Founders' goal of creating a democraticrepublic. In the century recently ended, these theoretical concepts underwent periodicreinterpretations to accommodate changing circumstances and administrative values.

This study covers the period through 1999, but it is already clear in this new century that newinstitutional questions and challenges are facing the President and Congress. For instance, how bestto reorganize the executive branch to pursue effective counterterrorist measures without erodingdemocratic accountability and the proper administration of other agencies and programs? ShouldCongress realign committee jurisdictions to best oversee and co-manage the national counterterrorism strategy? All of which leads to the question: What contribution, if any, mightanother landmark commission provide towards addressing these questions?

Landmark Commissions

Those commissions considered to be "landmark" in character, while they may be studiedindividually or collectively, may also be viewed as part of a much larger institutional category, thefederal "advisory commission." Advisory commissions, or committees as they are often called, comein many sizes, lengths of service, and are assigned remarkably diverse mandates. Indeed,categorizing the multitude of advisory commissions has proven to be a daunting task. (55) One attempt wasundertaken by Hugh Davis Graham. Graham suggested that there were essentially five categoriesof advisory commissions:

1. reorganization . The study of organizational structure generally with the intent torealign authorities, organizations and personnel toward the end of increasingrationality and accountability.

2. mega-commission. Intended to examine the existing status of national life and offerrecommendations for its betterment.

3. crisis-induced. In the turbulent 1960s, the practice began of establishing highvisibility commissions to make investigations into so-called national crises (e.g., theNational Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968), generally referred to asthe Kerner Commission).

4. technical. The great majority of advisory commissions perform technical functionsand give advice to agencies. Most such commissions are permanent, staffed bytechnical experts, and form a basic method for the inclusion of diverse views in theagency's policies and management.

5. major policy . These commissions have been appointed to study and makerecommendations on policy issues. In the past, such commissions have studied civilrights, elements of U.S. foreign policy, and more recently, provided a study on thefuture of Social Security. (56)

In this study our attention will center on one of the subcategories of advisory committees, thereorganization commissions, those that were assigned a comprehensive mandate to study theorganization and management of the executive branch, broadly interpreted. It is also worth notingthat the literature on both advisory committees and reorganization generally focuses on advisorycommittees created by, or related to, the executive branch. Much less attention has been paid to themany advisory committees created by or related to the legislative branch. (57) Many of these advisorycommittees, such as the Base Closure and Realignment Commission, (58) while reporting toCongress, nonetheless ultimately impact the organization and management of the executive branch.

Keep Commission (1905-1909)

Context.

As the new century dawned, the United States was fully involved in the age of industrial andtechnological growth. The Spanish American War had established the United States as aninternational power with the responsibilities of empire. What had historically been a tax systemresulting in surpluses was now producing recurrent deficits. Calls were heard from "reformers" torevamp the federal government to permit growth in the capacity of government to perform its basicfunctions and those functions being added each year.

As Governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt had been engaged in a number ofreorganization projects, such as reorganization of the state canal system and its correctionalinstitutions. At the national level, he supported Elihu Root's campaign to professionalize themilitary. Upon becoming President after William McKinley's death, Roosevelt set about to bringhis Progressive values to play in reorganizing the executive branch. He believed that problem areasshould be first studied by an advisory commission that would provide recommendations to thePresident. In his view, the advisory commission should be composed of volunteers, typically unpaidinterdepartmental committees, drawn from the ranks of career civil servants.

Several advisory commissions offered recommendations for improvements in specificagencies and programs (e.g., Gifford Pinchot's Committee on the Organization of GovernmentScientific Work) during 1903 and 1904. The President was convinced that a similar advisorycommission should be established to examine the organization and operations of all executive branchdepartments and agencies. (59) A preliminary outline for what such a commission should do waswritten by Gifford Pinchot and James R. Garfield, Commissioner of the Bureau of Corporations.

Authority.

In 1905, on his own initiative, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed by letter aCommission on Department Methods, and named Charles Hallem Keep, Assistant Secretary of theTreasury, as chairman. (60) The commission (committee) became known as the KeepCommission. The President's practice of appointing commissions to study and recommend changesin administrative practices without consulting Congress or receiving its approval upset many in thelegislative branch. They believed that such oversight and management recommendations properlybelonged to Congress, as it had been in the 19th century. (61)

The commission, although its principal work was completed in 1907, remained in operationuntil the close of the Roosevelt Administration in 1909. (62)

Membership .

The Keep Commission consisted of five government executives of sub-cabinet rank: CharlesHallem Keep, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury; Lawrence O. Murray, Assistant Secretary ofCommerce and Labor; James R. Garfield, Commissioner of the Bureau of Corporations in theDepartment of Commerce and Labor; Gifford Pinchot, Chief of the Forest Service in the Departmentof Agriculture; and Frank H. Hitchcock, First Assistant Postmaster General.

The selection of sub-cabinet officers to the commission understandably upset some cabinetsecretaries since the commission's analyses and recommendations would tend to highlightdeficiencies in the administration of departments and agencies, thus presenting departmentalsecretaries in an unfavorable light. This problem, for the most part, was never fully resolved but wasmitigated by restraint practiced by all parties.

Administrative Philosophy.

President Roosevelt, in his 1905 Message to Congress, made clear the philosophy onadministrative management he wished to see come to fruition.

There is every reason why our executivegovernmental machinery should be at least as well planned, economical, and efficient as the bestmachinery of the great business organizations, which at present is not the case. To make it so is atask of complex detail and essentially executive in nature; probably no legislative body, no matterhow wise and able, could undertake it with reasonable prospect of success. I recommend that theCongress consider this subject with a view to provide by legislation for the transfer, distribution,consolidation, and assignment of duties and executive organizations or parts of organizations, forthe changes in business methods, within or between the several Departments, that will best promotethe economy, efficiency, and high character of the Government's work. (63)

Organization, Support Staff, and Financing.

In performing its work, the Keep Commission in 1906 was aided by a group of 12subcommittees (e.g., Subcommittee on Accounting and Personnel) composed of approximately 70persons from among full-time employees in the various executive departments. In addition to longerrange studies of cross-cutting administrative issues, the commission was also used by the Presidentto investigate specific management problems that were actual or potential scandals.

In a message to Congress in 1906, Roosevelt requested an appropriations for $25,000 "forthe employment of specialists and experts to assist the special Committee on Department Methods." Congress, however, was not persuaded and granted the President only $5,000 to be used for hiringprivate experts. (34 Stat. 635). As a consequence, few outside consultants were hired and the workwas performed almost completely by federal officers and employees on their own time, in additionto their regular duties.

Congress was sufficiently upset at the Rooseveltian use of commissions, which theycorrectly viewed as a tactic to bypass Congress, that it passed the Tawney amendment to the 1909supplemental appropriations act (32 Stat. 1027). The Amendment prohibited the expenditure ofpublic funds to support presidentially created commissions unless appropriated for that expresspurpose.

Reports and Recommendations.

By December 1907, the major inquiries of the Keep Commission had been completed;nonetheless the commission continued its work until the end of President Roosevelt's term on March3, 1909. In all, it issued 19 formal reports to the President, although they were never compiled andissued as a single report. Gustavus Weber states: "It is much to be regretted that ... these reports ofthe Keep Commission were never published as public documents. The result is that they areexceedingly difficult to obtain. The set possessed by the Institute of Governmental research [laterto become The Brookings Institution] is, in fact, the only complete set of which the author of thepresent volume has knowledge." (64)

While there were hundreds of recommendations ranging from agency specific togovernment-wide proposals, the "success" of the exercise was difficult to measure. Most of the KeepCommission's recommendations were not incorporated in executive orders or legislation. Implementation varied from one department to the next, dependent in large measure on the supportof department secretaries.

The commission recommended many housekeeping changes in the fields of accounting,purchasing and contracting, records management, coordination of statistics, and government printingand publications. Recommendations were forthcoming on ways and means to improveinter-departmental relations and coordination. It was in the area of personnel management that theKeep Commission probably made its innovative recommendations, calling for competitive pay and a retirement system for federal workers.

Results and Assessment.

The Keep Commission was generally accorded high marks, then and now, for the quality ofits research and the insight of its recommendations. (65) Writing in 1970, Herbert Emmerich concluded:

The work of the Keep Commission ... was alandmark of executive introspection. It stimulated management improvement in bureau after bureauand in such varied fields as accounting and costing, archives and records administration,simplification of paper work, use of office machinery, personnel administration, procurement andsupply, and contracting procedures.... Congress, however, resented its activities because itthreatened many vested interests and jobs and because it had only presidential sanction. (66)

No major structural reorganizations can be attributed to the work of the Keep Commission. The reports dealt with specific aspects of administrative methods and procedures, yet relatively littlechange in these practices can be credited directly to the commission. What, then, was thecontribution of the Keep Commission? First, it produced a quality set of reports that reflected theinitial effort by the executive branch to study itself in a comprehensive fashion. Second, it was acommission that broke with the congressional definition of efficiency, a term associated almostexclusively with "economy," or the spending of less monies, and concentrated instead uponexpanding the capacity of agency heads to manage their agencies. Third, the commission wasresponsible for creating a whole new vocabulary of terms and concepts to be applied to publicadministration. Finally, in Oscar Kraines' opinion, the major contribution of the commission lay in"the assertion for the first time of the Presidential responsibility for administration." (67)

President's Commission on Economy and Efficiency (1910-1913)

Context.

When William Howard Taft assumed the presidency in 1909, it was generally agreed that thebudgetary and fiscal practices of the executive branch were no longer adequate and that the situationwas rapidly deteriorating. Deficits were becoming chronic and Congress found the ministerial Bookof Estimates submitted each year by the Treasury Department an inadequate tool for comprehendingthe financial status of the entire government and for making informed decisions among competingclaims for limited resources.

Authority.

In 1909, Congress specified that the President and the Secretary of the Treasury were tocompare expected revenues and the appropriations requested by the agencies and then makerecommendations as to both the priority of appropriations and where expenditures might be reduced (35 Stat. 1027). In effect, Congress was calling for an executive budget to be submitted by thePresident, a practice in use in many states. President Taft and his Treasury Secretary, FranklinMacVeigh, quickly found that they did not have the resources to meet this requirement. As a resultof the Tawney Amendment passed during the Keep Commission days, Taft was not able to establishand fund a commission by presidential directive. Also, Taft, unlike his predecessor, had a lessexpansive view of presidential prerogatives and was more deferential to congressional sensibilities:he requested funds so that he might determine how best to establish a commission to address theexecutive budget issue. Taft requested that Congress appropriate $100,000 for this preliminaryexercise, and Congress appropriated the funds (36 Stat. 703).

The project was conducted in two phases; phase one, from October 1910 through March1911, consisted of making preliminary studies, largely under the direction of the President'sSecretary, Charles Norton, to determine the scope of the issue areas. Phase two comprised theestablishment of a commission to study the data and make recommendations to the President, andthe Commission on Economy and Efficiency.

Membership.

In 1911, President Taft named Frederick Cleveland as chairman of the President'sCommission on Economy and Efficiency, and physically provided space and support in the WhiteHouse. Four other members were appointed, William F. Willoughby, a public administration scholar,who was at the time was assistant director of the Bureau of the Census; Walter Warwick, one-timeauditor of the Isthmian Canal Commission; Frank J. Goodnow, professor of administrative law;Harvey S. Chase, a certified public accountant; and Merritt O. Chance, then Auditor for the PostOffice Department, was made secretary and later a member of the commission.

Later on, in an economy measure intended to appease a hostile Congress, Taft reduced thecommission in 1912 to three members, Cleveland, Warwick and Chance. Former membersGoodnow and Willoughby maintained close ties to the commission nonetheless.

Administrative Philosophy.

There was, at least initially, a division of opinion regarding the appropriate direction for theproposed commission to take. For the most part, Congress wished to have the commission reassertits values, meaning congressional dominance over agency management and funding. Efficiency,defined simply as spending less monies, was the congressional leitmotif and they expected anyreorganization proposal and any executive budget proposal to promote this overall objective. Taft,however, rejected this narrow approach and determined instead to align himself with the newlyemergent field of public administration. In consultation with the New York Bureau of MunicipalResearch, he determined to make this definitely a presidential exercise by having the study based inthe White House. Frederick Cleveland, the director selected by Taft for the initial study was alsodirector of the New York Bureau. By placing the study physically in the White House, Taft wasnot only concerned with protecting the commission from congressional pressures, but from pressuresby cabinet members as well. The study was to be comprehensive in scope, concerned withorganization as well as budgetary matters and management practices.

In President Taft's message to Congress of January 17, 1912 (H. Doc. 458), he reviewed thestatus of the executive branch as he found it in 1909:

This vast organization has never been studiedin detail as one piece of administrative mechanism. Never have the foundations been laid for athrough consideration of the relations of all its parts. No comprehensive effort has been made to listits multifarious activities or to group them in such a way as to present a clear picture of what theGovernment is doing. Never has a complete description been given of the agencies through whichthese activities are performed. At no time has the attempt been made to study all of these activitiesand agencies with a view to the assignment of each activity to the agency best fitted for itsperformance, to the avoidance of duplication of plant and work, to the integration of all administrative agencies of the Government, so far as may be practicable, into a unified organizationfor the most effective and economical dispatch of public business. (68)

By the comprehensive vision President Taft brought to the project, he significantly redefinedthe debate over organizational management and established the President as the key player for futureorganizational management. As Peri Arnold notes:

From a modern perspective, it is difficult toappreciate how innovative was Cleveland's model of the organization of the executive branch. Nolonger were these agencies to be understood as single units tied to Congress by an imbilical cord ofstatute and appropriations. Rather, they would be seen as part of a whole that had hierarchy andordered authority--a bureaucracy. When seen through this new conception, the traditional pictureof the dominant tie of agency to legislature is an intrusive element--a pathology. (69)

Organization, Staff Support, and Funding.

Pursuant to its statutory authority, a preliminary investigation was begun under CharlesNorton, Secretary to the President. At the close of the preliminary studies President Taft, as notedearlier, requested an appropriation of $100,000 which Congress granted in a sundry civilappropriation act for 1911. This appropriation was supplemented by one for $75,000 contained inthe sundry civil appropriation act for 1912. Another appropriation for $10,000 passed to meet theexpenses of a special investigation of the Patent Office, which Congress, by joint resolution, directedthe President to make. Finally, Congress appropriated $75,000 in the sundry civil appropriation actfor 1913. The total funding for the commission was thus $260,000 from fiscal years July 1, 1910,to June 30, 1913. (70)

Reports and Recommendations.

The commission, complaining of meagre funding and inadequate congressional support,nonetheless produced many reports, some of which were sent to Congress, others not. The formsof publications included a Message of the President, accompanied by the official reports to Congress;circulars printed by the commission; and miscellaneous documents (e.g., Treasury circulars). Thegreat majority of reports and recommendations were agency-specific (e.g., consolidation of theBureau of Lighthouses with the Life-Saving Service) or process-based (e.g., principles for handlingcorrespondence) and thus constituted what today might be referred to as micro-management issues. Most of the recommendations were concerned with personnel, financial practices, and business typeactivities performed by agencies. (71) The running thread of the various recommendations was thatagencies should be grouped together by purpose and that they should follow similar procedures inthe conduct of their affairs.

One of the recommendations of the commission proved, however, to be of government-wideand political importance. President Taft forwarded a Message to Congress, attached to thecommission's 568 page supporting report ( The Need for a National Budget ), calling for a nationalexecutive budget. (72) In the meantime, Taft directed that agencies simultaneously assemble an estimate of expendituresusing the traditional congressional method and an executive budget according to a presidentiallydirected format. In 1913, just prior to his leaving Office, Taft proposed that his successor be givena presidential staff agency to support the President in his new budgetary responsibilities.

Understandably, a major political debate ensued over which institution, the President orCongress, had principal authority and responsibility to oversee the agencies. Opposition to theproposal was not confined to certain Members of Congress, but included some cabinet secretariesas well, secretaries with well developed lines of communications and support from their committees. In the immediate term, Congress, and more particularly the two appropriations committees,prevailed over President Taft, the latter being politically weakened by the congressional electionsof 1910 and the divisive 1912 presidential elections, in which the Democrats swept not only theWhite House but both houses of Congress as well. Some voluntary actions at the agency level wereforthcoming, but generally speaking, little action proceeded directly from the commission report orits leadership. In a post-election gesture, Taft proposed that his successor be given a presidentialstaff agency to support the President in meeting his responsibilities as part of the larger executivebudget reforms. (73)

Results and Assessment.

Subsequent assessments of the commission and of President Taft's leadership in thedevelopment of executive branch budgetary and management methods have generally beenfavorable. (74) "That theCommission's life ended with none of its major recommendations implemented," Peri Arnoldconcluded, "ought not be taken as a measure of failure. In hindsight the Commission was strikinglysuccessful, even if that success was longer in coming than any of its members would have preferred. Its work formed the template of modern comprehensive reorganization planning." (75)

Taft had made a plea to Woodrow Wilson, his successor, to keep the commission alive, butto no avail. Wilson, although considered a successful Progressive in many respects, was notinterested in continuing the life or the work of the commission.

The major contribution made by the commission was more in the theoretical or conceptualrealm than in the contribution of specific recommendations. With the commission's studies, the casewas made for presidential authority and resources to manage the federal bureaucracy. Congress itselfgradually became persuaded by this argument and also by the experience of World War I, with itsmassive demands upon the administrative system of the nation.

Congress, early in the Wilson administration, passed a bill, signed by the President (March25, 1913) (38 Stat.1007), establishing the Bureau of Efficiency as a branch of the Civil ServiceCommission. In a sense, Congress looked upon this Bureau as a successor of the President'sCommission on Economy and Efficiency. The Bureau was plagued by the absence of adequatefunding. Nonetheless, the mandate of the Bureau was expanded by act of March 4, 1915, to includethe "investigation of duplication of statistical and other work and method of business in the variousbranches of government service." In 1916, the Bureau was made an independent agency (39Stat.15). Although the Bureau was authorized to investigate the need for administrativereorganization, it never undertook such a project. (76) The Bureau of Efficiency had an ambiguous status. As GustavusWeber noted at the time: "[T]he Bureau, notwithstanding that its legal status is that of a part of theadministrative branch of the government, is functioning largely as a direct agent of the legislativebranch." (77) The Bureauwas abolished in 1933 (97 Stat. 1519).

Joint Committee on Reorganization (1921-1924)

Context.

