End of a Mission

Still ruddy and erect at 80, Herbert Clark Hoover went up from Washington last week to apartment 31A in Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Towers, and packed for a long fishing trip to the California redwood country. He had just finished a 21-month tour of duty as chairman of the second Hoover Commission to study the operations of the U.S. Government. A vice chairman was authorized but never elected--and never needed. Hoover personally recruited each task-force member, supervised the 525-man staff, ran every meeting of the commission and wrote all but two of the reports (Legal Services and Procedure. Real Property Management). In the report on Water Resources and Power, he boiled 1,783 pages down to 124; in some cases he produced half a dozen penciled drafts before the final version.

Candid Premise. The 1947 Hoover Commission was restricted to checking on the procedural efficiency of existing agencies. The new (1953) Hoover Commission got a much broader mission: to examine the substance of Government activity and arrive at conclusions not only as to how agencies were doing their work but also whether the work should be done at all. Such evaluations were made on a premise candidly expressed. Said Herbert Hoover: "Private enterprise is the root of our system, and the underlying thesis of the commission has been to preserve and strengthen the fundamentals of our system and our Government."

In all, the commission wrote 19 reports on 60 Government agencies that account for more than 95% of expenditures in the executive branch. Task forces made extensive investigations resulting in 362 recommendations. They were often concerned with details, e.g., eliminate free hospital and medical service for all merchant seamen, but the specifics were woven into a broad pattern. The $3,500 saved each month by having a civilian concern clean the General Accounting Office Building in Washington was used to dramatize a recurring theme--private industry should be used to perform services for the Government whenever possible.

Keep Out. The 1955 Hoover reports recommended that many of the 104 Government units involved in banking and insurance should either 1) shut up shop or 2) operate on a self-supporting basis, and Postal Savings was cited as one activity the Government should give up entirely. The commission urged that Government loans be made at realistic rates and made its case by citation. Item: Rural Electrification Administration loans are made at 2% interest, and are covered by Treasury money borrowed at 3%. In its most controversial report, the commission strongly urged that the U.S. Government keep out of the power business wherever private concerns are willing to take over.

The commission was consistently against 1) competition between the Government and private agencies (parallel military and civilian airline routes) and 2) competition within the Government (General Services Administration and Veterans Administration warehouses side by side at Wilmington, Calif.). The commission was for continued foreign aid despite "many mistakes and waste." It urged greatly increased funds for medical and scientific research.

Savings that the Hoover Commission task forces estimated that their recommendations would effect each year were spectacular. A few: budgeting and accounting, $4 billion, depot utilization, $253,000,000, paperwork management, $288,300,000, use and disposal of federal surplus property (first four years), $2 billion.

Hoover estimated that the Treasury could recover some $15 billion through the sale of surplus property and other liquidations. If all commission proposals were adopted, he said, the U.S. could balance the budget and lower taxes. The savings recommended by the reports totaled $8.5 billion a year, but this figure was deceptively high because some of the proposed economies overlapped.

A Dozen Dissents. There was some disagreement by the commissioners. California's Democratic Congressman Chet Holifield dissented from twelve reports and vigorously argued that the commission did not have the right to deal with U.S. policy, which he felt was a prerogative of Congress. Even Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. and Defense Mobilizer Arthur Flemming dissented from four reports. On the Water Resources and Power report, they argued that it went further than the public-private partnership theme of the Eisenhower Administration in the field of power.

The reports of the 1947 Hoover Commission were widely applauded and nearly 75% of the recommendations have since been adopted. The 1955 reports are far more basic and more controversial. Many of the recommendations have already been met with sharp criticism from New Deal Democrats and other advocates of big government and the welfare state. Quieter, but perhaps more important, is the resistance from entrenched bureaucracy, military and civilian, and from powerful business groups that want special Government services. Not all opponents are New Dealish; many pay obeisance to the doctrines of free enterprise. Much of Government expansion, including some Government competition with business, has resulted from business pleas for Government help.

Men who have responsibility for Government functions cannot be expected to recommend the elimination or shrinking of the functions; the great value of the Hoover report is to appraise these activities with an objectivity that bureaucrats, subsidized businessmen or pressured Congressmen cannot share.

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