Reorganization Renaissance

"Now that we are out of the trough of the Depression, the time has come to set our house in order. The administrative management of the Government needs overhauling. . . ."

With these brave words, Franklin Delano Roosevelt in January 1937 launched what looked at the time to be the most far-reaching project of his Administration to date: a gigantic plan to reorganize the entire executive branch of the Federal Government, intended among other things to kill the U. S. spoils system.

Few U. S. Presidents ever acquired as much political prestige as Franklin Roosevelt had in December 1936. Few have lost as much as he lost in 1937. Crowded off the Congressional stage by the fight to enlarge the Supreme Court last spring, the plan to reorganize the executive branch was crowded off again this winter by more practical concerns. By last week, with the country apparently back in the trough of at least a Recession, the Reorganization Plan had reemerged. Because it gave the President's enemies in Congress a fine excuse-- ill-supported by the bill itself--to argue in effect that he was trying to make himself a dictator, it produced the major political fireworks of a highly incandescent week.

Plan. Idea that the executive branch needs repair did not originate with its present chief. Ever since the turn of the century, Presidents have been trying to untangle the underbrush of overlapping duties, conflicting authorities and mechanical inadequacies of the various bureaus, commissions and other agencies responsible to the executive. The bill which the Senate was debating last week, a considerably modified version of a report of a committee headed by a University of Chicago political science lecturer named Louis Brownlow, proposed five major changes:

1) For the purposes of economy and efficiency, the President could coordinate, reorganize or segregate any of the 100-odd Government agencies which he found superfluous, badly integrated or overlapping. This did not include quasi-judicial bodies like the Board of Tax Appeals, Federal Trade Commission, National Labor Relations Board, as the Brownlow Committee had originally suggested. Though he could reshuffle agencies, the President could not create any new ones unless they were to serve functions already authorized by Congress. Changes could be voted down by Congress within a 60-day limit, but if Congress disapproved, a Presidential veto of the disapproval could be overridden only by a two-thirds vote.

2) Admittedly, one of the gravest flaws in the U. S. Government since Andrew Jackson has been the system whereby the victorious political party always assumes control of Government jobs. Daringly, the Reorganization Plan struck at this by giving the President power to "cover into" the classified civil service any minor office he wished, and to create, instead of the present three-man bipartisan Civil Service Commission which can be changed at the will of the President, a single Administrator, to be appointed by the President with the Senate's approval, for 15 years. The Administrator would be specifically delegated by the bill to submit plans for the development of a Government career service.

3) As currently organized, disbursement of Federal funds and auditing of Federal accounts are both duties of the Comptroller General. The Senate Reorganization Bill would abolish his office entirely. Supervising expenditures would become the job of the Bureau of the Budget, whose director would be responsible directly to the President instead of to the Secretary of the Treasury as he is at present. Auditing Federal expense accounts would become the job of an entirely new official: an Auditor General, to be appointed by a new Joint Congressional Committee on Public Accounts. Object of this change is to make spending and auditing functions independent of each other (as they are in most well-run private businesses), insure prompter, sounder Government accounting.

4) Reorganization proposed the first new department since Labor was created in 1913; Welfare, under which would function agencies like WPA, National Youth Administration and possibly the Social Security Board. It proposed also a National Resources Planning Board.

5) Among other miscellaneous improvements, the bill empowered the President to hire six administrative assistants, which he once said should be equipped with "a passion for anonymity."

Faced with its impressive omnibus, a joint Congressional committee last year soon fell to squabbling, finally split apart to work on it separately. The House Committee divided the bill into four sections, passed two last August. The Senate bill, introduced by Joe Robinson last June, was rewritten by South Carolina's Jimmy Byrnes and reintroduced in January, finally emerged from committee last month. Last week, the Senate settled down to work on it with a will.

50-to-38. To Congress nothing is at once dearer and harder to defend than patronage. Any bill putting patronage jobs under civil service would have faced a hard fight at any time and when the Senate Reorganization Bill was brought up for debate the same confident group of anti-Rooseveltian Democrats who helped defeat the Court Plan jumped jubilantly into the fight against it. First test of their strength was an amendment proposed by Massachusetts' David Walsh to leave the civil service administration under a three-man commission. It was defeated, but by such a narrow margin--50-to-38--that Floor Leader Alben Barkley promptly betrayed the fact that his alarm outweighed his satisfaction by leaving himself appallingly wide open to a rude jibe from Idaho's Borah. To Mr. Borah's suggestion that the President favored shifting the Forest Service from the Agriculture to the Interior Department, perturbed Leader Barkley indignantly cried:

"I would be willing to bet my head against the hole in a doughnut that it is not transferred."

Replied Mr. Borah: "The Senator's comparison is not fair."

Floor Leader Barkley could think of no better comeback than to hope that his opponent was not minimizing the odds that had been offered.

43-to-39. To Montana's Burton Wheeler, anything that looks like a grab for Presidential power is profoundly disturbing. Wheeler scheme for drawing the teeth of the Reorganization Plan was an amendment whereby Presidential changes, under Title 1, needed Congressional approval to be effective--thereby throwing the balance of power to Congress since a simple majority would be sufficient to thwart any executive proposal. Scurrying to round up votes against the amendment. Floor Leader Barkley found so few that it seemed advisable to have Louisiana's Ellender launch a miniature filibuster to prevent a roll call. Meanwhile, Floor Leader Barkley was so busy bargaining on the floor that Mr. Borah was moved to another and more pertinently acid comment on the proceedings. Said he: "Certain things are being promised on and off the floor that amount to reorganization of the Government before the bill is passed.''

Next day, when a vote was finally taken, Mr. Wheeler's canny amendment was beaten by an even smaller vote than its predecessor--43-to-39. By this time, however, to offset its dwindling majority, the Administration bloc had found a new trump card in the form of charges that a good part of the pressure against the bill had been generated by a high-powered lobby financed by Publisher Frank Gannett. Convening his Lobby Investigation Committee for the first time since he succeeded Hugo Black as its chairman, Indiana's Sherman Minton quickly produced a Dr. Edward A. Rumely who as secretary of something called the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government admitted that he had spent $50,000 and sent out 800,000 letters to defeat Reorganization, in which Publisher Gannett sees a threat to Democracy. On Dr. Rumely's somewhat ill-chosen mailing list, it turned out, was Texas' Tom Connally who had received a letter addressed to the Honorable Tom Connally at Marlin, Tex., urging him to urge Senator Connally to vote against the bill. Said Senator Connally: "Senator Connally took counsel with Citizen Connally and decided to vote the other way."

By week's end, only two more major battles remained, over amendments 1) to strike out the section of the bill abolishing the office of Comptroller General and 2) to except a number of agencies from the group which the President could change. With two victories to their credit, Administration Senators felt reasonably confident of winning their final one.

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