The First World War provided extensive evidence of the need for an integrated executivebranch with the President as chief manager. President Taft's call for a national budget andadministrative reorganization, first heard in 1912, now fell on more receptive ears. The newRepublican majority in both chambers saw this as an opportunity to regain the initiative in the fieldof executive branch organization

Following the War, the House took the initiative in promoting the national budget conceptby passing a bill in October 1919 requiring the President to be responsible for estimates of theagencies. To this end, the bill provided for the establishment of a Bureau of the Budget in the Officeof the President. President Wilson announced his support, belatedly in the view of supporters, forthe executive budget concept. The Senate passed a revised version of the bill on May 1, 1920. Thisrevised bill provided not only for a Bureau of the Budget but for a General Accounting Office in thelegislative branch as well. (78)

While the bill had some recognized flaws, supporters were nonetheless surprised whenPresident Wilson invoked his veto power, citing constitutional grounds. The President objected toprocedures for removing the Comptroller General. (79) Frantic efforts to refashion the bill before adjournment wereunsuccessful, thus ending the opportunity for President Wilson to take some credit for establishinga national budget and a national budget agency.

The Republican sweep of 1920 enhanced already strong sentiment for budget reform. Congress altered the Budget bill slightly, hoping to overcome objections. First, the new BudgetBureau was to be "in but not of" the Department of the Treasury, with a separate director to beappointed by the President and not subject to Senate confirmation. Second, Congress wouldcontinue to be the initiatory agent for removing the Comptroller General, but removal would requirea joint resolution, a procedure with the effect of law, thereby requiring a presidential signature. Thenew President, Warren Harding, did not challenge this removal procedure (it has never beenemployed), and thus the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 became law (42 Stat. 20). HerbertEmmerich, succumbing to hyperbole, described the Budget and Accounting Act as "probably thegreatest landmark of our administrative history except for the Constitution itself." (80)

Authority.

In the waning days of the Wilson Administration, Congress, by joint resolution of December29, 1920 (41 Stat. 1083), created a Joint Committee on Reorganization, to be composed of threemembers of each house of Congress, appointed by the President of the Senate and the Speaker of theHouse. The mission of the commission was "to make a survey of the administrative services of thegovernment for the purpose of securing all pertinent facts concerning their powers and duties, theirdistribution among the several executive departments and their overlapping and duplication ofauthority...." (81)

At the suggestion of the new President, Warren Harding, Congress passed a supplementaryjoint resolution, approved May 5, 1921 (42 Stat. 3), authorizing the President to appoint arepresentative of the executive branch to cooperate with the Joint Committee on Reorganization,whose salary should be paid in equal parts from the contingent funds of the Senate and House. (82) President Harding'spersonal representative on the committee, Walter F. Brown, was subsequently voted the chairmanof the congressional committee, an unprecedented action. (83)

President Harding, suspected of subscribing to congressional dominance of organizationalmethod, surprised Congress by reasserting presidential prerogatives over matters of executiveorganization and management. (84) As a matter of high priority, Harding successfully pushed forpassage of legislation to establish both a General Accounting Office and a Bureau of the Budget. (42Stat. 20). Next, Harding sought to not only have executive participation on the Joint Committee,but for the executive branch to take the lead. He was committed to submit to Congress acomprehensive executive reorganization proposal, which occurred in the early months of Harding'ssuccessor, President Calvin Coolidge. (85)

Membership.

The joint committee was composed of three members from each house of Congress, one ofwhom was to be a member of the minority party (Democratic at that period). The initial makeup ofthe joint committee was Senators Reed Smoot (R- UT), James Wadsworth (R-NY), and Pat Harrison(D-MS). House members were Representatives C. Frank Reavis (R-NE), Henry Temple (R-PA),and Robert W. Moore (D-VA).

At the request of the President, Walter F. Brown was elected chairman of the jointcommittee. No apparent concern was expressed at the time about this extraordinary apparentbreaching of the separation of powers doctrine.

Administrative Philosophy.

The principal philosophical underpinning of the joint committee exercise was to reorganizethe executive branch according to "major purpose." In President Harding's letter of June 13, 1921to the joint committee, he stated:

Since it is extremely difficult to administerefficiently departments which include wholly dissimilar and unrelated services, and quite impossibleto administer economically identical or similar services which are scattered throughout severaldepartments, it would seem necessary at the outset of the work of reorganization to provide astatutory regrouping of governmental activities to the end, as far as practice, that each departmentbe made up of agencies having substantially the same major purpose and, further, that identical orsimilar services shall be grouped together. (86)

The joint committee, especially its chairman, Walter F. Brown, was receptive to the conceptof reorganizing by major purpose, although this term was as likely to raise questions as to be theanswer.

The chief player in developing and sustaining an administrative philosophy for theAdministration was a member of Harding's Cabinet, Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce. Hoover enthusiastically embraced the Brown effort as his own and set about to reassert theProgressive ideal of an efficient, but also effective, executive branch. (87) Peri Arnold provides agraphic description of the dynamic quality that Herbert Hoover brought to the Harding Cabinet:

The major intellectual thrust in thisreorganization effort came not from the President or Brown, but from the Secretary of Commerce,Herbert Hoover. Hoover was vitally interested in reorganization, and to this day stands out asperhaps the most prominent theoretician-practitioner in American public administration. Beyondthis, Hoover was the pillar of the Harding cabinet. The President trusted his Secretary of Commerceand tended to rely on Hoover for advice on a wide range of policy matters. While President Hardingused his position to support the reorganization planning effort, and Walter Brown offered thelegitimizing aegis of the joint committee and served as coordinator, Herbert Hoover provided theintellectual thrust for the endeavor. (88)

As Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover set out to reorganize much of the executivebranch. His immediate objective was to alter and expand the functions of the Department ofCommerce. During the course of the discussion in 1921 within the executive branch, he proposedthree great divisions for the Department; one for industry, one for trade, and one for transportationand commerce. A variety of agencies would then be shifted to the Commerce Department. EllisHawley observed of Hoover's early reorganization effort: "In essence, the Commerce Departmentwas to become a department of economic development and management; other agencies would stillbe responsible for special sectors of the economy, but Commerce would serve as a generalcoordinator...." (89)

Not surprisingly, Secretary Hoover's grand scheme, while enjoying some implicit supportfrom the White House, was viewed by the other departments and agencies as a "power grab." Opposition within the cabinet to the Hoover proposal was immediate and intense. (90) Congress, although it hadbeen waiting for the comprehensive executive reorganization report from the joint committee it hadcreated in cooperation with the White House, was less than enthusiastic with its finalrecommendations and chose to take a pass on this first opportunity to perform major surgery on theexecutive branch. (91)

Organization, Staff Support, and Funding.

Unable to establish its own staff, the joint committee, in the form of Walter F. Brown,requested the assistance of the Bureau of Efficiency under Herbert Brown (no relation). Like thejoint committee, the Bureau tried to straddle the branches. It worked with congressional committeeson budgetary matters and worked with the executive branch to promote central managerial interests. The Bureau was very cognizant of the institutional weakness of the presidential office.

Under the Constitution, the President isresponsible for the management of the executive branch of the government, but up to the present,Congress has not seen fit to give to the Chief Executive any machinery with which he can effectivelydischarge this responsibility. The President's staff consists wholly of a small number of personalsecretaries and clerks. The time of this staff is taken up with the consideration of legislativebusiness, the preparation of commissions, appointment matters, and so on. Under these conditionsthe President is... unable to function as an administrative officer. (92)

The Bureau of Efficiency did provide clerical and other support to the Joint Committee. Herbert Hoover's staff at the Commerce Department was also used to develop and promote his viewson the proper direction for the executive branch to take. Hoover, as we will learn, tended to besimultaneously of two minds with regard to executive branch organization. First, he sought to buildup the capacity of the executive branch to meet its responsibilities under a President holdingsufficient authority and institutional support to be the activist Chief Manager. Second, andsomewhat paradoxically to his critics, he believed that government should be limited in its functionsand seek the least claim (economy and efficiency) upon the resources of the taxpayers.

Reports and Recommendations.

When the joint committee received the reports and recommendations from theHarding-Coolidge administration, it reviewed the studies without benefit of staff. Nonetheless, thejoint committee held hearings in 1924, but several factors discouraged the committee from pursuinglegislation on recommendations of the report. First, a new President, Calvin Coolidge, had replacedthe recently deceased Harding, and had exhibited little interest in executive branch reorganizationor the development of a White House staff capacity. Second, administration witnesses illustratedin their remarks the strong divisions of opinion on reorganization proposals, especially the proposalto merge the Departments of War and Navy. Third, there was little discussion of how thereorganizations would eventually "save" money.

The plan submitted by the joint committee to the full Congress was essentially the Hardingplan minus the provision to merge War and Navy. Neither Harding's plan or the specific proposalsprovided firm statistics on "savings" to be achieved by the reorganization. As it turned out, theattractiveness of reorganization was waning and "none of the Joint Committee's large-scalerecommendations were given serious consideration." (93)

The methodology for developing an overall executive branch reorganization plan was to havethe departments themselves take the first shot. Each was to submit a plan to Walter Brown. InBrown's view, such an approach, which was the opposite of the arms-length approach of Taft'sCommission on Economy and Efficiency, was more likely to produce informed analysis by thosemost clearly affected. This approach, however, left most of the department secretaries nonplusedor highly defensive.

Unlike his cabinet colleagues, Secretary Herbert Hoover saw this approach as an opportunityto recast his Department as the centerpiece of a completely redesigned government. Under hisreorganization plan, submitted to Brown (and also the President) in 1921, the Commerce Departmentwould become a "super department" responsible for government's activities in industry, trade, andtransportation. To achieve this objective, many agencies would be taken from their currentdepartments and placed in whole or in part in the new Department of Commerce. A typical transferproposed by Hoover was to move the Bureau of Public Roads from the Agriculture Department toCommerce. Not surprisingly, Hoover's proposals and those of other departmental secretaries,provided the grist for controversy within the Administration. Rather than presiding over a rational,scientific debate on the alternatives of organizational design, Brown found that he was a referee inan amazingly intense political struggle. As if the individual reports of departmental secretaries werenot enough, Brown was the recipient of two major reports from outside organizations, the NationalBudget Committee and the Brookings Institution. (94)

The plans submitted by the departments generally called for the aggrandizement of theirfunctions. In no instance did a department propose to limit or shed one of its functions. Brownworked diligently to make a single plan from the many submitted to present to the President for hisreview. Finally, a single reorganization plan was put in front of the President, who was immediatelyfaced with strong opposition from cabinet members. Conflict was intense on certain proposals,especially the proposal to transfer the Forest Service from the Agriculture Department to the InteriorDepartment. For months, the cabinet debated the provisions of the plan, and there was littleprogress.

Finally, under pressure from Congress, Harding had Brown produce a single plan, onepresumably representing the President's views, and sent it to the joint committee. TheAdministration's proposals were bold and expansive, but politically unacceptable and no action wasforthcoming.

Results and Assessment.

None of the specific recommendations of the joint committee was directly adopted, but theyinfluenced executive organization and management nonetheless. The 1920s were years of transition,with the President gradually emerging as the dominant force in supervising administrativeagencies. (95) A numberof agency-specific reorganization studies were published during the decade, and definite steps weretaken to enhance the managerial capacities of departmental secretaries as well as those of thePresident. (96) In thatsense, therefore, the work of the joint committee and other reorganization efforts of the 1920s wereprecursors of the President's Committee on Administrative Management (Brownlow Committee)appointed in 1936.

Reorganization Authority (1930-1933)

As previously discussed, Hoover had been the principal driving force in promoting thedepartmental reorganization by general purpose and shifting authority and responsibility for suchreorganizations from Congress to the President. Speaking as Secretary of Commerce in 1924,Hoover had recommended that Congress give the President authority, within specified limits, toreorganize executive departments and agencies. (97) No action was forthcoming on his proposal. In his first yearas President, 1929, Hoover included in his Annual Message to Congress, a request for authority tosubmit proposals for reorganization, subject to some form of congressional disapproval. He said thathe saw "no hope for the development of a sound reorganization of the Government unless Congressbe willing to delegate its authority over the problem (subject to defined principles) to the Executive,who should act upon approval of a joint committee of Congress or with the reservation of power ofrevision by Congress within some limited period adequate for its consideration." (98)

During 1930, Hoover was able to secure from Congress approval of two agencyconsolidations. On May 27, 1930, he signed a bill authorizing him to consolidate all the Prohibitionenforcement agencies into the Department of Justice, which he did. On July 8, 1930, under authorityof Congress, he issued an Executive order creating the Veterans' Administration out of some fiveagencies scattered among the departments. The new Administrator of Veterans' Affairs claimed thatthe reorganization and consolidation saved $10,000,000 a year, thus reasserting the standard rationalefor reorganization, the saving of money, and only secondarily the improvement of managerialcapacity. (99)

President Hoover returned to the subject of executive reorganization in his Annual Messagefor 1931, although this time not specifying a method of congressional disapproval. (100) In a major address ofFebruary 17, 1931, Hoover asked for authority consolidate various executive and administrativeorganizations and activities. The form of congressional control was left indefinite. Herecommended that Congress provide that:

Authority under proper safeguards is to belodged in the President to effect these transfers and consolidations and authority to redistributeexecutive groups in the 10 executive departments of the Government or in the independentestablishments, as the President may determine, by Executive order, such Executive order to liebefore the Congress for 60 days during the sessions thereof becoming effective, but becomingeffective at the end of such period unless the Congress shall request suspension of action. (101)

During 1932, a year in which Hoover campaigned for reelection, the subject of reorganizationappeared two dozen times in executive messages. (102) Both political parties called for drastic reductions ingovernment spending. On February 24, 1932, the House of Representatives created a seven-memberSelect Committee on Economy to investigate the possibilities of agency consolidation. The temperin Congress favored some grant of authority to the President as a means of avoiding the delayscreated in the legislative branch, delay attributed to the power of interest groups. Senator DavidReed expressed his disillusionment with the existing system:

Mr. President, I do not often envy othercountries their governments, but I say that if this country every needed a Mussolini it needs one now. I am not proposing that we make Mr. Hoover our Mussolini, I am not proposing that we shouldabdicate the authority that is in us, but if we are to get economies made they have to be made bysome one who has the power to make the order and stand by it. Leave it to Congress and we willfiddle around here all summer trying to satisfy very lobbyist, and we will get nowhere. The countrydoes not want that. The country wants stern action, and action quickly.... (103)

Hoover received reorganization authority in the form of an amendment (Part II) to theLegislative Branch Appropriations Act for fiscal 1933. Title IV of Part II (known as the EconomyAct of 1932) authorized the President to reorganize the executive branch. The President couldtransfer the whole or any part of any independent executive agency, or the functions thereof, to anexecutive department or to another independent executive agency. Functions within a departmentcould be consolidated. This power was conferred upon the President without a time limit (47 Stat.413).

Reorganization proposals were subject to a one-house veto. The legislation provided that thePresident could propose a reorganization by an executive order, which would be transmitted toCongress while in session, but not become effective until 60 days after its transmittal. Congresscould shorten the period by passing a concurrent resolution of approval. Any executive order or partthereof would become null and void if either house, within the 60-day period, passed a resolutionof disapproval. The bill therefore allowed not only for disapproval in whole but also selectivedisapproval.

Hoover signed the bill on June 30, 1932. Shortly thereafter Congress adjourned. When itreconvened on December 3rd, President Hoover issued 11 executive orders consolidating some 58governmental activities. (104) By that time, however, Hoover had been overwhelminglydefeated in the general election, and it was evident that Members of Congress, in the closing hoursof a lame-duck session, intended to leave reorganizations changes to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hoover,aware of sentiments in the House, announced on January 3, 1933, that either Congress "must keepits hands off now, or they must give to my successor much larger powers of independent action thangiven to any President if there is [ sic ] ever to be reorganizations." He further stated that suchauthority, to be effective, should be free of the legislative veto. Otherwise the reorganizationauthority would, "as is now being demonstrated in the present law, again be merely make-believepolitics." (105)

The House Committee on Expenditures in the executive departments recommendeddisapproval of all the executive orders and the full house, after some parliamentary maneuvers,proceeded to pass the resolution of disapproval by voice vote. (106)

However, Congress decided to follow Hoover's advice and provide the President withreorganization authority free of the legislative veto process to avoid "merely make-believe politics." One day prior to Roosevelt's inauguration, Congress passed the Economy Act of 1933 (47 Stat.1519). The delegation of power in that act was extraordinary. The statute did more than allow thePresident to transfer functions. It authorized him, for a two-year period, to "abolish the whole or anypart of any executive agency and/or the functions thereof." Moreover, it eliminated the check of aone-house veto. (107)

President's Committee on Administrative Management (Brownlow Committee), 1936-1937

Context.

Franklin Roosevelt did not exhibit any overall interest in executive organization during hisfirst years in office. Indeed, Roosevelt preferred a loose approach to organizational management,creating new agencies under the aegis of his emergency powers rather than by statute, reorganizationplan authority, or by reorienting existing agencies to perform new missions. (108) One consequence ofthis approach was that a relatively high percent of the new government growth in agencies,personnel, and programs took place outside the executive departmental structure.

The use of emergency legislation as the vehicle for executive reorganization reached its peakin 1935, and also encountered its first real challenge, when the Supreme Court struck down twodelegations of legislative power to the President, both involving the National Industrial RecoveryAct (NIRA). (109) TheCourt concluded that the NIRA failed to provide adequate standards and guidelines foradministrative action.

A more serious challenge to Roosevelt's authority came on May 27, 1935, the same day theSupreme Court handed down the second of the NIRA decision. The Court agreed unanimously thatRoosevelt did not have unlimited authority to remove members of independent regulatorycommissions. (110) Roosevelt viewed this decision as severely restricting his administrative capacities and now turnedto administrative reorganization "as a possible means of trying to integrate all of the separateindependent agencies into major executive departments where they would clearly be subject to thePresident's administrative supervision." (111) Roosevelt was apparently convinced that he would henceforthhave to reorganize the executive branch in a straightforward statutory manner and also provideinstitutional capacity to the President to manage the departments and agencies.

With respect to the reorganization plan authority in the 1933 Economy Act, he issued onlya few Executive orders transferring various agencies and functions, none of which was controversialor far-reaching. (112)

Authority.

On March 22, 1936, President Roosevelt announced by a White House statement theformation of the President's Committee on Administrative Management. (113) This committee'sprimary purpose was to consider the problem of overall management of the entire executiveestablishment. Technically, the committee was to serve as an adjunct of the National EmergencyCouncil.

Membership.

The President's Committee on Administrative Management consisted of three persons; LouisBrownlow as chairman, Charles E. Merriam, and Luther Gulick as members. The committee soonbecame known popularly as the Brownlow Committee. Brownlow had been an eminent citymanager with additional national and international experience. Charles E. Merriam, one-timeChicago city councilman, held a professorship with special interest in American political theory, andLuther Gulick was head of the Institute of Public Administration (IPA) in New York City. Inpreparation for staff work on the Committee's report, the IPA had published a volume titled: Paperson the Science of Administration , (eds. Luther Gulick and L. Urwick, 1937). The membershipremained constant through the committee's life.

