Second Objective

To assert that the ordinary U. S. citizen grows excited about politics only once every four years and thinks about Government only when his mail goes astray is a trite slur on the national intelligence. Last week vigilant patriots felt reluctantly impelled to believe that there might be some truth in it. Difficult to explain otherwise was the public indifference which greeted President Roosevelt's proposal of the most momentous change in U. S. Government and politics since Andrew Jackson perfected the spoils system. Possibly, however, citizens were simply baffled because the President had packaged his dynamite--a proposal to destroy the spoils system--in bewildering layers of less explosive schemes.

"Now that we are out of the trough of the Depression," wrote the President to Congress, "the time has come to set our house in order. The administrative management of the Government needs over-hauling."

With this introduction Franklin Roosevelt, in the final days of his First Administration, proceeded to reveal in detail one of the major objectives of his Second. The effect of the revelation on politicians and political observers was almost as stunning as if in March 1933 he had laid down a complete blueprint of the New Deal. Knocked breathless, official Washington soon rallied sufficiently to indicate that between the President and his goal lay the hardest fight of his White House career.

"Great Document." President Roosevelt began the fashioning of his bomb innocuously enough last year by appointing three scholars to a committee on Administrative Management, charged with preparing a program for Government reorganization. Chairman was Louis Brownlow, 57, stubby, highbrowed, oldtime newspaperman who has held many a civic planning post, is now a University of Chicago lecturer on government and director of a coordinating agency called Public Administration Clearing House. Other members were University of Chicago's famed Political Scientist Charles Edward Merriam, Columbia's Professor of Municipal Science Luther Halsey Gulick. After lengthy palaver and much questionnairing in Washington, the Committee produced a thoughtful and persuasive report which of itself was no more significant than a thousand other more or less Utopian schemes concocted by academicians in the past. It took on vast importance because it embodied the long-cherished desires of a U. S. President, who, at the peak of his power, had decided to do something about them. Cried President Roosevelt in his message accompanying submission of the Committee's report to Congress last week: "I am convinced that it is a great document of permanent importance."

The theme of the document thus resoundingly endorsed was that Franklin Roosevelt has been doing his Presidential job very badly indeed. But the Committee disagreed with last year's Republican campaigners by asserting that the fault was not the President's but the system's. "The Committee has not spared me," agreed President Roosevelt in his message. "They say, what has been common knowledge for 20 years, that the President cannot adequately handle his responsibilities; that he is overworked; that it is humanly impossible, under the system which we have, for him fully to carry out his constitutional duty as Chief Executive, because he is overwhelmed with minor details and needless contacts arising directly from the bad organization and equipment of the Government. I can testify to this. With my predecessors who have said the same thing over and over again, I plead guilty."

To help make the head of the biggest U. S. business as efficient as the heads of lesser Big Businesses, the President's Committee set forth a monumental program of reform.

Secret Six. It proposed first to give the President six new tongues, six new pairs of eyes and ears, by adding six personal assistants to his present staff of secretaries. These six "would not be assistant presidents in any sense." Contact men between the President and his subordinates, their job would be to lighten his enormous burden of interviews and memoranda, round up and synthesize information, relay the President's decisions. "They should be men in whom the President has personal confidence and whose character and attitude is such that they would not attempt to exercise power on their own account. They should be possessed of high competence, great physical vigor, and a passion for anonymity."

Without suggesting where six such selfless paragons could be found, the Committee next proposed to give the President new arms in the shape of greatly strengthened managerial agencies for personnel, efficiency, spending and planning.

Career Service. "The merit system should be extended upward, outward and downward to include all positions in the Executive Branch of the Government ex cept those character." which Thus are calmly was it policy-determining proposed in to alter the whole color and pattern of U. S. politics -- draining political machines of most of their fuel, revolutionizing the calibre of Government service.

Long have U. S. patriots envied the crack civil service of Great Britain which attracts its best brains to Government service, and keeps them there, by offering prestige, security, chance for promotion and comfortable pay. Ever since its in ception, political observers have pointed to the New Deal as a prime illustration of the need for a similar service in the U. S. In stead of having a full staff of brilliant, experienced career men at hand as a new British Prime Minister would have had, President Roosevelt was forced to draft his top administrators from universities and business. Now many of them have left or are leaving him because their pay is small, their futures doubtful. And many a friend of the New Deal has agreed with its enemies that, however noble its purpose, its performance has often been sloppy.

The Committee would up Cabinet secretaries' salaries to $20,000 per year, under secretaries' to $15,000, assistant secretaries' to $12,000. Career administrators of the first grade would get $12^00 to $15,000; of the second grade, $8,000 to $10,000. To manage its new career service, the Committee would create a U. S. Civil Service Administration to serve as the Government's central personnel agency, be run by a full-time administrator and a non-salaried board of seven outstanding citizens.

Budgeteer Up. The director of the Budget, the Committee noted, is one of the few Presidential subordinates concerned with the whole executive branch of the Government. As such, it would relieve him of routine duties, make him the President's efficiency expert, charged with studying administrative performance, recommending transfer, creation, consolidation, enlargement or abolishment of executive departments. He would also administer a central division of information.

Comptroller Out. Prime incubus of the New Deal until his term expired last July was Comptroller General John R. McCarl, "Watchdog of the Treasury." Irremovable during good behavior and responsible only to Congress, he had the final word on whether Presidential spending projects were in line with Congressional purposes, and he rapped many a New Deal finger as it dipped into the Government purse. Last week President Roosevelt rehearsed with satisfaction his Committee's castigation of the Comptroller General for failing to furnish Congress with a prompt and complete audit of Government spending at each year end; for failing to keep the Government's books up to date; and most importantly for his "unconstitutional assumption of executive power" in regulating expenditures. Flatly asserting that it was the President's constitutional right to be his own judge and guardian in spending, the Committee recommended that the office of Comptroller General (created in 1921) be abolished, that his accounting and veto powers be transferred to the Treasury and Attorney General, his auditing duties to a new Auditor General whose yearly reports would keep the President strictly accountable to Congress.