Administrative Philosophy.

With the approach of the 1936 presidential election, Roosevelt determined that it was bothpossible and desirable to reorganize much of the executive branch during the early months of hissecond term. The President was further persuaded by Brownlow and Merriam that what was neededwas an academic theory and treatise to buttress a comprehensive reorganization strategy. Such areport was intended to raise issues in a way that they would appear to be based on neutral principles,not partisan advantage. Brownlow and Merriam were able to assure President Roosevelt that a reportcould be written to his liking. (114)

The underlying administrative philosophy of the Brownlow Committee was that of theascendent public administration discipline. The committee and its staff built on the intellectualdevelopments of the Progressive era and the 1920s in government management, national, state andlocal. Political accountability to the President for implementing the laws was the highest value tothe committee. Its immediate goal was to strengthen the President as chief manager of the executivebranch.

The essence of the committee's distinctive approach to reorganization was the view that thePresident must be made the central actor in the vast reorganization project. The concept of thepresidency as a uniquely American institution was their touchstone. Everything seemed to followfrom this basic premise. The problems affecting contemporary government were, to their minds,largely administrative in character. The solution lay in the provision of tools to the President sohe could manage the entire executive branch through well-conceived, consistent laws, aninstitutional arm in the Executive Office to promote government-wide procedures and practices, andthe reassignment of most "independent agencies" into the departments.

Organization, Support Staff, and Financing.

The committee, which held its first meeting on April 1, 1936, was to work withoutpresidential involvement until after the November election. Joseph P. Harris was selected Directorof Research, and a research staff was quickly recruited. The group consisted of some 26 experts, forthe most part being young, political science Ph.Ds. They worked on their respective papers duringthe summer and returned to their homes by September. (115) Committee members reassembled in September (Brownlowand Merriam had been in Europe) and began to put the Report together. The draft Report was readybefore the November election.

As for funding, Herbert Emmerich reported that no funds were granted for the President'sCommittee until June, 1936, when the President was authorized to allocate not more than $100,000from emergency funds for the study it was to undertake. (116) It needs to be recognized that the House and Senate, especiallythe latter, were involved in reorganization studies themselves, and political considerations arguablyentered into the appropriations equation (117) . The President's committee gave $10,000 to the Housecommittee and assumed expenses of the Senate select subcommittee headed by Senator Harry Byrd,to the extent of another $40,000. This left $50,000 for the use of the President's Committee of whichits spent $45,000.

Reports and Recommendations.

The Brownlow Committee submitted its report to the President on January 1, 1937. It wasa 55 page general report accompanied by supporting studies. (118) At the end of theReport, the Committee summarized their findings and recommendations.

1.Expand the White House staff to include assistants to the president who are"possessed of high competence, great physical vigor, and a passion for anonymity."

2.Develop and strengthen the central management agencies of government, especiallythose responsible for budget, management ("efficiency research") and planning.

3.Extend the merit system upward, outward, and downward to cover allnon-policy-determining posts.

4.Overhaul the 100 independent agencies, administrations, authorities, boards andcommissions and place them by executive order within one or another of the majordepartments. Two major new departments (Public Works and Social Welfare) wereproposed. The Department of the Interior to be changed to the Department ofConservation.

5.An auditor general within the executive branch should be provided to performpost-audits of all transactions. Intended to perform some of the functions of theComptroller General, who reports to Congress.

Additionally, certain other recommendations were found in the body of the report. Thepresidential assistants were suggested to be six in number and without portfolio. This was inaddition to the existing three assistants. The Bureau of the Budget would be responsible fordesigning new agencies and programs and approving reorganization proposals. The administrativefunctions of the independent regulatory commissions ("A headless fourth branch of government")should be assigned to the executive departments under single administrators. Congress shoulddelegate to the President continuing authority to transfer, consolidate, and abolish functions withinthe executive departments. Government corporations should be placed under departments acting as"supervisory agencies," with semi-autonomous status.

Results and Assessment.

The President received the Report as the new year and his second term began. He waspleased with the administrative philosophy of the Report and with most of the specificrecommendations. He introduced a bill in 1937 embodying many of the recommendations of theCommittee. The bill was debated in 1938, but was under consideration at the same time as thepresidentially inspired legislation to enlarge the Supreme Court. Indeed, the reorganization bill wasseen by some to be part of an effort to establish a "presidential dictatorship," a perception persuasiveenough to sink the reorganization bill. (119)

In 1939, still smarting from the defeat suffered the previous year, President Rooseveltsubmitted another, more modest, reorganization bill. The 1939 bill contained only two of the majorproposals recommended by the Brownlow Committee. It authorized the President to appoint sixadministrative assistants and to submit reorganization plans to alter executive branch organization,such Plans being subject to a veto by concurrent resolution of Congress. (120) While there wasconsiderable concern expressed regarding the constitutionality of the procedures outlined forapproving reorganization plans, (121) the House and Senate passed the bill, and it was signed by thePresident on April 3, 1939 (53 Stat. 561).

The report of the Brownlow Committee has been characterized as the "high noon oforthodoxy" because of its advocacy of clear lines of accountability, departmentalism, and thedoctrine that responsibility for making policy and setting standards ought to reside in the Presidentand departmental secretaries, rather than being devolved to the agency level. (122)

In a study of Roosevelt's efforts to reorganize the executive branch, Richard Polenbergobserved: "What distinguished Roosevelt's conception of reorganization from that of hispredecessors was his objective rather than the means he employed. Other Presidents had consideredreorganization an Executive responsibility, but their aim had consistently been the reduction ofexpenditures. Roosevelt disagreed. He believed that the true purpose of reorganization wasimproved management.... In this appraisal of reorganization the New Deal marks a sharp break withtradition." (123)

Reorganization Authority: 1939, 1945 Acts

The preamble to the Reorganization Act of 1939 contained a statement of the ScientificManagement ideal and the invocation of economy, the latter point having been added to the bill bySenator Harry Byrd. (124) President Roosevelt had not highlighted "economy" as apurpose of executive reorganization because he was skeptical of this objective. In 1936, thePresident told Louis Brownlow and Luther Gulick: "We have got to get over the notion that thepurpose of reorganization is economy. I had that out with Al Smith in New York.... The reason forreorganization is good management." (125) Extensive economy, he told Congress in 1938, "depends upona change of policy, the abandonment of functions, and the demobilization of the staff involved," allof which were outside the scope of his request for reorganization authority. (126) Roosevelt's skepticismnotwithstanding, the objective of reducing expenditures would appear prominently in the preambleof all subsequent reorganization acts.

While Congress was sympathetic toward economy in expenditures, it was also protective offavored agencies and programs. Congress prohibited the President from using this procedure tocreate or abolish executive departments, and exempted a number of agencies, commissions, boards,and government corporations from the reorganization process. A reorganization plan submitted bythe President would lay before Congress for 60 days, during which time it could be disapproved bya concurrent resolution of both Houses (two-house veto). After the 60 day time limit, thereorganization plan became law. From the outset, the legislative veto procedure promptedcontroversy within Congress, in part because the procedure gave the President a tremendousadvantage when compared to normal legislative procedures. (127)

Under the Reorganization Act of 1939 (53 Stat. 561), Reorganization Plan No. 1 establishedthe Executive Office of the President, the Federal Security Agency, and several lesser transfers ofagencies from one department to another. Only four more reorganization plans were submittedbefore the authority expired in 1941, all of which were relatively minor shifting of agencies andauthorities.

The death of President Roosevelt and the close of World War II came within months duringthe year 1945. The new President, Harry S. Truman, assumed the office with the definite opinionthat his predecessor, whatever his strengths otherwise, had not been a particularly goodmanager. (128) Truman's first concern was to achieve an orderly reconversion of the economy from a war to apeacetime basis. He believed, at least initially, that substantial reorganization would be necessary.

The President requested, and Congress approved, the Reorganization Act of 1945 (59 Stat.613) which authorized the President to submit reorganization plans subject to fewer restrictions thanhad been present in the 1939 Act. The President, once again, could not abolish or create anexecutive department, and only 11 agencies were partially or wholly exempted form the provisionsof the Act. The legislative veto procedures were the same as in the 1939 Act. The reorganizationauthority would expire in 1948. President Truman used the authority infrequently and on minorissues.

First Hoover Commission (1947-1949)

Context.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, there was a fairly broad consensus favoringgovernmental "retrenchment." Such sentiment had its origins in the obvious need to re-evaluate theadministration of numerous organizations and programs left in the wake of the Depression, War, anddemobilization. Congress began the task by reorganizing itself under provisions of the LegislativeReorganization Act of 1946. (129) In November 1946, control of Congress shifted to theRepublicans and they were in the mood to tackle the unprecedented peace time federal budget andwhat they viewed as an unwise long-term shift of power to the President. (130)

Between the years 1947 and 1955, two major studies of the organization and functions of theexecutive branch were undertaken. Congress established by statute a Commission on Organizationof the Executive Branch of the Government, popularly known by the name of its chairman, formerPresident Herbert Hoover, as the first Hoover Commission. This Commission submitted its reportwith recommendations in 1949. In 1953, Congress again established a study commission with thesame title, also chaired by Mr. Hoover, that is referred to as the second Hoover Commission. ThisCommission submitted its recommendations to the President and Congress in 1955. (131) These two relatedcommissions will be discussed separately.

Authority.

Throughout 1946, Representative Clarence Brown (R-OH) studied previous efforts toreorganize the executive branch. Incremental proposals had yielded, in his opinion, disappointingresults and he concluded that what was needed was a "blue ribbon" commission to review the entiregovernment and to make recommendations for reorganization. (132) The opportunity torealize his objective followed the 1946 congressional elections, in which Republicans displaced theDemocratic majority in both the House and Senate. Brown introduced a bill in the House toestablish a "mixed commission" consisting of Members of Congress, appointees from the executivebranch, and representatives from the private sector, to study the organization of the executive branchand to submit recommendations to both the President and Congress. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge,Jr., (R-MA) introduced an identical bill in the Senate.

The bills were referred to the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments ofthe respective chambers and both Committees held hearings and voted unanimously to favorablyreport the bills. One June 26, 1947, the House considered the bill briefly and passed it by a voicevote without dissent. On the day following, the Senate acted on the House bill and voted its approvalunanimously. As Ferrel Heady observed: "The proposal had a singularly easy journey through thelegislative mill. No alteration of the language of the bill as originally introduced occurred at anystage; nor was a single vote recorded against the proposal, either in committee or on the floor." (133) The President signedthe bill into law on July 7, 1947 (62 Stat. 246).

Membership.

The commission was to consist of 12 members: four appointed by the President, two fromthe executive branch and two from private life; four appointed by the President pro tempore of theSenate, two from the Senate and two from private life; and four appointed by the Speaker of theHouse of Representatives, two from the House and two from private life. Of each class of twomembers, one had to be from each of the "two major political parties." The commission was to electits own chairman and vice chairman.

In order to accomplish the purposes set forth in the legislation, the Commission wasempowered to hold hearings, administer oaths to witnesses, and every executive agency was directedto furnish such information, suggestions, estimate, and statistics as might be properly requested bythe chairman and vice chairman. Compensation for members was stipulated in the Act. (134)

The three appointing officers lost little time in announcing their choices. Republican ArthurVandenburg (R-MI), President pro tempore of the Senate, appointed Senators George Aiken (R-VT)and John L. McClellan (D-AR), chairman and ranking minority member of the Committee onExpenditures in the Executive Departments, the committee with jurisdication over reorganizationmatters. Vandenburg's two appointees from the private sector were James K. Pollack, professor ofpolitical science at the University of Michigan, a Republican, and Joseph P. Kennedy, formerlychairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Ambassador to Great Britain, a Democrat.

Speaker of the House, Joseph Martin, (R-MA) named as representatives of the House,Congressman Clarence Brown, (R-OH), and Carter Manasco, (D-AL). (135) Both gentlemen weresenior members of the House Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments. From theprivate sector, Martin named former President Herbert Hoover (136) and James Rowe,Democrat, the latter known principally for his service in staff positions under President FranklinRoosevelt.

President Truman announced his appointments on July 17, 1947. His Democratic appointeefrom within the executive branch was James A. Forrestal, head of what was then called the NationalMilitary Establishment. (137) For the Republican member, President Truman selectedArthur Fleming, a member of the Civil Service Commission. From private life, he selectedRepublican George Mead, the owner and chief executive office of the Mead Corporation, a largepaper and pulp manufacturing corporation in Ohio. Dean Acheson was President Truman'sDemocratic choice from private life. Acheson had served in both the Treasury and StateDepartments, and was then in private law practice.

A few words on Herbert Hoover are appropriate. The two Hoover Commissions cannot beunderstood without first recognizing the crucial role played in their deliberations andrecommendations by their chairman, former President Hoover. Mr. Hoover's concept ofgovernmental administration, as Secretary of Commerce, as President, and later as chairman of theCommissions, was strongly influenced by Progressivism and the tenets of Scientific Management. He believed in fact-finding, research and planning, and, like the first Roosevelt, he favored "blueribbon" study committees. (138) His experience, first as an international business executive,then as administrator of a massive food distribution system under wartime and revolutionaryconditions, gave him two tools indispensable to his later political career. He acquired a cadre ofdevoted younger colleagues as well as a comprehensive philosophy of administration that stressedthe necessity of strong leadership emanating from a single executive. Hoover, prior to hispresidency, was widely viewed as the quintessence of the new, 20th century man, the publicmanager. (139) He hadbeen personally hurt by the treatment accorded him by his successor, the media, and even theacademy during his service as President, and viewed this appointment as chairman of theCommission as a chance to vindicate his reputation.

Administrative Philosophy.

Considerable publicity attended the establishment of the Hoover Commission. Within thecommission, however, divergent attitudes threatened the success of the venture. There were clashesover interpretations of the intent of the enabling legislation. The congressional grant of authoritycovered the entire executive branch, yet it was vague regarding what direction the commission wasexpected to follow and the type of product to be submitted to Congress.

According to the statute, the commission might recommend reducing governmentexpenditures "to the lowest amount consistent with the efficient performance of essential services,"and was authorized to recommend "abolishing services, activities, and functions not necessary to theefficient conduct of government." To those who interpreted these words broadly, the commission'smandate was to go to the heart of the federal government and review, restructure, and reduce thescope of government activities. (140)

Defenders of the status quo, as it was at that time, considered that while recommendationscould be made in the name of "efficiency," the law did not authorize recommending the abolitionof substantive functions. They feared the commission might venture into the fields of social security,foreign aid, and veterans' benefits.

For defenders of the Administration, the mandate assigned in the law was interpretednarrowly. They wanted the government to continue what it was doing, but were willing to concedethat it might be reorganized to perform these functions better. Commissioners critical of the Trumanand earlier Roosevelt Administrations, however, tended to see the "mandate" of the commission asthe retrenchment and reorientation of the federal government.

The terms of this philosophical debate progressively changed and were ultimately influencedby the results of the 1948 presidential elections. Mr. Hoover's concerns and emphases, however, hadbegun to change even prior to the election. As time passed, his primary goal had shifted fromretrenchments to the enhancement of the managerial authority of the President and his departmentalsecretaries. This shift in emphasis, evident before the election, was reinforced by the results of theelection.

President Truman, although protective of the residuals of the New Deal, was also sympatheticto the Scientific Management ideals of traditional public administration. Therefore, he and HerbertHoover were not far apart in philosophical terms regarding the "best" organization of the executivebranch. According to Harold Seidman:

President Truman had an organizationalstrategy, but it was that supplied to him by the first Hoover Commission. The Hoover commissionreports provided a conceptual framework for the organizational philosophy developed by HerbertHoover during his years as President and secretary of commerce, and did not stem from Truman'sown thinking. There is no evidence, however, that the return to orthodoxy symbolized by many ofthe Commission's recommendations was in conflict with Truman's views. (141)

Despite occasional lapses into partisan manuevering, Truman and Hoover developed a closepersonal relationship that grew with time and turned out to be a critical element in whatever successmay be attributed to the commission. (142)

Organization, Staff Support, and Finances.

The first meeting of the commission was held at the White House on September 29, 1947. Commissioner Brown moved to have Mr. Hoover elected chairman, a decision approvedunanimously. Dean Acheson, a Democrat was selected as vice chairman. One the early decisionsmade by the commission was that the basic work unit would be a "task force." Twenty-four taskforces ( e.g., Presidency and Departmental Management; Federal Personnel Management;Federal-State Relationships) were established. There was no master plan guiding the mandate,operations or timing of the reports of the several task forces. In most instances a task force washeaded by a project director, an individual usually selected by Hoover and accepted by thecommission, a staff and a task force advisory committee. These advisory committees varied inmembership from two to more than thirty, and were composed of prominent citizens. (143)

The commission listed 74 persons on its own staff. The staff personnel were divided intofour groups: (1) 18 commissioners' assistants; (2) a 13-member central staff, including an executivedirector, a public relations director and an editorial director; (3) a four-member administrative staff;and (4) a 39-member secretarial staff. Also, the commission called on more than 300 outsidespecialists from universities, institutions, and businesses. These experts made up 24 separate teamsor task forces, each having a specific field of inquiry. The task forces submitted technical findingsand recommendations to the commission. Eighteen of the task force reports were published. Theconcluding report (No. 19) contains a summary of the recommendations and detailed index tocommission reports and published task force reports. When the commission finished its work in1949 after 18 months of investigation, it had spent about $2 million. (144)

Reports and Recommendations.

As discussed above, the commission decided to divide its job among task forces, each withits own staff. This decision was crucial as it influenced--if not predetermined--the thrust of theanalyses and recommendations the commission would have before it to consider. The task forcesubmitted their reports to the full commission with recommendations. The commission, althoughit could have written its reports and recommendations without reference to the task force reports, feltconstrained to use the task force reports as "working documents." Deviation from these workingdocuments tended to require initiative on the part of individual commissioners. To some degree,therefore, the commission was constrained in what it could consider or conclude by its ownorganization and procedures. A "single" commission report was never completed and forwarded toCongress; rather, 19 separate reports were submitted over three months, the final report beingforwarded in May 1949. These reports were later compiled into a single document and publishedby a private firm. (145)

For the purposes of this study, the commission document titled "General Management of theExecutive Branch" is of special interest. The philosophy of the commission with respect to theorganization of the executive branch was stated at the outset: "[We] must reorganize the ExecutiveBranch to give it simplicity of structure, the unity of purpose, and the clear line of executiveauthority originally intended." (146) The commission, and in this instance the influence of Mr.Hoover is readily apparent, continued by stating that it was their objective to:

Establish a clear line of control from thePresident to those department and agency heads and from them to their subordinates with correlativeresponsibility from these officials to the President, cutting through the barriers which have in manycases made bureaus and agencies partially independent of the chiefexecutive.

Permit the operating departments and agenciesto administer for themselves a larger share of the routine administrative services, under strictsupervision and in conformity with high standards. (147)

The doctrine underlying most of the recommendations was that responsibility for makingpolicy and setting standards ought to be centralized in the President, central management agencies,and department secretaries, rather than being devolved to the agency level. The commissioncriticized the tendency towards dispersing functions to independent agencies and called for arenewed, hierarchical administrative structure.

The section titled "Departmental Management" was short. The commission believed that thedepartmental system had deteriorated because Congress, and sometimes the President, had departedfrom the norm of the integrated administrative system they believed was intended by theConstitution.

The Congress, and sometimes the President,have set up a maze of independent agencies reporting directly to the President; and the Congressfrequently has fixed by statute the internal organization of departments and agencies and has givenauthority directly to subordinate officers. As a result, instead of being a unified organization,responsible to the executive direction of the President and accountable to the Congress for use of thepower and funds granted by law, the executive branch is a chaos of bureaus andsubdivisions.

The responsibility, the vigor of executiveleadership, and the unity of administration of the executive as planned by the Constitution must berestored. (148)

The recommendations were for grouping agencies into departments "as nearly as possible bymajor purposes." Department secretaries should be given full responsibility and authority for theconduct of their department. There should be decentralization into the operating agencies of suchfunctions as accounting, budgeting, recruiting and managing the personnel. And finally, departmentheads should be given increased staff support. The commission concluded, in a rather off-handedmanner: "We recommend that these various agencies be consolidated into about one-third of thepresent number." (149)

The commission was generally pleased with the development of the Executive Office of thePresident (EOP) although they called for a new Office of Personnel to be headed by a director whowould also serve as chairman of the Civil Service Commission. It is interesting that the commissiondid not make any recommendations designed to convert the cabinet into a more cohesive policydeveloping unit with a degree of collective responsibility, a favored proposal of reformers. Thecommission recommended that the President be given permanent authority to submit reorganizationplans to effectuate changes in structure and that such plans should not be restricted by limitationsor exemptions. In short, the report on "General Management of the Executive Branch" constituteda clear, concise, statement of many of the orthodox principles of public administration as applied ina practical sense to the executive branch.

Results and Assessment.

"The record of results," Herbert Emmerich concluded, "achieved after the Commissionsubmitted its recommendations was extraordinary." (150) A number of commission recommendations provided crucialimpetus for the passage of major legislation such as the Federal Property and AdministrativeServices Act creating the General Services Administration. A large number of Reorganization Planswere submitted in 1949 and 1950 which enjoyed a high percentage of success. (151) Six of the plansprovided that responsibilities for performance of all functions within these departments be vestedin the secretary for delegation, not assigned directly to subordinate officers.

Not all commission recommendations were accepted. Among the rejected were those tocreate a Water Development Use Service in the Interior Department to consist of a merger of theArmy Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, and the creation of a United MedicalAdministration outside the departmental structure. The latter recommendation failed, in part,because it violated the principles of organization set out by former President Hoover in his openingremarks of the Report.

Former President Hoover was to prove innovative with respect to gaining public support forthe commission and its recommendations. He believed that prior commissions had enjoyed littlesuccess largely because they had not developed and nurtured a constituency and had been ineffectivein public relations. He set about to remedy these failings with respect to his commission. (152) Under Hoover'sguidance, the commission created its own interest group, the Citizens Committee for the HooverReport (CCHR).

The CCHR moved in stages, first with more than 700 prominent citizens listed as supporters. Next, Citizens Committees were formed in 45 states with 300 county and local affiliates. Evenallowing for organizational hyperbole, this was an impressive effort. Funding for the commissioncame from foundations, corporations, and individuals. The central office prepared vast quantitiesof materials for distribution and for other national organizations to distribute to their ownmemberships. Finally, the Citizens Committee drafted many legislative proposals and submittedthem to the relevant committees of Congress.

The principal message of the Citizens Committee, and its tireless leaders, was that savingsof billions, the most common figure cited was $4 billion, was possible if all the recommendationsof the commission were adopted. Even Mr. Hoover made this claim. (153)

Claims of savings had been a source of contention throughout the deliberations of thecommission, as well as afterward. To critics, all these figures were sheer "guesswork" that misledthe public. Objections to the use of "savings estimates" in no substantial way reduced their appealor utility to the Citizens Committee. Compromise was not considered a virtue by the CCHR in thisinstance. Like many successor commissions, supporters relied on "horror stories" of allegedgovernment incompetence and downplayed serious recommendations to increase the capacity ofgovernment to perform its statutory missions. The CCHR even refused a White House request thatthe committee drum up support for better pay for government executives.

The public relations effort, although prone to simplistic interpretations of crude statistics, wasnonetheless considered effective, as Herbert Emmerich later observed: "The public relations ofHoover I was a serious professional job, a job which the Brownlow Committee had neglected, andwhich supporters of Hoover II pushed beyond the limits of credibility...." (154)

The relationship between the CCHR and the White House was correct, if not cordial, withboth sides seeking to avoid confrontation. Generally speaking, the White House and supporters ofa strong managerial presidency were pleased that the CCHR had chosen "savings" as their themebecause this meant, in their opinion, that most of the significant aspects of the Hoover Report wouldbe missed by the press and the public, and thereby engender little opposition.

A concentration on the reorganization of departments, agencies, and certain functions, whileimportant, tends to obscure what to many was the principal achievement of the first HooverCommission, namely the enhancement of the presidential office as manager of the government. PeriArnold observes: "It was the supreme political accomplishment of the first Hoover Commission thatit masked the managerial Presidency with the older values of administrative orthodoxy and, to asignificant degree, undercut the conservative and congressional opposition to the expansiveexecutive.... In the end, Mr. Hoover and his Commission provided the bridge over which thecongressional opponents of the Brownlow Committee recommendations and the old politicalenemies of Franklin Roosevelt could embrace the managerial Presidency." (155)

As the work of the commission was coming to a close, President Truman, in 1949, createdhis own Advisory Committee on Management (Executive order 10072) to study managementproblems in the federal government from a presidential perspective. This committee was also toadvise him with respect to recommendations submitted by the Hoover Commission. The final reportof this committee to the President emphasized the need for a continuing, rather than episodic,program of management improvement for all agencies under the guidance of the Bureau of theBudget's Office of Management and Organization. (156)

Reorganization Act of 1949

The Reorganization Act of 1945 expired on March 31, 1948. President Harry Truman, onJanuary 17, 1949, some two months before the first Hoover Commission submitted its report, sentlegislation to Congress to renew the President's reorganization authority. (157) The Administration'sbill was much broader in scope than the 1945 Act. The bill contained no termination date, no agencyexemptions, eliminated the clause calling for a cost saving of 25%, permitted the creation of newexecutive departments (although no new functions) and required both houses of Congress toapprove a resolution (concurrent resolution) of disapproval before a plan could become effective.

In the House hearings, the perennial issue as to the constitutionality of the legislative vetoprocess was raised. Rep. Clair Hoffman (R-MI), a critic, used the hearings to argue that theprovision requiring a concurrent resolution to disapprove a reorganization plan was unconstitutional.

We all know that, under the Constitution, tobecome effective as a law a bill must receive a majority vote of each House and that, then, and onlythen, as provided in Section 7 of Article I of the Constitution, it must go to the President for hisapproval or disapproval. (158)

Hoffman's interpretation of the Constitution, while supported by some other Members, wasnot shared by any of the witnesses, including the Comptroller General, Lindsay Warren. Mostwitnesses before the House and Senate committees requested exemptions from the legislation fortheir favorite agencies, a move vigorously resisted by the Administration. Senator John McClellan,chairman of the Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, and also one ofthe 12 commissioners on the then Hoover Commission, opposed the transfer of civilian Army Corpsof Engineers functions to the Department of the Interior. The majority of the committee decidedthat the only way to eliminate agency exemptions, while retaining congressional protection forcertain favored agencies, was to institute a single-house veto procedure.

In order that the President might includeessential Government reorganizations in conformity with the recommendations of the Committeeon Organization of the Executive Branch [Hoover Commission], the committee was reluctant toinclude exemptions for specified agencies or to retain the House amendments placing certain of themin a restricted category, in the belief that such exemptions might interfere with realignments thatwould be desirable and in the public interest.... (159)

The Committee was satisfied that the one-house veto was not only constitutional, butrepresented a sound political decision as well. (160) When the bill reached conference committee, a time limit wasset upon the authority, expiring on April 1, 1953. The President signed the measure on June 20,1949 (63 Stat. 203).

Supporters of a strong managerial presidency were initially disappointed by the one-houseveto. Ferrel Heady divined unpleasant consequences resulting from the shift from a two-house toa one-house veto over reorganization plans.

"[T]he real objective in inserting the one-house veto requirement was not just to get rid ofexemptions, but to stiffen congressional powers of resistance to presidential reorganization plans. The success of this effort in the Senate to shift from the two-house veto to the one-house veto marksa definite withdrawal by Congress of effective reorganization powers which it had been willing todelegate in the 1939 and 1945 Acts. (161)

The results of the first years of the 1949 Reorganization Act were to prove the pessimistswrong. More reorganization plans were submitted and approved in 1949 and 1950 than in any yearbefore or since.

In 1949, President Truman submitted several reorganization plans to Congress. The pressgave a favorable response to the plans. All were significant in their impact, and in previous yearswould have generated considerable controversy. The Administration, as well as the CCHR,encountered some difficulties, however, as the plans did not provide for any substantial savings. Indeed, Plan No. 1 ran into opposition because it would clearly have expanded the federalgovernment's role in the health field. (162) The remaining six plans became effective, although there wasconsiderable controversy over several of them. "Truman could regard congressional treatment ofhis 1949 plans," William Pemberton concluded, "with a good deal of satisfaction." (163)

In 1950, the President submitted 27 reorganization plans. The plans fell into groups. PlansOne through Six provided that responsibilities for the performance of all functions within sixdepartments be vested in the secretary of those departments. Previously, the authority to performfunctions had been dispersed by Congress. The purpose of these plans was to establish clear linesof responsibility from the President on down through the lowest level of the department.

A second group of plans was submitted to improve the internal administration of theregulatory commissions. These plans were designed to enhance the managerial authority of thechairmen. Three plans were proposed to assist the new General Services Administration as thecentral service agency. In an attempt to meet the objections of those opposed to the defeated 1949reorganization plan to create a Department of Welfare, Truman submitted a plan to create a newDepartment of Health, Education and Security, but left the independent statutory authorities of theSurgeon General and Commissioner of Education intact. Overall, in 1950, the President faredreasonably well in having 22 of his 27 plans approved.

The years 1951 and 1952 were difficult ones for President Truman in a political sense. Hisadministration was burdened by the Korean War and distracted by a number of scandals involvingkey agencies, including the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Truman's interest in reorganization steadilywaned as his administration progressed.

Second Hoover Commission (1953-1955)

Context.

With a Republican victory in sight for 1952, the supporters of the "citizens commission"concept saw a second chance to achieve what they thought had been missing in the first HooverCommission exercise. The results of the first commission, somewhat to their dismay, hadstrengthened the institutional leadership of the President and agency heads, but had essentiallyignored the policy issues that underlay the growth of "big government."

Robert Johnson, chairman of the Citizens Committee (CCHC) and President of TempleUniversity, initially took a leading role in promoting a new Commission. He raised $100,000 tosponsor and publish a Temple University Survey of Federal Reorganization. The survey, begun inOctober 1952, during the presidential campaign, consisted of contributions from 102 persons, manyof whom had served in some capacity on the first Hoover Commission. President-elect DwightEisenhower was notified that this survey was underway in December and received a copy in October1953.

The Temple Survey itself proved unimportant, but the fact that it was being compiledinspired others to action. The movement for a second Hoover Commission gained momentumamong the recently ascendent Republican leadership in both chambers.

The newly elected President, Dwight Eisenhower, although a Republican, did not share thisenthusiasm for a new Commission, particularly one outside the presidential orbit. (164) The President, as washis style, followed an oblique counterstrategy (165) to this congressional initiative by creating on his own authoritya President's Advisory Committee on Government Organization (PACGO), a three-memberpermanent panel to be discussed shortly. Notwithstanding the President's lukewarm attitude, the ideagained momentum in Congress.

Authority.

Early in the 83rd Congress, similar bills were introduced in both Houses to create a new"citizens commission" to study the executive branch. As with the legislation creating the firstHoover Commission in 1947, floor debate on the proposed new commission was perfunctory withno evident opposition. Both Houses unanimously approved the establishment of the commissionand the President signed the bill on July 10, 1953 (67 Stat. 184).

Membership.

The Commission consisted of 12 members; four appointed by the President, two from theexecutive branch and two from private life; four appointed by the President pro tempore of theSenate, two from the Senate and two from private life; and four appointed by the Speaker of theHouse of Representatives, two from the House and two from private life. Unlike the law creatingthe first commission, the legislation creating what rapidly became known as the second HooverCommission did not impose a partisan parity requirement upon the selection process. Thecommission at its initial meeting, held in the White House with President Eisenhower in attendance,unanimously elected Herbert Hoover as chairman, although the commission did not elect a vicechairman, as authorized in the legislation. The Senate Committee on Government Operationssuggested that "appointing authorities might well consider the inclusion of former members of theCommission who may be available, so as to give the new Commission the full benefit of theirexperience and qualifications." (166)

As it turned out, the members of the commission were former President Hoover, chairman,Arthur S. Fleming, Senator John McClellan (D-AR), Representative Clarence Brown (R-OH), andJoseph P. Kennedy, all carry-overs from the first Commission. The new members were James A.Farley, Herbert Brownell (newly appointed Attorney General), Representative Chet Holifield(D-CA), Dean Robert G. Storey, Solomon C. Hollister, and Sidney A. Mitchell, the latter being theformer executive director of the first commission. The partisan breakdown of the membership was7 Republicans and 5 Democrats. This membership reflected the intention to have considerablecontinuity between the commissions. This continuity did not result, however, in harmony on thecommission, as the issues they addressed were more contentious than those that preoccupied the firstcommission.

Administrative Philosophy.

The sponsors of the legislation had been forthright in stating their intentions for thecommission. Senator Homer Ferguson pointed out in his testimony before a Senate Committee:

The most important difference between this billand the Hoover Commission statute [1947] is found in the declaration-of-policy section. Theseparagraphs are intended to make certain that this Commission has full power to look into theactivities of the Federal Government from the standpoint of policy and to inquire, 'Should theGovernment be performing this activity or service, and if so, to what extent?' This Commission mustask questions of this nature which the original Hoover Commission did not ask. (167)

Although a broad interpretation of the commission's mandate was held by its sponsors anda majority of its members, it is not surprising that this view generated controversy. Chet Holifield,commission member and chairman of the House Government Operations Committee, disputed theidea that the commission could delve deeply into policy matters. Indeed, he questioned the wisdomof the whole concept of creating unelected commissions to second-guess, in effect, electedassemblies. He concluded that the creation of policy-oriented commissions, such as the secondHoover Commission, was "an unwise departure from representative government." (168) The "mandate battle"continued throughout the life of the Commission and indeed remains an issue confronting all "citizencommission" proposals to this day.

Organization, Staff Support, and Finances.

The second commission, like the first, apportioned its job to 19 task forces. These task forcesvaried considerably in size, from five members on the Paperwork Management task force to 26members on the Water Resources and Power task force. Similarly, the size of the staffs working fortask forces varied. There is some disagreement as to the total number of person involved with thecommission. MacNeil and Metz estimated that close to 200 persons served on the task forces andcommittees of the commission (169) while James Fesler states that the commission "was assistedby 513 persons at the peak of employment." (170) Regardless of which figure is accepted, there were a largenumber of persons involved, particularly if agency detailees, consultants, and Bureau of the Budgetpersonnel are included.

The central staff of the second Hoover Commission was relatively small (77 persons) andhighly supportive of the chairman. They generally viewed their task as ministerial and clerical, andleft the great bulk of the investigation, research, and writing to the staffs of the several task forcesand the consulting organizations. In most respects, the central staff was similar to that of the firstcommission except that they were not responsible for developing a set of summary reports in acommon format for submission to Congress. (171)

Once the task force reports were received, the chairman typically appointed threecommissioners as a committee to study the report and draft a working paper for full commissionconsideration. The draft would be circulated among the members and staff for comment. Theworking paper generally omitted or modified a number of task force recommendations.

The deliberative process followed by the Commission was limited, for the most part, to theworking papers placed in front of the members. Much time was spent on textual questions with littletime spent on discussing the assumptions underlying the recommendations or the possible impactof the recommendations upon the administrative system as a whole. The Commission took up therecommendations one at a time in a sequential fashion rather than viewing the recommendationscomprehensively. No distinction was made between major and minor recommendations, nor werethey integrated into a single report. Nineteen separate reports were sent to Congress (the legislationhad not provided that the President receive the reports) followed by a relatively short Final Reportto the Congress submitted in June 1955. In this final report the Commission made an "officialestimate" of savings possible from implementation of its recommendations, a figure of $8billion. (172)

The second Hoover Commission was granted appropriations totaling $2,848,534. Itexpended $2,768,562 and returned $83,527 to the Treasury. (173)

Reports and Recommendations.

Twenty commission reports, including the Final Report , were submitted to Congress overa several month period. The reports did not fall into systematic categories with respect to subjectmatter. (174) There wasan emphasis, however, on functions and managerial problems that cut across the departments andagencies.

Unlike the first commission, where an administrative model was offered in the first reportsubmitted to Congress, the second commission simply examined the several task force reports asthey were received, wrote a report of its own and submitted them individually to Congress. Littlephilosophical consistency was discernible. Indeed, there were instances where the recommendationsof the second commission ran counter to the philosophical thrust of the first commission.

The reports were of widely varying importance and quality. Several reports representedmajor efforts and proposed substantial changes. Included in the category of major commissionreports were: Personnel and Civil Service; Budget and Accounting; Legal Services and Procedure;Business Enterprises; Lending Agencies; and Water Resources and Power. The remaining reportstended to cover subjects of minor contemporary interest with commission's recommendations beingfor minimal changes in agency structure and operations.

The 20 reports of the second commission contained some 314 numberedrecommendations. (175) By 1958, the Citizens Committee reported that 200Â½ of the recommendations had been fully orpartially implemented for a "success" rate of 63.9%. Assigning full or partial implementation rates,however, is not an exact science. When Mr. Hoover was asked which one of the recommendationshe thought the most important, he was reported to have replied without hesitation: "I would pick therecommendation for setting up a senior civil service." (176)

Results and Assessment.