Planners. Because the New Deal had no precedent or preparation for the prodigious task of finding work for 4,000,000 jobless citizens, much of its relief and public works program was inevitably haphazard, wasteful. To help avoid such confusion in future, to co-ordinate the work of regional, State, county and city planning boards, and to advise the President on longtime policies of land, water and mineral use, the Committee recommended creation of a permanent National Resources Board, comprising five non-salaried patriots with indefinite terms, a permanent career staff.

Welfare & Works. The great new Government functions of recent years, observed the Committee, are public welfare, public works, public lending, conservation, business control. For two of these, it asserted, there is no adequate provision in the present Governmental structure. Therefore let there be created two new Cabinet departments. A Department of Social Welfare would administer Federal health, educational and social activities. Federal charitable, corrective and penal institutions, and social security-on-the-basis-of-need (Relief), with social security-on-the-basis-of-right (Social Security) going to the Department of Labor. A Department of Public Works would administer public works. The Committee also suggested that the Department of the Interior be renamed, as Secretary Ickes has long wished, Department of Conservation.

Having prospectively upped major executive departments from ten to twelve, the Committee next asked that the President be given power to bring order out of chaos by assigning to these departments, along general lines to be laid down by Congress, all the Government's 90-odd boards, bureaus, commissions, authorities and corporations which now lead independent existences.

Fourth Branch. Consolidation of most of these agencies would be simply a matter of eliminating duplication and cross pur poses. A graver problem was presented by the dozen-odd business-regulating commissions like I. C. C., SEC, Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission. "They," declared the Com mittee, "are in reality miniature independent governments. . . . They constitute a headless 'fourth branch' of the Government, a haphazard deposit of irresponsible agencies and uncoordinated powers. . . . The Congress has found no effective way of supervising them, they cannot be controlled by the President, and they are answerable to the courts only in respect to the legality of their activities."

These mavericks might readily be rounded into the executive herd if it were not that they possess quasi-judicial as well as administrative functions, each one acting as combined police, prosecutor & judge of its field of U. S. business. Long & loudly has regulated business protested against this procedure. The Committee's solution was to have Cabinet departments take over policy, expenditures, investigations and preparation of cases, leave the commissions to hold hearings and render judgments as independent quasi-courts.

Tommyrot & Quibble. Not until they had chewed over it for weeks could Congressmen and political observers expect to comprehend the full implications and probable effects of this far-reaching program. Two points were clarified by President Roosevelt in his preliminary seminar for newshawks, one in his message to Congress. It was tommyrot, cried he to the press, for critics to complain because the plan did not aim at economy as well as efficiency. No governmental reorganization, he declared, had ever achieved much economy. At best his scheme might pare 1%, or about $30,000,000 off the cost of salaries and supplies. The only way to achieve real economies, he asserted, was to eliminate governmental functions, and that was Congress' job, not the President's.

There was no use asking, continued the President, just how boards, bureaus and commissions would be reshuffled. Not even he knew that, and it would probably take one, two or even three years to finish the job.

He would certainly, declared the President in his message, be accused of seeking more power. That, he argued, was not true. His listeners detected a quibble. Indubitably the proposed reorganization would make the President more powerful. But President Roosevelt argued that he already possessed these prospective powers by constitutional right, was simply prevented from exercising them by faulty organization.

Challenge v. Challenge. In the critical chorus which greeted the President's plan, loudest howl rose from ex-Watchdog McCarl. To abolish his old job, barked he, would mean robbing Congress of its constitutional right to regulate government spending. Not constitutional but practical, however, was the white-crested old Republican's most persuasive argument. "When economy in government is so utterly essential, due to our public debt condition," he declared, "any wisdom in striking down our one money-saving agency is difficult to see."

Among shocked Congressmen even Administration stalwarts could not bring themselves to do more than damn the President's plan with faint praise. General reaction was to applaud some aspects of the program, challenge others. Many a Senator and Representative deplored the failure to seek economy. But none except Speaker Bankhead, who said he would be glad of it, dared mention outright the awful prospect of losing his patronage.

Virginia's Byrd, chairman of a special Senate committee which for months has been working up a reorganization plan of its own, loomed as the spearhead of Congressional opposition. As Virginia's Governor, Senator Byrd pared the State budget by 5% through reorganization. Last week he saw no reason why the Federal Government should not do the same. "After the study I have made," said he, "I feel more keenly than ever that hundreds of millions of dollars can be saved by courageous and prompt action. . . . What we need is a drastic overhauling of the Government, the elimination of every useless agency. . . ."

When Senator Byrd opened his economy campaign by opposing extension of RFC for another two years, the Senate handed him a rebuke, 74-to-1. House and Senate promptly moved to set up a joint committee to consider the President's program.

No Washington correspondent believed for an instant that Congressmen and bureaucrats would yield their powers & privileges without a desperate struggle. No one who has observed President Roosevelt's growing proneness to regard himself as world's champion of democracy, no one who heard the recurrent theme of "Make Democracy Succeed'' in his State of the Union speech last fortnight, could doubt his readiness to do battle as he introduced his great plan to Congress last week with this ringing challenge: "Will it be said 'democracy was a great dream, but it could not do the job?' or shall we here and now, without further delay, make it our business to see that our American democracy is made efficient so that it will do the job that is required of it by the events of our time?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.