The assessments of the second Hoover Commission vary considerably. MacNeil and Metzclaimed: "[T]he Hoover Commission met all its goals. It made a frontal attack on Big Governmentand all that it means, but did not recommend the elimination of any one activity required for thesecurity or welfare of the American people. All its recommendations stood firmly on Americanprinciples of Government." (177)

Citing the numbers of recommendations accepted, wholly or in part, is a rather crude measureof the substantive impact of the commission because there is no distinction made between major andminor recommendations or between hortatory pleas and specific organizational or programmaticchanges. Also, ascribing credit, or degrees of credit, to the commission for a particular legislativeor administrative decision may be misleading because of a variety of factors that may havecontributed to the ultimate decision.

These qualifications noted, certain changes may be reasonably credited to the commission. The Department of Defense was further reorganized to reinforce civilian control and to unify combatcommands. There was a reduction in the amount of government competition with firms in theprivate sector. Veterans' laws were codified. A number of specific improvements were also adoptedfor the federal career service.

Critics saw the second Hoover Commission in a very different light. While the firstcommission had an administrative model in mind of what the executive branch ought to look like,the second commission, critics argued, had no such model. This deficiency, as James Fesler argued,proved crucial:

The [second] Commission provides noadministrative model; the Brownlow Committee and the first Hoover Commission did provide sucha model and one could decide whether he liked it or not. The vacuum is not adequately filled by theCommission's effort to state its objectives. The principal explicit statement provides a mixture of goals (national security, fundamental research, private enterprise, common welfare, andstrengthening of 'the economic, social and governmental structure which has brought us, now for 166years, constant blessings and progress') and means (efficiency, elimination of waste, elimination orreduction of government competition with private enterprise), but the means are actually treated asends valuable in themselves so long as they do not war with other ends.... (178)

The second Hoover Commission found that the standard terms of discourse since theProgressive Era; "economy and efficiency," "overlap and duplication," "streamline," wereinstrumental in content and of little utility in designing, managing, and evaluating a moderngovernment. According to one observer, they had become clichÃ©s, part of a general attack on thecompetency and integrity of government. (179) While the second commission did contribute to someworthwhile changes in government operations, e.g. , civil service improvements, it appeared to beadrift without general organization or managerial principles for guidance, and outside the centers ofpolitical decision-making.

What the second commission seemed to prove, if nothing else, was that in an open clashbetween the canons of administrative orthodoxy and the dominant political values of the moment,the latter is likely to prevail. Hoover, personally, had been able to avoid this confrontation in hisown mind for many years. "Herbert Hoover's perception of the principles of good administration,"according to Peri Arnold, "allowed him to skirt effectively the tension between his political values[anti-statism] and his attraction to the apparent efficacy of the positive state." (180) This separation wasfragile, however, and broke down when the second commission decided to make overt policyjudgments.

In retrospect, the executive branch appears to have been reasonably well managed during the1940s and 1950s. The managerial agencies, e.g., Bureau of the Budget, were at the zenith of theirstrength. While a number of factors may be cited as contributing to this felicitous situation, it wouldbe unfair and inaccurate to ignore the contribution of the two Hoover Commissions. The firstcommission, in particular, argued from first principles stressing the need for political and managerialaccountability and clear lines of responsibility. All proposals for change, in its view, should bemeasured by whether or not they enhance these values. The influence of the two HooverCommissions and their administrative philosophy lasted about two decades.

Study Task Forces on Executive Reorganization (1953-1968)

President Eisenhower, as discussed earlier, did not like to be tied into any one source foradvice and recommendations. He also preferred structured advice designed for the President, notfor outside constituencies. It is not surprising, therefore, that he established a competing advisorypanel reporting solely to him to counterweight the second Hoover Commission. The President'sAdvisory Committee on Government Organization (PACGO) was chaired by Nelson Rockefellerin the years 1953 through 1958. (181) During these years, 14 reorganization plans were drafted bythe committee, presented to the President, and accepted by Congress. Although the committeefunctioned with little publicity, its work and results have generally been accorded high marks. (182)

Other commissions, committees and task forces would be established over this 15-yearperiod, and in many instances their recommendations carried organizational impact. Some of thereports of these bodies would be made public, others were never published. Some of the groups hadbroad mandates while others were directed toward rather narrow subject fields.

During the Kennedy and Johnson years, there were no "mixed commissions" to review theorganization of the executive branch. Numerous policy and managerially oriented task forces were,however, appointed. (183) Before he was inaugurated, President Kennedy commissionedsome 29 informal task forces in various foreign and domestic fields to provide him papers andrecommendations. (184) President Johnson was to rely even more heavily upon the formal and informal task force approachto develop policy positions. (185) Some of the task forces were directed at immediate legislativeneeds while others were given a longer range perspective.

In the field of executive reorganization, two such task forces, to use the generic name popularat the time, were created during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. The first was named byPresident Kennedy and chaired by Don K. Price. According to Peri Arnold: "The task force's modeof operation was contemplative. It instituted no major studies, relying on the Bureau of the Budgetfor information. The Bureau might be likened to a memory bank into which the task force wasplugged." (186) Itsubmitted its 116 page report privately to President Johnson in 1964. (187) The recommendationsincluded, among other things, the creation of five new executive departments: Transportation;Education; National Resources; Economic Development; Housing and CommunityDevelopment. (188) There were recommendations respecting the establishment of institutional capacity for policyplanning and evaluation, and for making the executive officers in the departments and agencies moreresponsive to presidential direction. The close philosophical ties between the task force and theBudget Bureau were evident. (189)

With the management of the Great Society programs under attack and the growing salienceof international issues, related principally to the Vietnam War, President Johnson created a secondreorganization group, the Task Force on Government Organization, an 11-member group appointedin October 1966 and chaired by industrialist Ben Heineman. President Johnson indicated he wantedboth some systemic recommendations and quick administrative "fixes," particularly with respect tothe poverty programs run by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). Numerous staff reportswere written and debated. Proposals were considered for reorganizing the Bureau of the Budget toemphasize program administration, and additional proposals for "super-departments." The principaltheme, however, was that the President must resist pressures to create more departments andagencies, and pressures to create programs outside regular hierarchical systems of accountability.

Few of the Heineman Task Force recommendations were immediately adopted, in partbecause the timing of the reports coincided with the height of the Vietnam War and PresidentJohnson's decision to not seek re-election. While Mr. Johnson was sympathetic to most of therecommendations, even the most far-reaching, his commitment to organizational management wasmore instrumental than substantive. He saw reorganization as an instrument to increase presidentialpower, not for achieving more efficient management of agencies and program. Thus, when histenure was effectively ended in March 1968, he withdrew from the fray and embargoed the reports. When the Heineman report was requested by a Nixon transition official, President Johnson'sresponse was: "Hell no. And tell him I'm not going to publish my wife's love letters either." (190)

The Heineman Report did not, however, remain hidden for long. When Roy Ash, named byPresident Nixon in 1969 to head the President's Advisory Council on Executive Organization (AshCouncil), later requested of Heineman a copy of the Report, Heineman made the Reportavailable. (191)

President's Advisory Council on Executive Organization (Ash Council) (1969-1970)

Context.

Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, at least in part, as a reaction to the apparent failure ofLyndon Johnson's Great Society. The cities and universities had undergone sieges by the verypersons whom the Great Society programs had been intended to benefit. Literally hundreds ofprograms had been initiated and run from Washington with little apparent concern for their impactupon state and local governments. Indeed, the poverty programs had funded organizationsintentionally insulated from accountability to state and local governments. (192) Some expressed fearthat the political and administrative system was unraveling. Writing about his 1968 victory, afterhis years as President, Richard Nixon noted:

As I saw it, America in the 1960s had undergonea misguided crash program aimed at using the power of the presidency and the federal governmentto right past wrongs by trying to legislate social progress.... The problems were real and theintentions worthy, but the method was foredoomed. By the end of the decade its costs had becomeprohibitively high in terms of the way it had undermined fundamental relationships within ourfederal system.... (193)

President Nixon had considerable faith that structures could condition behavior, and that itwas worth expending the political capital necessary to reorganize the government to achieve his goalof policy centralization and administrative decentralization. As President-elect, Nixon created anumber of task forces to give him advice. Tops on his priority list was reorganizing the WhiteHouse-Executive Office complex to have it more responsive to presidential direction. (194) Reorganizing thecabinet and departments came next on his priority list. It was Nixon's intention to eventually relymore on his cabinet team for domestic policy leadership leaving the President to focus more attentionon foreign affairs.

One of the first advisors he selected was Roy Ash, president of Litton Industries, whom heasked to head a task force on government management. Ash was a Washington outsider whopridefully avoided the professional public administration leaders, like Don Price, and believed thatgovernment should be organized and run in large measure like a private corporation. In April 1969,the President announced the formation of an Advisory Council on Executive Organization with Ashas chairman.

Authority.

President Richard Nixon established an Advisory Council on Executive Organization througha "Presidential Announcement" issued April 5, 1969. (195)

Membership.

In addition to Ash, as chairman, the Council consisted of four others, George Baker, dean ofthe Harvard School of Business; John Connally, former governor of Texas and Secretary of the Navyin the Kennedy Administration; Frederick Kappel, chairman of AT&T's executive committee; andRichard Paget, partner in the management consulting firm of Cresap, McCormick and Paget. TheCouncil was to have a close relationship with the President through its chairman. Later, due to Ash'sother commitments, an additional member, Walter Thayer, president of Whitney Communications,was added and also designated a special consultant to the President. Murray Comarow was theexecutive director of the Council.

Administrative Philosophy.

Richard Nixon came into office convinced that many of the problems facing governmentcould be solved by reorganizing the federal establishment along sound political managementprinciples. He did not view the purpose of reorganization as being the implementation of neutralprinciples of economy and efficiency. Rather, the principal purpose of reorganization, to his mind,was to alter the terms of political power. In Nixon's case, the objective was to reorganize to enhancethe power and capacity of the President. Paradoxically, his goals was not to make the Presidentpowerful for the institution's sake, but to create the leverage to ultimately decentralize thegovernment. He believed you had to centralize before you could decentralize. Nixon's overalllong-range goal was to move much of the power away from Washington and towards the states andlocalities, or what he called the "New Federalism." (196)

The mission of the Ash Council was to suggest ways and means to the President on howpolicymaking could be centralized while administration was decentralized.

From the outset, the Ash Council relied heavily upon the work and philosophy of the earlierPACGO and the Heineman Task Force. The memorandums and reports of these earlier bodiesemphasized, among other points, the need for "super departments" and additional institutionalsupport for the President. Secondly, there was a belief that the President and the departments wouldbe benefitted by a regional executive structure in which the vertical program oriented structurereaching to Washington would be altered by having program officers report to a regionalagency/program representative. These regional officials would be appointed by the Secretarythereby, presumably, breaking the "stovepipe" to Washington. Regional officials, who tended to begeneralists selected politically, would be more likely to move the management of the agencies andprograms along Administration lines than was the case with narrowly focused, programmatic officerslocated at headquarters. (197)

Nixon was following in the path of earlier Presidents, but he was more open about hisobjectives, and he was prepared to do battle. His goal was to refashion the government so that thePresident could concentrate more on foreign affairs while letting his cabinet officers take the leadin domestic affairs. (198) Nixon also had considerable faith that structures conditionbehavior. He decided to begin reorganizing while the Ash Council was meeting. In his first messageto Congress, he requested that the President's reorganization plan authority, having lapsed onDecember 31, 1968, be renewed for a two year period. (199) Congress granted Nixon reorganization authority to expireon April 1, 1971, and later extended to April 1, 1973. Very early on, Nixon proposed, and Congressaccepted, a change in the status of the Post Office Department to that of an independent governmentcorporation, the United States Postal Service (39 U.S.C. 101). Frederick Kappel had headed a taskforce in the Johnson Administration that had made that recommendation. (200) Kappel was now amember of the Ash Council.

Organization, Staff Support, and Finances.

The Ash Council was small with a prestigious membership. The audience for its reports andrecommendations was the President alone, not Congress and the public. Walter Thayer, the sixthmember appointed to the Council and special consultant to the President, was charged with puttingtogether a staff. In fiscal year 1970, the Council received an appropriations of approximately $1million, which permitted a staff of approximately 35 by the end of 1969. At its peak, in mid-1970,the staff numbered 47 full-time employees. By fall 1970 the total number of staff was under40. (201) Throughoutthis period, the staff of the Bureau of the Budget was used, although the relationship was not alwaysharmonious. (202)

After discussion between Council members and staff, six working groups were assembled. From the very beginning, however, the first item on the agenda was the organization of the ExecutiveOffice for management. The Council met monthly for two-day meetings. "One element of the AshCouncil's operating style which particularly requires notice is its aggressive out-reach to largenumbers of individuals in the agencies under study, knowledgeable about them or politically salientto the fate of a recommendation." (203)

Reports and Recommendations.

The President received some 13 memoranda from the Council. (204) He did not wait,however, for receipt of all the recommendations before proceeding with reorganization.

On March 12, 1970, President Nixon forwarded Reorganization Plan no. 2 of 1970implementing one the Council's recommendations. The plan included two major changes; thereorganization of the Bureau of the Budget into the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) (205) and the creation of aseparate Domestic Policy Council. (206) With respect to the new OMB, the heads of operatingdivisions were to be made subject to presidential appointment, reversing the traditional practice ofcareer officers serving as assistant directors. This "politicization" of OMB was, and remains today,controversial. (207) After a spirited debate within the House, the plan was approved. (208)

The council set about to present to the President a comprehensive executive branchreorganization proposal that would at once improve the President's capacity to manage, even control,the executive branch, and also rationalize the structure of the executive branch to reflectcontemporary service demands being placed upon government.

The council concluded that the executive branch had become too fragmented resulting in alack of effective coordination in meeting public problems. To address this problem offragmentation, the council proposed more centralized and politically responsible lines of authoritywithin the executive branch. The council advocated a "package" approach to reorganizationcombining the various elements of the "new Federalism," such as revenue sharing, with executivebranch reorganization. As to restructuring the executive branch, the objective was to move awayfrom the narrow, constituency-oriented, traditional departments towards broader, general purposedepartments. (209) Itis interesting to note that the Council, although tilted heavily toward business executives, rapidlyadopted the more traditional public administration theory of organizational management, rather thanattempting to reorganize the executive branch according to some model of the private firm.

In March 1971, President Nixon sent four bills to Congress which had as their intent thereorganization of seven existing departments and several independent agencies into four new, large"super departments" ( i.e., Human Resources; Community Development; Natural Resources; andEconomic Affairs). (210) As proposed, each department would be headed by a secretaryassisted by a small number of staff officers having department-wide responsibilities. To providemeans for a rational grouping of the large bureaus and programs to be inherited by the newdepartments, the concept of the "Administration" was introduced as a first-tier device for programdirection. These organizations, patterned after the operating administration in the then-newDepartment of Transportation (1966), were envisioned as management centers--each with a majorsegment of the department's administrative program. Administrators would head these basic unitswithin the departments and would report directly to the secretary.

The combined use of cross-cutting staff officers with functions affecting all elements of thedepartment, and program administrators charged with directing important segments of thedepartment's operating responsibilities, was expected to facilitate decentralized management whilesimultaneously providing for more effective secretarial control and department cohesion. The fieldstructure was to be strengthened with common regional boundaries established.

It was a dramatic proposal, and in many respects the logical conclusion of the orthodoxpublic administration values embodied in the earlier Brownlow and Hoover Commission reports. Policy directions and lines of accountability to the department secretaries would be strengthenedwhile administrative functions, e.g., personnel, would be decentralized, often to the standardizedregional offices. The council's recommendations took the form of four pieces of legislationproposing four new departments. One might disagree with the proposals, but they did constitute acomprehensive and theoretically consistent view of how the executive branch ought to be organized.

Results and Assessment.

The legislation submitted to Congress was aimed at putting into place an overarching set ofpublic management principles. There was nothing small in the proposals. It was almost too much,however, for Congress to fully digest. For one thing, the proposals, if enacted, would have playedhavoc with the existing congressional committee structure and jurisdictions, the latter fact alonebeing sufficient to raise major opposition. (211) Finally, both houses of Congress were heavily dominated byDemocrats little inclined to give President Nixon more power and a major political victory, duringa time characterized by bitter partisanship.

As it turned out, the only organizational proposal of the Ash Council to be accepted byCongress was the previously discussed reorganization plan that established the Domestic Counciland renamed the Bureau of the Budget to the Office of Management and Budget. Otherwise, exceptfor three hearings, (212) Congress did not consider any of the other proposals of the President.

With the failure of President Nixon's comprehensive strategy to reorganize the executivebranch, the commission and report approach to organizational management was abandoned. President Nixon, influenced by the defeat of his legislatively based reorganization strategy, becamereceptive to the arguments that he should follow a strategy based more on Richard Neustadt's viewof the presidency.

In 1960, Richard Neustadt had argued in his influential book, Presidential Power , thatPresidents ought to seek personal power, a power based on political skills, and rely less onConstitutional and statutory authority. "Laws and customs," Neustadt averred, "tell us little aboutleadership in fact." (213) The message for Presidents was to study the techniques ofinfluence and persuasion, rather than public administration principles if they wanted to "move"government. In the Neustadian scheme, the personalized presidency largely replaced theinstitutionalized presidency. President should move away from managing the executive branch,because in so doing they are performing mere clerkship functions and miss their opportunity forheroic destiny.

Heeding the personalized presidency theme of Neustadt, Mr. Nixon determined that the mosteffective route for reorganization was to rely on "administrative action --that is," in Richard Nathan'swords, "by using the discretion permitted in the implementation of existing laws rather thanadvancing these policy aims through enactment of new legislation." (214)

President Nixon attempted to implement as much of the Ash Council recommendations aspossible through administrative orders, e.g., creation of a "super-cabinet," bypassing in the processthe requirement of congressional approval. The "administrative presidency strategy" included suchtactics as impounding appropriated funds and the use of the appointments process to thwart theimplementation of legislatively mandated programs, tactics calculated to upset Congress. Congressresponded, not surprisingly, by following a legislative (public law) strategy of its own. The strategyincluded passing laws such as the War Powers Act of 1973 and the Congressional Budget andImpoundment Act of 1974, inserting numerous legislative veto requirements to additional new andexisting laws, and extending Senate confirmation requirements to additional appointees, all actionsintended to combat the administrative presidency strategy and to decrease presidential discretion inadministrative matters. (215)

The organizational legacy of the Nixon presidency, which began as a testament to traditionalorganizational management doctrine, albeit with some political updating, turned out to be a legacyof institutional diminution. With the second term of Richard Nixon, Presidents began a long-termmovement away from institutional capacity building management and toward a managementphilosophy more reliant upon political control from the White House. (216) The centralmanagement agencies began to be downsized and assigned reduced missions. Executivereorganization was just as likely to be viewed as a tool to diminish the capacity of government asenhance it. (217) Presidents increasingly shied away form their role as chief manager of the executive branch anddistanced themselves from the bureaucracy they presumptively led. Indeed, President often assignedthemselves the role of chief critic of the government. This latter role, not surprisingly, had its impacton how Presidents performed their managerial responsibilities and how organizational managementwas viewed for the remainder of the century. (218)

President's Reorganization Project (1977-1979)

Context.

As a candidate for President in 1976, Jimmy Carter made it clear from the outset that he wason a crusade to clean up Washington and a broad-scale executive branch reorganization was to bethe centerpiece of this crusade. He offered little in the way of specifics but did declare that he wouldapproach executive reorganization comprehensively as he claimed to have done in Georgia stategovernment during his years as governor (1971-75). (219) Mr. Carter stated that his primary goal was to trim theexecutive branch from some 1900 agencies to 200, figures without clear parentage. (220) Shortly after hiselection, President-elect Carter instructed his transition team to study how the executive branch wasorganized. They were to make an "inventory" of these 1900 agencies and tell him which ones toeliminate or reorganize. They were stymied, however, in this exercise by finding that even with thebroadest definition, there were only some 597 units (a term broader than agency) in the executivebranch. (221)

President Carter personally envisioned reorganization as part of an exercise to cleanseWashington of its corruptions. Structural reform was viewed by the new President not as merely oneamong many possible instruments for addressing the idiosyncratic problems of individualdepartments and agencies. Rather, structural reform was characterized as the linchpin of the newAdministration's reorganization package and beginning with the transition period the OMB andWhite House cast about for 'problems' that structural changes could address. (222)

Authority.

During his first month in office, President Carter established a President's ReorganizationProject PRP) within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under the leadership of OMBDirector and presidential confidante, Bert Lance. (223) Harrison Wellford and Richard Pettigrew subsequently playedleadership roles.

Membership.

The President decided against the appointment of a board of prominent citizens to makerecommendations. The project would be essentially an in-house exercise reporting to the President.

Administrative Philosophy.

The leadership of the PRP rejected the relevance of the orthodox principles of organizationalmanagement that had guided earlier reorganization exercises in this century. Indeed, they apparentlyrejected the utility of theory altogether: Bert Lance openly derided the earlier commission effortsas mere "box-shuffling." In Lance's words describing the PRP's mission:

[R]eorganizing is more than box-shuffling, itsobjective will be to make government more efficient. Previous reorganizations have stressed movingagencies among cabinet departments. Ours will take a bottom-up approach, looking first to aprogram and people's needs and reworking structure and procedures to meet those needs. (224)

The PRP leadership consistently rejected the idea of following overarching theory or conceptsin its work and recommendations. When James T. McIntyre was before a Senate Committee inMarch 1978 for confirmation as Director of OMB, he was asked to prepare in advance the answersto several questions. One question was: "After a year of work with the Government ReorganizationProject, what underlying principles or conclusions have you reached regarding executivereorganization?" Mr. McIntyre's response was indicative of the PPR's working philosophy

After our first year of reorganization activity,we have arrived at three general principles that guide our efforts: (1) to concentrate on solvingproblems; (2) to look for the least disruptive remedies to identify problems; and (3) to follow aprocess committed to openness and public and Congressional involvement. (225)

As late as 1979, Deputy Director John P. White of OMB made the following point in hisconfirmation hearings: "Reorganizations should proceed from problems which have been identifiedtowards solutions rather than from preconceived notions of idealized structure." (226) These statementsconfirmed what others suggested; namely that the Project defined its mission in terms of process,rather than the achievement of some theoretical objective.

In other words, the Carter people were saying that the earlier reorganization efforts hadessentially failed to achieve their potential because they started from public administration"principles" of organization and then attempted to apply these principles without proper regard forthe "facts." What the Carter Administration would do, they continued, would be to begin with thefacts and from these facts would evolve the principles. Wisdom would come from the bottom-up,not the top-down. (227)

In point of fact, there rapidly emerged an apparent disjunction in the PRP's philosophy andactions. Its members continued to publicly disavow the "top-down" philosophy of reorganizationwhile, in practice, following this approach. For example, they made recommendations to restructurefour departments, even creating two super departments in the process, without first specifying theproblems that warranted such major restructuring. According to one source, the drivingadministrative philosophy was that there was a solution available (restructuring) and now the job wasto find a problem (agency needing restructuring). (228)

Organization, Staff Support, and Finances.

Although the President took some personal interest in the PRP, it was assigned to the Officeof Management and Budget and its Director for implementation. The individual directly responsiblefor the Project was Harrison Wellford, Executive Associate Director of OMB for Reorganization andManagement. Facts and figures on the PRP tend to be elusive, as are the work products. JohnOsborne, a journalist covering the White House, gave as good an estimate of the work force as anywhen he noted: "What Carter proudly calls 'my Reorganizations' is quite an operation. In early 1977,129 full-time employees, including 40 people recruited from outside Government for the project, andbetween 150 and 175 detailees from various department and agencies--the number varies with needfrom week to week--were at work on 27 projects...." (229)

From the outset, the staff was divided into working groups, and by early 1978, the peak ofactivity, there were some 30 studies underway. Two of the studies emphasizing an organizationalobjective were those on border management and on the administration of the Employee RetirementSecurity Act (ERISA), the latter culminated in the President submitting Reorganization Plan No. 4of 1978. Studies with management objectives included groups reviewing such matters as automaticdata processing in the delivery of government services, the collection of statistical data by federalagencies, and workplace safety. By the close of 1978, only 10 groups remained, the others havingsubmitted their reports or having been disbanded.

The project's creation required an immediate supplemental appropriation of $2,172,000, afigure that included 32 new personnel for OMB. (230) Salaries of detailees were not included in this total.

Reports and Recommendations.

The PRP, while large in size and initial mission, did not produce a comprehensive report withrecommendations. In fact, printed products of any type by the PRP were few and far between. Almost immediately upon assuming office, President Carter retreated from his statements calling fora dramatic reduction in the number of departments and agencies, adopting in its place an incrementalapproach. In this mode, Carter requested (February 5, 1977) that Congress renew the President'sauthority to submit reorganization plans, a request Congress granted.

All reorganization action was not limited to the PRP. Other groups were studying issue areasand eventually made recommendations to the President. Two proposals for new departments, onefor a Department of Energy and another for a Department of Education, were developed with PRPassistance, but essentially developed lives of their own. The proposal for a Department of Energyhad presidential backing, although it was intentionally separated from larger substantive issues. Thebill was promoted as a simple good management exercise which could consolidate most energyactivities under one roof. (231)

The proposal for a separate Department of Education had been advanced in various formsfor a number of years. The Education bill could not be defended as a consolidation bill, however,as it was intended to break up the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the one civilian"super department." The consolidation arguments for this separate department tended to be limitedin scope since few educational activities (e.g., military dependent schools overseas) were slated tobe shifted from other departments. The principal argument favoring the separate departmentproposal was this action would elevate and highlight the Nation's commitment to education. (232) Critics suggested, onthe other hand, that the new department was simply a "political pay-off" to the National EducationAssociation. (233)

The single most ambitious reorganization proposal involved making major changes in thefederal civil service. A Personnel Management Project was established to be led and staffed, in largepart, with civil servants. (234) The personnel project, while technically under the larger PRP,functioned in practice on its own. Unlike the PRP, the personnel project worked with key membersof Congress and the relevant interest groups at the initial stages, not simply writing a report withrecommendations in isolation. The leaders of the project, and subsequently the PRP, acceptedconsiderable compromise to ensure passage. (235)

Results and Assessment.

The reorganization process itself during the Carter Administration tended to follow twotracks; one for reorganization plans that were considered using the President's reorganizationauthority, and the second for specific legislative proposals.

Under the authority of the Reorganization Act of 1977, President Carter submitted 10reorganization plans, all of which Congress permitted to become effective. (236) The first, and mostimportant was Reorganization Plan No. 1, which restructured the Executive Office of thePresident. (237) Theremaining nine reorganization plans tended to be comparatively minor in scope, such asReorganization Plan No. 1 of 1979 that created a federal inspector for the Alaska natural gas pipelineproject. Such proposals, arguably, could have been handled as expeditiously by following the regularstatutory process. The White House and OMB staff apparently concluded that once reorganizationauthority is granted it must be used on a regular basis or Congress may take it away. With respectto statutory proposals, Carter did have some successes, although the role of the PRP in thesesuccesses was limited. Two new departments were established; the Departments of Energy andEducation. These Acts followed the regular legislative process, resulting in considerable input byCongress.

On March 2, 1978, President Carter submitted legislation to reorganize the civil servicesystem of the federal government. As originally introduced, the President's bill was largely a productof the recommendations of the President's Federal Personnel Management Project. The mostimportant provision in the Act was the establishment of the Senior Executive Service. (238)

Some observers tended to be critical of the PRP and the Carter reorganization exercisegenerally. Writing only two years into the Administration, James Sundquist commented: "At thebeginning of his presidency it is clear Jimmy Carter did not recognize quite what was wrong. Hesaw the need as one not of management but of management improvement projects." (239) The reorganizers wereoverwhelmed by their immersion in facts and details. The problem, they finally realized, was thatthe facts did not speak for themselves. Facts generally make sense when there is a conceptualframework for reference and where generalizations can be tested against experience. In rejecting theso-called orthodox principles of public administration, their position was weakened because theyoffered no alternative set of principles upon which to evaluate the relative merits of the proposalsbeing considered.

The alleged absence of principles on how the executive branch, viewed broadly, ought to beorganized to perform its various functions, formed the crux of the criticism of the CarterAdministration's reorganization effort. Harold Seidman put it thus:

No unifying theme or set of innovativeorganizational principles can be discerned from analysis of Carter's proposal for Departments ofEnergy, and Education, as well as for civil service reform and consumer protection. The same canbe said for his reorganization plans for the Executive Office of the President, InternationalCommunications Agency, Equal Employment Commission, Federal Emergency ManagementAgency, and the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). Except for civil servicereform, none can be related to Carter's goal of energizing and controlling the bureaucracy.

Overall reorganization objectives are describedin almost meaningless generalities--streamlining the government making it more competent to servethe people. Specific proposals are justified mainly by reference to orthodox doctrines: Eliminationof overlapping duplication, consolidation of related functions, improved economy and efficiency,and more effective planning and coordination. (240)

Considering the Carter reorganization exercise overall, man viewed it as a disappointmentif not a failure. As Peri Arnold concluded, the Project "... lacked coherence and coordination; asits managers proudly claimed, it followed no overall conception of management. It was a collectionof young professionals without significant applied or academic experience with administration,working under a President burdened by a rigid and curiously moralistic conception of administration. These reorganizers generated a large bulk of recommendations, but little that they did enhanced thecapacity of President Carter to govern effectively." (241)

Reorganization Act of 1977

President Carter had been convinced during his presidential transition period that renewalof the President's reorganization plan authority was key to success of his larger strategy to restructurethe executive branch. Hence, one of his first legislative proposals to Congress, on February 4, 1977,was a bill to renew the President's authority to submit reorganizations plans, an authority which hadexpired on April 1, 1973, and had not been renewed. (242) A bit of history provides some background on the situationthat accompanied the President's proposal.

In the three decades since the passage of the Reorganization Act of 1949, there had been agradual, yet persistent, erosion in the President's reorganization authority. The erosion reflected theambivalence felt by Congress regarding its delegation of power to the President, and the waysPresidents in recent years had used this authority. (243)

The original 1949 Act was noteworthy for the broad scope of authority delegated to thePresident. In this respect, Congress was heeding the recommendation of the first HooverCommission that few limitations be placed on the President's authority to submit plans, and that noagencies be exempted. "Once the limiting and exempting process is begun," Hoover warned, "it willend the possibility of achieving really substantial results." (244) In subsequent years,however, Congress chose to place limits on this authority and exempted certain agencies fromcoverage.

Congress is sometimes described as an institution rendered virtually helpless by the presenceof "roadblocks" in the normal legislative process and the dispersion of power and authority. One ofthe justifications traditionally given for the executive reorganization plan process was that itpermitted the President and congressional leadership to overcome these hurdles. In 1961, forinstance, the Kennedy Administration submitted a bill to establish a Department of Urban Affairsand Housing. The Senate and House Government Operations Committees favorably reported thebill, but the House Rules Committee (a major roadblock at the time) declined to clear the measurefor floor action. Faced with this opposition, the administration decided to short-circuit the legislativeprocess and submit a reorganization plan to create the department.

The Senate Government Operations Committee held hearings on the plan, but a motion todischarge the committee of its jurisdiction was introduced prior to the expiration of the normalperiod for consideration. The extraordinary haste in this effort to take the plan from the committee,coupled with political reservations on the substance of the proposal, led the Senate to reject themotion to discharge by a vote of 58 to 42. On the day following the Senate action, the Housedisapproved the plan, 264 to 150. (245)

Rather than de-emphasize politics, this episode illustrated how the reorganization planmethod can escalate politics to high intensity. Details of the departmental structure were relegatedto the background. The primary issue became whether the President would be politicallyembarrassed by Congress. Congress, in this instance, chose to embarrass the President and defeatthe plan. When Congress renewed the reorganization authority in 1964, it reacted to what itconsidered a presidential "end-run" by prohibiting the President from submitting reorganization plansthat established an executive department (78 Stat. 240) Other restrictions on the reorganization planauthority followed.

Congress, in 1964, denied the President authority to submit plans proposing new executivedepartments. When the law was renewed in 1971, there was a provision inserted that a plan mustbe limited "in effect" to dealing with no more than "one logically consistent subject matter." Thislimitation had been inspired by an presidential attempt to have a number of subjects covered in oneplan thereby increasing the congressional oversight burden.

The Reorganization Act of 1977, as introduced for the President, sought to soften oreliminate five of the restrictions then operative in the reorganization process.

1.The President would be allowed to amend a plan within 30 days after sending it toCongress, unless a Resolution of Disapproval had been ordered reported in eitherhouse or the appropriate committee in either house had otherwise reported itsrecommendations.

2.The requirement that only one plan be submitted within a 30-day period would beeliminated

3.The requirement that each reorganization plan deal with a single logically consistentsubject matter be eliminated.

4.The requirement that, when a plan is submitted, it have attached a statement ofprojected cost savings, would be eliminated. In its place would be includedinformation on the improvements in management efficiency and the delivery offederal services that the plan would produce.

5.A four year extension of the authority would be authorized in place of the customarytwo year extension.

The Senate reacted to the President's bill by acceding to several of the provisions but, in turn,added to the list of prohibitions already in the law. The provision prohibiting establishment of anexecutive department by reorganization was retained and expanded to prohibit also the eliminationor merging of independent regulatory agencies. Further, a provision was inserted that permitted thePresident to submit a reorganization plan abolishing all or part of the functions of an agency, "exceptthat no enforcement function, and no function conferring a substantial programmatic benefit on thepublic, shall be abolished by the plan." In the House, the debate focused on whether Congressshould require an affirmative vote of some sort for approval of a plan. The chairman of the HouseOperations Committee, Representative Jack Brooks (D-TX), had long opposed the legislative vetoapproach to approval of plans. He favored passage of a joint resolution within a 60-day period asmeeting the constitutional test of approval by Congress for statutory enactment. (246)

Although a majority of the House committee accepted the constitutionality of this process,they agreed to add an action-forcing requirement. When the President submitted a plan to theCongress, a resolution of disapproval had to be introduced at the same time by the chairman of theHouse Government Operations Committee and the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. Thetwo committees would also be required to make recommendations to the House or the Senate,respectively, within 45 days, or the committee would be deemed as having been discharged fromconsideration of the resolution. Since any Member could move for consideration of the resolution,it was believed unlikely that any future plan would go into effect without Congress having a chanceto vote on it. With this change, Chairman Brooks withdrew his opposition saying that it was "thebest unconstitutional bill you could draw up." (247)

Under the authority of the Reorganization Act of 1977, President Carter submitted 10reorganization plans, all of which Congress permitted to become effective. The newly authorizedprocess for approval was not, however, without its controversies. In February 1979, President Carterannounced he would forward a reorganization plan to establish a Department of Natural Resourcesthat would absorb the Interior Department and include the Forest Service from the AgricultureDepartment and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from the Commerce Department. While the use of the reorganization plan process to establish this department was endorsed byChairman Brooks of the House Government Operations Committee, it ran into stiff opposition fromSenator Abraham Ribicoff, who chaired the Governmental Affairs Committee. Ribicoff's objectionwas based on his interpretation of the Reorganization Act's prohibition against such reorganizationplans to create new departments. Administration officials argued that they were not proposing a"new" department. Rather, they were just moving some agencies around and changing some titles. Ribicoff disagreed: "Section 905(a) of the Reorganization Act of 1977 states that no reorganizationplan may provide for or 'have the effect of creating a new executive department.' It is my belief--andthe belief of a number of other Senators--that this prohibition was written into law to cover just thekind of situation we are facing in this instance." (248)

Administration officials had been quite candid in their belief that the proposal for a newDepartment of Natural Resources could not be passed using the regular legislative process. The onlychance for success, in their view, lay in a reorganization plan. (249) When the WhiteHouse recognized that the Senate leadership adamantly opposed the use of a reorganization plan toestablish a department, it withdrew the proposal. President Carter, however, did pay a price. Inresponse to his request for an extension of the reorganization authority, members of Congress gavehim only a one year extension and served notice that they would use the time to review the authorityand its procedures. The administration also had to promise that it had no plans to propose thecreation of a Department of Natural Resources "or anything resembling it." (250)

What was revealed, especially during the Carter years, was that the reorganization planauthority was of dubious value. Congressional ambivalence over the delegation of reorganizationauthority to the President resulted in misunderstanding, confusion, and recrimination between thetwo branches. On the one hand, Congress gave the President authority to skirt the regular legislativeprocess, yet when the President invoked the power, he risked being accused of violating theestablished system. After each presidential "misuse," Congress responded by adding restrictions andexemptions, gradually circumscribing the power until the reorganization act was but a shadow of the1949 statute. The original design had been so diluted that recourse to the regular legislative processgenerally made more sense--a conclusion especially compelling in view of the 1977 change allowingPresidents to submit amendments to their plans. Having introduced one more element of thelegislative process, the value of the reorganization plan process became, at best, problematic.

Reorganization authority under the 1977 Act was granted to the President for three years andwas subsequently extended for an additional year. The authority expired on April 7, 1981, just threemonths after President Ronald Reagan assumed office.

President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control (Grace Commission) (1982-1984)

Context.

The Administration of Ronald Reagan entered office in 1981 with a definite policy agenda,and this agenda did not include comprehensive executive reorganization. They discerned that sincePresident Carter had followed the organizational route with less than what they regarded as salutaryresults, they would follow another course to maximize their political leverage. The budget wasviewed as the key to that overall objective, the reduction in the ability of the government to intervenein the economic and social spheres of national life. Good management, then, was to be judged byits contribution toward the achievement of that end.

Although President Reagan and his advisors were not generally in sympathy with the ideaof another presidentially oriented commission to undertake a comprehensive review of theorganizational management of the executive branch, they were persuaded by a number of businessexecutives that it would not hurt Reagan's political agenda if an "outside" study were made. Theprincipal promoter of this idea was industrialist J. Peter Grace, who argued that he could put togethera study by leading business leaders that would result in massive savings. President Reaganeventually concurred and Grace was approved to chair a private commission (President's PrivateSector Survey on Cost Control) to submit a report with recommendations on how to make the federalgovernment work better for less money.

Authority.

The legal status of the commission was in question from the outset. Rather than submittinglegislation to create the commission, an indirect route was selected. The President issued anexecutive order 12369 which, in turn, was based on an obscure provision in a law administered bythe Department of Commerce (15 U.S.C. 1525), a provision not intended to authorize a commissionsuch as the Grace Commission. This provision, however, was considered sufficient by theAdministration to permit hundreds of private citizens to venture into the agencies and reviewrecords, interview personnel, and make public policy recommendations. (251)

Membership.

The commission, on paper, was large, composed of 161 chief executive officers ofcorporations. The full commission never met, however, and was not an active factor in thecommission's work. In essence, the commission was Peter Grace and some close associates.

Administrative Philosophy.

Like the earlier Carter Project, the Grace Commission rejected the idea that any generalprinciples of organizational management were unique to the public sector or the federal government. Indeed, the commission went further by rejecting the distinctiveness of the public sector altogether. The opening paragraph of the Grace Commission report, which appeared in a commercial version,read:

Most reports of presidential commissions beginwith a lengthy introduction detailing the origins, premises, and methodologies of their studies beforefocusing on the results of the study. We are omitting such matters because we do not want to risklosing even one reader who would be turned away by having to wade through such preliminarymaterial. (252)

The operating premise was that the government was poorly organized, incompetentlymanaged, and plagued by waste, fraud and abuse.

Insofar as there was an administrative theory underlying the Commission's work, it wascaught in an early line in the report: "it is with private sector management tenets in mind that theGrace Commission findings have been developed." (253) The dominant theme was that the governmental and privatesectors were alike in their essentials and should be judged by the same set of economic variables andmanagerial principles. Government should be organized like a large commercial corporation (IBMwas their example of choice), that is, with a structure permitting top-down control. Decisions shouldbe brought to the top where a large, central Office of Federal Management would ensure uniformity.

Organization, Staff Support, and Finances.

The commission assigned its responsibilities to 36 task forces, and was staffed over time bysome 2,000 people, generally on loan from their corporations, with a cost to these 859 companiesand other organizations of $75 million in cash and services. (254)

Reports and Recommendations.

The commission worked approximately two years and produced 47 volumes (23,000 pages),all of which were produced in mimeographed form. There was no common index. From thesereports the commission brought forth two documents. The first was a list of some 2,478 specificrecommendations which was not given much public circulation, and a single, commercially availablebook entitled: War on Waste . Unencumbered by the requirement that the full commission meet,debate, and vote on recommendations, Peter Grace was able to shape the report to his liking. Thereport, as a result, emphasized statistics and money. Figures, correct and otherwise, (255) were featured in highlycontroversial formats. The commission attacked Congress directly, and originally included thenames of Members who allegedly accepted favors and made pleadings for special interests. (256) Congress was viewed,at best, as a nuisance, an impediment to good management, and was to be ignored wheneverpossible. The Grace Commission claimed that if Congress adopted the Commission proposalstotally, the savings would be $424 billion during the first three years (257) and in the trillions ofdollars during the 1990s. (258)

The commission did not engage in any comprehensive or systematic review of structures inthe government. The principal exception in this regard was its recommendation to establish a newOffice of Federal Management which would include the existing Office of Management and Budget,the Office of Personnel Management, and the General Services Administration, and several lesserunits. (259)

Results and Assessment.

The reception to the report with its 2,478 specific recommendations was mixed, ranging fromwarm to hostile. The recommendations were split between those requiring congressional action andthose which could be implemented by presidential authority alone. OMB was charged withimplementing those recommendations requiring presidential approval and with working withCongress to implement recommendations requiring legislation.

How many of the recommendations were accepted and implemented? The answer to thisquestion is complicated. For one thing, it is always difficult to assign credit and parentage to an ideawhich is ultimately implemented. A substantial number of the Grace Commission recommendationshad been around in one form or another (often in a GAO Report) for a number of years. To whomshould credit be assigned? A number of proposals (some old and some new) found their way intolegislation or presidential directive. Arguably, the most significant of the laws that could beattributed in large measure to Grace Commission promotion was the Chief Financial Officers Act( P.L. 101-576 ). While the Act had many sponsors, the critical impetus was provided by the GraceCommission and its interest group constituency in the financial management community.

Under pressure to show results, OMB announced victory in its Fiscal 1990 AnnualManagement Report to Congress:

The President kept his promise. He accepted83 percent of the Grace Commission recommendations (1,792 of the 2,160 unduplicatedrecommendations.... A summary of the current status of the 1,792 recommendations accepted bythe President is as follows: 1,607 (90 percent of those accepted by the President) have been agreedto by Congress.... 117 (6 percent of those accepted by the President) have been rejected by Congressand are not being reproposed by the President.... 68 (4 percent of those accepted by the President)are being proposed or reproposed with the fiscal 1990 budget." (260)

While the Administration refined the Grace Commission "savings" projections, the fact wasthat substantial financial savings were only possible through major changes in public policy. Savingsin administrative expenses directly attributable to the Grace Commission were modest. (261)

By and large, Mr. Grace and his commission were disappointed with the reception to theirreport. What had occurred, in the opinion of many, was that a report had been written with littleunderstanding of the distinctive legal, organizational, and political factors that characterize theactivities of the federal government. Peri Arnold summed up criticism of the Grace Commissionthus: "[T]he Grace Commission's highly public and very large effort may not be best assessed bywhat reforms and savings it achieved. It was a populist-administrative passion play, and itdemonstrated that given a chance to observe government closely, business people would see theinefficiency and waste they expected to find." (262)

Reorganization Act of 1984

The Reorganization Act of 1977 expired on April 7, 1981. Some in the then- new ReaganAdministration called for the renewal of the authority, although the President never made it a majorpart of his personal agenda. In 1983, during the early days of the Grace Commission exercise, theAdministration requested Congress to renew the authority, and hearings were held on H.R. 1314 (97thCongress) by the Subcommittee on Legislation and National Security of the House GovernmentOperations Committee, chaired by Representative Brooks. The bill, which included a number ofsubstantive alterations to the 1977 Reorganization Act, was intended by its sponsors to be acooperative effort by the President and Congress to expedite reorganizations believed to be neededby the executive branch.

Court decisions during years after 1977, especially the Supreme Court's decision in INS v.Chadha, (263) had asignificant impact on deliberations in Congress. In Chadha , the Supreme Court ruled that legislativevetoes, including those attached to the reorganization authority, were unconstitutional.

In an effort to meet the requirements of the Chadha decision, H.R. 1314 required that a jointresolution be introduced in both the House and Senate upon receipt of a reorganization plan. Affirmative action on this resolution was required for the reorganization to become law. If eitherhouse failed to vote, such inaction would constitute disapproval of a plan. Also, in the unlikely eventthat a President vetoed the plan he had previously submitted, a veto override would require atwo-thirds vote of both houses.

Expedited procedures established in the 1977 Act were also significantly altered in H.R.1314. The 1977 Act included a 60-day time period for congressional consideration of eachreorganization plan, and also provided that no more than three plans might be pending at any time. Brooks and Representative Frank Horton, as congressional sponsors of the legislation, believed thatthe time frame was overly burdensome, and therefore extended the period for congressionalconsideration to 90 days. Within the 90-day period, other time limitations were extendedproportionately. The 1977 Act allowed 30 days from the date of submission for the President toamend the proposal. H.R. 1314 extended that allowance to 60 days. The time period in which aPresident might withdraw a reorganization plan was extended from 60 to 90 days.

Committee action, previously required within 45 calendar days following submission, wasextended to 75 calendar days. If the committee failed to report a resolution within that period, itwould be deemed to have been discharged and the resolution would be placed on the appropriatecalendar.

Another significant innovation in H.R. 1314 was the requirement that an implementationsection be included in the President's message accompanying the reorganization plan. Such aprovision was recommended by the GAO in its report of March 20, 1981 entitled: Implementation:The Missing Link in Planning Reorganizations . The GAO had found that agencies wereexperiencing considerable problems in implementing reorganization plans:

Agencies reorganized under the ReorganizationAct of 1977 experienced substantial startup problems. These included delays in obtaining keyagency officials, inadequate staffing, insufficient funding, inadequate office space, and difficultiesin establishing administrative support functions such as payroll and accountingsystems.

Solving these startup problems distracted agencyofficials form concentrating on their new missions during the critical first year of operation. Thesestartup problems could be alleviated by including in future reorganization plans front-endimplementation planning objectives. (264)

An "implementation provision" was added to Section 903(b) of Title 5:

In addition, the President's message shallinclude an implementation section which shall (1) describe in detail (A) the actions necessary orplanned to complete the reorganization, (B) the anticipated nature and substance of any orders,directives, and other administrative and operation actions which are expected to be required forcompleting or implementing the reorganization, and (C) any preliminary actions which have beentaken in the implementation process, and (2) contain a projected timetable for completion of theimplementation process. The President shall also submit such further background or otherinformation as the Congress may require for its consideration of the plan. The President's reorganization authority expired on December 31, 1984. During this periodPresident Reagan did not submit any reorganization plans nor did he subsequently request renewalof the authority.

Why, after all these political maneuvering, did the Reagan Administration not take advantageof this brief (two month) window of opportunity to submit some reorganization plans? The answerappears to be that what little advantage remained in the reorganization plan process, namely anexpedited procedure with a guaranteed vote, was more than matched by the disadvantages offollowing the complex introduction procedures and the submission of an implementation plan. Inshort, it was easier to simply follow the regular legislative process.

No subsequent President requested the reintroduction of the reorganization planauthority. (265)

National Performance Review (1993-1997) National Partnership for Reinventing Government (1997-2000)(266)

Context.

The last major executive reorganization exercise of the century, the National PerformanceReview (NPR), or as it was more popularly referred to, "reinventing government," represented anintentional break with earlier reorganization efforts. To be sure, there remained some similarities,but for the most part the NPR was different. To understand these differences, it is necessary torecognize that public sector management was undergoing a major philosophical (or paradigm) shiftglobally. (267)

In the years following World War II, virtually all nations, developed and less developed,followed a path of creating centrally planned economies with large bureaucracies and varyingdegrees of state-owned enterprises (SOE). This highly nationalistic approach to managing aneconomy created rigidities and noncompetitive industries that placed whole economies at risk ofbankruptcy. With collapse looming, many nations in rapid succession abandoned their centrallyplanned economies and privatized their SOEs. In a matter of a decade, the 1980s, the world changedwith the emergence of a globalized, technology-driven international economy. (268)

The decision to move away from governmentally controlled economies and towards a moredecentralized, competitive, and market economy was striking in its speed, comprehensiveness, anduniversality. Commonwealth countries, (269) with their parliamentary form of government, in particularseemed to act the quickest in their retreat from state dominated economies. In this transformation,Great Britain and New Zealand stood out, as their actions were based in considerable part on theintellectual foundation of public choice theory. The specific actions were not random but rathertended to be part of a systematic implementation of a broad-based theoretical approach.

The nation that went furthest fastest in the direction of what had become known as the NewPublic Management (NPM) was New Zealand. (270) Using the language of transaction cost economics, the LabourParty (socialist) government attempted to separate administrative policymaking from servicedelivery, introduce private sector managerial practices, and reorient government managementincentives toward individual manager self-interest. A series of laws set in motion large-scaledivestiture, performance contracting, administrative devolution to sub-national governments, andthe creation of quasi governmental organizations (sometimes called Quangos) were the highlightsnot only of the New Zealand exercise, but of many other of the Commonwealth countries, such asCanada, as well. (271) Donald Kettl summarized the management revolution in the Westminster world:

Together, the British Commonwealthexperiments amounted to a 'new public management'.... The new public management stemmed formthe basic economic argument that government suffered from defects of monopoly, high transactionscosts, and information problems that bred great inefficiencies. By substituting market competition-- and market-like incentives -- the reformers believed that they could shrink government's size,reduce its costs, and improve its performance. Sometimes the argument came from the left, as inNew Zealand. Sometimes the argument came from the right, as in the United Kingdom. However,at its core the movement sought to transform how government performed its most basicfunctions. (272)

The changes in public management were most evident first in the Commonwealth countries,next in selected OECD nations, and finally in the United States. The situation in the United States,however, was considerably different from that found in most other countries. First, unlikeparliamentary systems, where the executive is able to change direction with considerable facility, inlarge part because their firm control over disciplined parties holding a majority in parliament, theUnited States operates under a Constitution that intentionally separates powers and brings theexecutive branch, ultimately, under the control of Congress. The President and Congress areco-managers of the executive branch, thus making dramatic and comprehensive shifts less likely tooccur. (273) Second,the United States had never widely accepted the doctrine of government ownership of key industries,thus it had less apparent need to move toward many of the tenets of the New Public Management. And finally, the United States generally followed a constitutional practice of keeping separate anddistinct the government and private sectors. Each had developed its own legal precedents andpractices, with government being required to meet higher standards of behavior toward citizens thanelements of the private sector. (274)

The American variation on the New Public Management theme, with its public choiceovertones, was the "reinventing government" exercise led principally by Vice President Al Gore. Describing themselves as "New Democrats," President Bill Clinton and Vice President Gore soughtways and means for Democrats to move away from their traditional sympathies for governmentplanning and economic intervention and toward a government organization guided more by marketprinciples. To make this shift palatable to their partisans, the reinventors largely rejected thelanguage of public choice opting instead for the language of business schools.

The origins of the entrepreneurial management paradigm, as it came to be called, are to befound in David Osborne's and Ted Gaebler's popular account, Reinventing Government: How theEntrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector . (275) The authors mixedmany of the ideas of market economics, as refined in the voluminous privatization literature of the1970s and 1980s, with the most popular of the then-current business motivational literature. Theresult was a call to action to those who favored government economic intervention (e.g., PresidentClinton's national health care program) but who wished it to be done selectively and at less cost, orat least the appearance of less cost. Osborne and Gaebler convinced Clinton and Gore that"reinventing" government to have agencies resemble large private sector corporations was bothdoable and politically advantageous. (276)

It was within this context that President Bill Clinton announced the establishment of theNational Performance Review in 1993.

Authority.

There was no statutory authority assigned to the National Performance Review. Thisomission was intentional. The establishment of the NPR was simply announced by the President onMarch 3, 1993. (277) The whole operation was to remain informal, fluid, and with a moving cast of detailed participants. In 1997, the NPR changed its name to the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, toindicate that reinventing government called for constant change, even in titles.

Membership.

The creation of a blue-ribbon commission to manage the exercise and give its imprimatur tothe reports and recommendations was never seriously entertained. The objective was to keep theNPR under the Vice President's Office and for the reports and recommendations to reflect his viewsand those of his staff. In this regard, several key staff leaders warrant mention. These includedElaine Kamarck of the Vice President's Office, Bob Stone, Project Director, and John Kamensky,formerly of GAO and Assistant to the Deputy Director at OMB.

Administrative Philosophy.

The administrative philosophy of the National Performance Review was intended to addressa near universal problem; the public's disenchantment with government. Numerous studies and pollsover a period of time indicated increasing frustration by the public with the manner in whichexecutive agencies performed their duties and delivered services. This frustration was directed atall levels of government. In the 1980s, there was considerable interest in promoting "privatization"of services, a term employed broadly to include virtually any action that moved government towardprivate sector practices. (278) But privatization was not enough for those who wanted anAmerican version of the New Public Management. Vice President Al Gore had assembled in April1993 a large meeting of political and career executives where he announced that the government wasgoing to be "reinvented" to reflect certain objectives, objectives encapsulated on laminated cardsdistributed to attendees.

We will invent a government that puts people first, by âserving its customers âempowering its employees âfostering excellence Here's How: We will -- âcreate a clear sense of mission âdelegate authority and responsibility âreplace regulations with incentives âdevelop budget based outcomes âmeasure success by customer satisfaction

Six months later, the NPR issued a report, From Red Tape to Results: Creating aGovernment That Works Better and Costs Less . (279) Four premises underlay the Report and the whole NPRexercise.

1.The federal government and the private sectors are similar intheir essentials and respond similarly to managementincentives and processes.

2.Federal government agencies should be viewed asentrepreneurial bodies which function best in a competitivemarket environment.

3.The size of the government is a function of the number ofcivil servants employed fulltime, hence it follows that todecrease the number of civil servants is to decrease the size ofgovernment.

4.Federal agency management should be both tied andsubordinate to, budgetary priorities and processes.

The constitutional, or administrative management, paradigm that guided the republic sinceits inception was rejected by the NPR. This "old" paradigm, based on law, was the cause, in theirview, of the "red tape" that hampered the introduction of contemporary management practices. Inthe entrepreneurial management paradigm, the agency manager is central. Congress is viewed asbeing engaged in micro-management. (280) The central management agencies, such as OMB, are tied tothe administrative management paradigm and therefore ought to be downgraded. And the executivebranch is in need of disaggregation. With respect to the latter, agencies should be given widelatitude over their personnel, compensation, acquisition, and contract policies, as well as theapplicability of regulations.

The administrative philosophy of the NPR set out to "melt the rigid boundaries betweenorganizations. The federal government should organize its work according to customers' needs andanticipated outcomes, not bureaucratic turf." (281) The Report argued to change the public law basis of anagency's mission and replace it with an "outcomes" mission orientation as defined by the agency'smanagement. The executive branch was to be culturally reorganized, not organizationallyreorganized, to reflect the entrepreneurial values of the private sector. Vice President Gore wrote:"We are turning some of today's agencies into smaller, sleeker organizations that won't look likegovernment at all. They will be like private companies, with a real CEO on contract to cut costs, anda free hand when it comes to the remaining government rules." (282)

Entrepreneurial managers view the legal distinctions between the government and privatesectors as largely artificial, serving to hinder the implementation of contemporary businessmanagement practices. To their mind, the future should be one of government-private partnershipsfunctioning in almost all fields. The partnerships, ideally, will be largely autonomous bodies run bymanagers under contract to meet negotiated performance standards. Managers of the future will berisk-takers who are willing to ignore the "unnecessary" rules, regulations, and control systems to getthe job done right--and less expensively. There will be little need to change the laws, the goal beingto change attitudes and behavior. The role of Congress, under the entrepreneurial model, will bereduced. (283) Empirical results, however defined, will be what counts, not legal processes and politicalaccountability. The precedence of economically based values over legally based values is evidentthroughout the NPR literature.

Organization, Staff Support, and Finances.

When President Clinton announced on March 3, 1993 that the National Performance Reviewwould issue a report with recommendations six months hence, there was no NPR in existence. Therewas no staff, no funding, and no work plan. The Vice President formed a small team, which in turndeveloped an interagency task force. As an interagency task force, as opposed to a statutory body,the NPR could not have its own personnel or an independent budget account. Its personnel were tobe temporarily detailed from agencies and NPR's funding would, in effect, have to originate inexisting agency appropriations. Some consultants (e.g., David Osborne at $10,000 a month) werehired. Space was rented across the street from OMB and the size of the staff, at its height, reached250 persons, nearly all of whom were career government employees on detail from their agencies. The actual cost for the NPR exercise, although substantial, was included for the most part in agencybudgets, but has not been identified or estimated.

Reports and Recommendations.

The President, in announcing the formation of the NPR in March 1993, stated that heexpected to receive a report with recommendation in six months. A number of study teams met anddrew up recommendations. David Osborne was the leader in the drafting stage. The end result wasunveiled at a ceremony held on the White House lawn on September 7, 1993. Titled From Red Tapeto Results: Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less , the report promised changesin government management, not so much programmatically as behaviorally. (284)

The report describes "roughly 100 of our most important recommendations, while hundredsmore are listed in the appendices...." These recommendations were expected to produce savings of$108 billion over 5 years with the biggest savings ($40.4 billion) listed under the category of"streamlining the bureaucracy through reengineering." The NPR report recommended eliminatingone half of the executive branch middle management (252,000 persons) over 5 years. "The reportwas vividly anecdotal." (285) The remaining recommendations were a mixture of thesignificant and insignificant. There was a call for biennial budgeting, a line item veto, and majorrestructuring of the Inspectors General role, all requiring statutory action at some point. On the otherhand, minor items such as establishing a Customer Service Bureau in the Executive Office of thePresident and reducing the number of Marine guards at U.S. embassies, received equal billing.

Much more important than the specific recommendations, and much more subtle, was theimplicit recommendation in the report to redefine the role and authorities of the institutionalPresident and the central management agencies. The "M" ("management") side of OMB was to bedowngraded or eliminated and replaced by interagency committees, (286) principally a newPresident's Management Council. (287) The entrepreneurial management paradigm underlying theNPR called for a highly pluralistic organizational and management structure for the executivebranch. Agencies were to be viewed as competitive enterprises in charge of their own personnel andfinancing systems. They were to be substantially reliant upon a contractor workforce. Throughoutthe report, the implicit argument appeared to be that greater faith should be placed in the abilities andmotivations of politically appointed leadership in the departments and agencies. Together with are-culturated federal and contract workforce, the new management team would insure thatperformance, however defined, would become the pre-eminent value. Performance would replacepolitical accountability as the primary objective for federal organization and management. (288)

Results and Assessment.

Enumerating and evaluating the results of the NPR is not an easy task, as James Thompsonindicates:

Assessing the NPR is in many waysproblematic; the scope of the reform program is broad, the rhetorical element is substantial, theunderlying 'theory' elusive. Some objectives are so broad and ambiguous as to deter other thantentative conclusions about outcomes. Also, given the size of the government, a major commitmentof time and resources would be required to make any kind of comprehensive assessment ofoutcomes. (289)

The thrust of the NPR, as noted previously, was different than earlier reorganizationexercises. (290) It wasnot so much interested in altering institutions and lines of accountability as in changing behavior atthe line agency level and below. The pertinent concepts were to be found more in the genericbehavior literature of business schools than in public administration literature. (291) "Change" became theoperative word. Managers were referred to as "change agents" and expected to adopt genericmanagement practices.

Legislatively, not much can be credited directly to the NPR. The most important piece oflegislation reflecting the shift of values from political accountability to performance was theGovernment Performance and Results Act (GPRA), passed by Congress in 1993 (107 Stat. 285). The development of the bill and the concepts it represents, however, came principally from Congressand organizations outside the executive branch and NPR. Think-tanks, both conservative and liberal,actively promoted the legislation in Congress, with a vigorous assist from GAO. Unlike previousbudgetary/management process exercises, such as the program performance budgeting system(PPBS) and zero-based budgeting (ZBB), GPRA had a statutory basis and mandate making it moredifficult for agencies to ignore altogether. NPR leaders, plus a number of outside organizations(e.g., Reason Foundation, National Academy of Public Administration), pushed hard to integrateGPRA thinking into agency management, and to a limited degree succeeded. Finally, agovernment-wide set of GPRA goals was published for FY 2001. (292) Like much of the restof the NPR, evaluations of GPRA are presently mixed, (293) but GPRA is still a story in the making.

Just prior to the 2000 election, the NPR evaluated itself and returned to its earlier populistthemes. Its most important self-proclaimed accomplishment was the "ending of the era of biggovernment." The NPR "reduced the size of the federal civilian workforce by 426,200 positionsbetween January 1993 and September 2001," more than the 252,000 they originally promised. "Action [was taken] on more than two-thirds of NPR recommendations resulting in savings of morethan $136 billion," once again more than the $108 billion promised. The NPR made its cuts andsavings "the right way by eliminating what wasn't needed--bloated headquarters, layers of managers,outdated field offices, obsolete red tape and rules." They cut 78,000 managers, cut 640,000 pagesof internal agency rules and closed nearly 2000 obsolete field offices and eliminated 250 programsand agencies, like the Tea-Tasters Board, the Bureau of Mines, and the wool and mohair subsidies. Similar statistical claims were offered under other headings, such as "Serving People Better." Onthe other hand, critics disputed whether these statistics and claims constituted steps toward a bettermanaged government, or were even true. (294)

Second-level objectives, such as "employee empowerment" and increased discretion tomanagers, were declared successful in a number of agencies. Personnel practices were indeedloosened in some instances and agencies went out on their own initiative to create "quasi"entities. (295) Managers were encouraged to be entrepreneurs with financial objectives and standards. (296) There was substantialevidence of changes in behavior patterns (presumably better) in agencies dealing with the public. Whether all this action was "successful" depends upon the values and evidence used by the reviewer. Thus, there are reviews warm in their praise.

The federal government has become a businessincubator, nurturing a dazzling variety of small businesses within its own agencies. Entrepreneurialorganizations have flourished since the Clinton administration came to power in the early 1990s withits goal of remaking government in the image of business.

(297)

Other reviewers hold mixed opinions (298) or conclude that, on balance, government management hassuffered from the experiment to remodel the executive branch along private corporate lines. Criticsgenerally see an erosion in the legal basis for administrative management, a weakening of the centralmanagement agencies and authorities, and a general process of disaggregation overtaking theexecutive branch. Most seriously, they tend to see in entrepreneurial management generally, and theNPR specifically, an unhealthy retreat from democratic values. (299)

The Future of Reorganization Commissions

It is one of the givens of government that executive organization undergoes constant change.These changes may be comprehensive and visible, or incremental and of low visibility. They mayreflect a variety of values, some emphasizing universality, and others particularity. Changes maybe designed and intended to enhance agency accountability, or encourage managerial autonomy. Onereorganization may be inconsistent, or even contradictory, with another. Reorganizations may reflecta new agreement among previously conflicting parties, or reinforce their irreconcilable differences. The point is that reorganizing the executive branch of government is a natural and continuousactivity.

Reorganization, while it may be natural and continuous, is not a neutral activity. There arewinners and losers when reorganizations occur. Not all reorganization proposals are of equal valueand utility. Reorganizations are instrumental in character and have no value except as they assist inachieving an agreed upon political or policy objective. Reorganizations cannot make workable andsuccessful programs that are conceptually unsound. There are distinct limitations and managementcosts associated with reorganization. Reorganizations are not self-executing exercises. Implementation may be costly and result in unanticipated and undesired consequences. Even if oneassumes that the motives of the reorganizers are worthy, how is one to know a "good" from a "bad"reorganization? Is there any theory or set of principles available to use as guideposts in evaluation? Is there some tribal wisdom available that expresses the collective experience of those who havewrestled with executive management issues before? Or, are we intentionally to avoid this collectivewisdom of the past and single-mindedly seek out new truths and new organizations?

Reflecting upon the organizational state of the executive branch during the 20th century, itis evident that the motivating force for comprehensive reorganization commissions has changed. From the turn of the century to the mid-1970s, comprehensive commissions were viewed asinstruments to promote executive branch political accountability to the President, and through thePresident to Congress. The proposal for a Bureau of the Budget, for instance, was strongly favoredby Congress as a means to hold the President responsible for agency budget submissions and forsubsequent agency oversight. To be sure, the Budget Bureau strengthened the institutionalpresidency, but this strengthening was not part of a zero sum game where one institution's gain mustnecessarily be at the expense of another institution. Rather, the centralizing element inherent in theestablishment of the Budget Bureau worked to the benefit of both the President and the Congress intheir relations with the departments and agencies of the executive branch.

Beginning in the 1970s, and reaching its peak at the end of the century, a differentmotivating force for reorganization emerged. The entrepreneurial values of the NationalPerformance Review (NPR), for instance, were arguably not congenial to central management of theexecutive branch, or to the political accountability associated with central management. Indeed,managerial autonomy at the agency level became one of the highest values of the NPR. Politicalaccountability, in the NPR view, was to be largely supplanted by management processes intendedto provide better results and performance, however those terms might be defined and measured.

There was nothing modest in the claims of the NPR. The rhetoric tended to be hortatory andthe evidence cited anecdotal. Entrepreneurs prefer to avoid theory and rely instead on "successstories" to teach government managers how to perform better. Congress rarely appears in theirwritings or motivational seminars, and their attitude is more likely to be one of confrontation thanconciliation. Vice President Gore's reinventing government exercise measured its success in"vanquishing big government" at least in part by the number of civil service positions it eliminated. By and large, the entrepreneurs abjure theory with its requirements of precision, predictability,replicability, and acceptance of disproof, (300) preferring instead the enlightenment of success indicators, suchas customer polling ("We will ... measure our success by customer satisfaction"). (301) All of this isimportant in assessing the future of landmark commissions in the coming century, even if the NewPublic Management "paradigm" itself proves to be of passing persuasiveness.

A distinction needs to be drawn between commissions established to study specific issueareas with recommendations forwarded to the President, Congress, appointing authority, the public,or any combination of the above. These commissions, such as the current Social SecurityCommission, remain popular, and the number appointed annually is likely to remain high. Theso-called landmark commission, however, constitutes a very different situation. Of necessity, acomprehensive review of the organization of the executive branch requires a coherency of objectivesand evaluations that are difficult to develop without some overarching theory or set of principles.

Has the day of the landmark commission passed? Has the loss in appeal of the so-called"orthodox theory" of organizational management made the comprehensive study approach obsolete? Can the entrepreneurial management paradigm be offered as a viable, comprehensible theory towhich a commission may repair in organizing its studies and recommendations? Or, would acommission naturally gravitate back toward the earlier values of, say, the Hoover Commissions? Can a new set of organizational doctrines be developed to accommodate the traditionalconstitutionalist values with the entrepreneurial values? Or, is there a "new" new publicmanagement waiting somewhere to be discovered? (302) Even if some agreement on organizational theory can bereached, at a more practical level has the executive branch simply become too complex for a singlecommission to study and make appropriate recommendations? What about the burgeoningquasi-government; should it be included within the purview of any future landmarkcommission? (303) Finally, should the President and his central management agencies seek to reassert their prior roleover matters of organizational management? (304)

Doubts regarding the utility of landmark-type commissions notwithstanding, they retain muchof their appeal to lawmakers. It is a rare Congress indeed in which there is not some effort toestablish a "new Hoover Commission." As mentioned previously, such a bill ( S. 2306 )was introduced in the 106th Congress by Senator Fred Thompson, then-chairman of the SenateGovernmental Affairs Committee. The charge to the nine-member commission was to makestructural recommendations respecting the entire executive branch and incorporate them in a singlebill. This bill would then have to be considered by Congress and voted up or down followingexpedited procedures. Among its supporters was Paul Light of the Brookings Institution whoannounced at a hearings in 2000:

I believe, too, that there has been a lack ofattention to structural reform.... I think you should pass S. 2306 . I think you shouldattach it to every bill leaving this Committee and every bill leaving the Senate. I have referred to theFederal organization chart as rather like the mouth of the Ulonga-Bora River where the AfricanQueen and Humphrey Bogart got bogged down. I think that S. 2306 could be thatgentle rain that lifts the Federal Government out of the mouth of that swamp and gets it back ontrack. I think it is time for a very detailed look at the structure of the Federal Government, and thathas to be done through legislation. I don't see anyway you can do it otherwise. (305)

In the late 1980s, Congress passed a law (which President Reagan signed) one provision ofwhich authorized the establishment of such a commission. The public law elevating the VeteransAdministration to departmental status provided for the establishment of a National Commission onExecutive Organization patterned in general outline after the first Hoover Commission of the late1940s (102 Stat. 2635, Sec. 17). This new Commission, however, could be activated only bypresidential initiative. If the President, in this case the newly inaugurated George H.W. Bush,transmitted written notification to Congress within 30 days after the operational date for the VeteransDepartment (March 15, 1989) that such a Commission would serve "the national interest," then, andonly then, would the Commission be activated. President Bush, although he was on the receivingend of some congressional lobbying for the Commission, let the final date, April 15, 1989, passwithout a message to Congress requesting the Commission. (306)

If, obstacles notwithstanding, a new landmark-style commission were established to reviewcomprehensively the structure of the executive branch, what sort of situation would this commissionface with respect to the political and institutional presidency and the Congress? Are there unitswithin each of these branches that currently handle organizational management issues that might feelthreatened and offer resistance? Or, have both institutions retreated from their organizationalmanagement responsibilities?

Looking to the presidency first, it is clear that recent Presidents have been ambivalenttowards management generally, and organizational management in particular. Whereas once,through the mid-1970s, there was a consensus that the President was the "chief manager" of theexecutive branch and should have institutional capacity to perform these responsibilities, no suchconsensus exists today. Recent Presidents, beginning with John F. Kennedy, have been warned byscholars and aides to avoid management issues. Stephen Hess, writing in 1976, and read byPresident-elect Jimmy Carter, argued that the President ought to limit himself to political leadership. "Presidents have made a serious mistake, starting with Roosevelt, in asserting that they are chiefmanagers of the federal government.... Rather than chief manager the President is the chief politicalofficer of the United States." (307) This argument was repeated in various forms for theremainder of the century. These scholarly warnings reinforced the inclination of contemporaryPresidents to shy away from management responsibilities. One consequence of this retreat was anerosion in the will and capacity of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to performmanagement functions. In a bit of historical irony, the erosion of OMB's capacity to manage becamepronounced shortly after the implementation of the Reorganization Plan of 1970 that, among otherthings, changed the name of the Bureau of the Budget to that of the Office of Management andBudget. (308)

While employee statistics may not tell the whole story, they provide evidence of the declinein OMB's management capacity, and therefore the institutional presidency's decline as well. In 1970,224 employees were on the management side of OMB. By 1980, when Carter left office, the numberhad fallen to 111. The Reagan Administration further reduced this staff to only 47 (compared to8,500 at the staff level of agency Inspectors General). (309) Rather than rebuild the OMB management capacity, asrecommended by NAPA and others, the Clinton Administration decided ("OMB 2000 Review") tointegrate most of the remaining staff of the General Management Division into five ResourceManagement Offices (RMOs) structured along budgetary functional lines. (310) In early 2002, thereremained only a skeletal staff of 12 with the position of Deputy Director for Management continuingits pattern of vacancies and short tenures. (311)

What does this admitted retreat from management by the President and OMB have to do withfuture proposals for a landmark-style commission? The fact is that the proper design andimplementation of structural management proposals rests with a central management agency thatfunctions from a presidential perspective. Reorganizations that are designed and implemented bythe agencies themselves tend to meet parochial needs that may or may not be in concert with thePresident's interests.

With respect to Congress, it had been the intention of the Hoover Commission in 1949 tohave most future executive reorganization be the result of ongoing interchange between thethen-Bureau of the Budget and a single committee in both houses of Congress. The House andSenate each established Government Operations Committees, committees that continue to functiontoday with different titles and an altered sense of mission. All presidentially initiated reorganizationplans were to be sent to these committees rather than to the subject field committees to insure thatmanagerial issues were addressed according to executive branch-wide standards. Joint hearings andreferrals yes, but the final response rested with the general management committees. With the endof the reorganization plan process in 1984, reorganization proposals now typically are referred to thesubject field committees none of which have a government-wide perspective. The result isincreasing disaggregation in the organization and management of the executive branch.

The institutional weakness in the executive and legislative branches with respect to structuralquestions has implications that could well influence the prospects of success any new landmarkcommission might enjoy. A commission cannot successfully function and see its recommendationsimplemented if it does not have institutional support readily available. It cannot work in anenvironment isolated from the ongoing government. A successful landmark commission seeminglyrequires as a necessary, but not sufficient, precondition the proper working of a central managementagency in the Executive Office and jurisdictional support of general management committees in theHouse and Senate.

Several generalizations may be useful in concluding this review and analysis of landmarkcommissions and their utility for the future.

1.A focused and limited mandate for a commission (e.g., the need for a separate Officeof Management and Budget) is more likely to provide useful results than acommission with a broad, unstructured mandate with substantial policy implications.

2.A commission should have ties with central managerial agencies in the executivebranch and with committees with general management responsibilities in Congress. Others besides the commission must have a stake in the success of the exercise.

3.Commissions should be cognizant of the distinctive legal character of governmentalorganization and activities. Included in any commission review should be a review,with recommendations, of the general management laws pertinent to the mandate ofthe commission.

4.There should be some consensus in advance among commission members regardingthe organizational principles to be applied in their review and recommendations. Commissions do not tend to be effective vehicles for generating consensus if nonepreviously existed.

Acceptance of these general propositions for an effective landmark-style commission doesnot guarantee success, but it may be difficult to envision success if they are willfully ignored.