June 15, 1966
Page 13228
A NATIONAL INTERGOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS COUNCIL
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, in a Senate speech on March 25, I warned that there was too much tension and conflict in the implementation of Great Society programs -- from top Federal policymakers to State and local officials -- and I called for a wholly new policy of coordinating Federal aid, and working with the State and local governments, to help them improve their administrative effectiveness.
The point that I made then -- and I reiterate it now -- is that we are headed for trouble in the building of the Great Society if we do not pull the Federal Establishment together and develop a more positive attitude of helping State and local governments meet their increasing public needs.
We have initiated more dynamic new programs and appropriated more Federal aid during the past five sessions of Congress than in all the previous Congresses going back to 1789, but our programs are only as good as the machinery that carries them out. At the moment, the machinery is seriously in need of modernization. The spotlight now must be shifted to procedures for making these programs work in the fastest and most effective way. We must take a hard look at our Federal system of government and see where it is failing to meet the challenge of the sixties and of the decades to come.
In my speech I made some 13 suggestions which I felt would provide a good beginning in the modernization of our administrative machinery and better working relationships between Federal, State, and local governments. Implementation of some of these, I understand, is already underway at the executive level, and this is encouraging. Two of these proposals, however, require the mandate and support of Congress, whose responsibility for strengthening our Federal system is equal to that of the executive branch.
The first such area concerns the development of a new, comprehensive Federal aid program designed to help State and local governments upgrade their public service and improve their intergovernmental cooperation in the personnel field. This is the subject of the proposed Intergovernmental Personnel Act of 1966 which I introduced on this floor on May 25.
The second area involves the establishment of a new, and permanent, operating unit in the Executive Office of the President for developing and enforcing the coordination of Federal programs and policies, for resolving interdepartmental conflicts, and for keeping in constant touch with State and local leaders to encourage their cooperation in joint-action programs. This is the subject of the bill which I introduce today.
I believe that these two legislative proposals, together with S. 561, the intergovernmental cooperation bill presently being considered by the House, will provide a very creative and far-reaching effort toward developing a total governmental approach to economic and social development problems.
A NATIONAL INTERGOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS COUNCIL
The bill which I now introduce, for appropriate reference, would establish in the Executive Office of the President a National Intergovernmental Affairs Council, chaired by the President and composed of the Vice President and those Cabinet officials and agency heads whose programs have a major impact on State and local government. Its membership would include the Secretaries of HUD, HEW, Labor, Agriculture, and Commerce; the Attorney General; the Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity; the Director of the Bureau of the Budget; the Chairman of the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations; and such other top-ranking officials as may be designated by the President.
The Council would be -- and I emphasize this -- a "working" organization both to advise the President and to see that agreed-upon administrative procedures are carried out and made effective. It would have a top-flight Executive Secretary in direct contact with the President. The Council's secretariat would be composed of experts independently selected and directly responsible to the Executive Secretary and to the President. This secretariat would be assisted by top-level policy officials -- no lower than deputy under secretaries or equivalent from the departments and agencies specially designated to handle program coordination and intergovernmental relations.
The role of the NIAC is expected to be a broad one. It would go far beyond the staff responsibilities of the Bureau of the Budget and the Council of Economic Advisers, but nevertheless would utilize the resources of these offices. It would be a staff and operating arm of the President -- a forum for determining administrative policies for domestic program coordination, and a mechanism for overseeing their implementation. At the same time, it could be the President's ombudsman, a watchdog for domestic crisis, a central information agency, and an inspector general for the effectiveness of domestic programs. It would be concerned with both urban and rural development -- as a multi departmental responsibility involving education, housing, transportation, public facilities, law enforcement, civil rights, and other issues. It would play a strategic role in national long-range planning, and assist State and local governments in their own development efforts.
A National Intergovernmental Affairs Council, as its name implies, is essentially oriented toward helping the States and local communities develop all available resources to better meet their expanding public needs. With the assistance of the Bureau of the Budget and the department and field offices, it could develop a computerized clearinghouse system which would provide immediate information to the President and others concerning: First, the social, economic, and other basic characteristics of individual States and local areas; second, efforts on the part of these jurisdictions to meet their growth problems and projected needs; third, Federal aid programs which are now assisting specific State and major local jurisdictions; and fourth, those available Federal assistance programs which have not been utilized by such units but could assist them in meeting their individual program needs.
Through NIAC's offices, the President would have the opportunity to be constantly informed about any area in the country as to its problems and requirements. The President would have the means of developing flexible and more direct relationships with State and local leaders. And the States and localities, in turn, could be secure in knowing that "someone up there" in the complex of the Washington bureaucracy was concerned with their problems.
In this respect, NIAC could also provide the leadership and the organization for calling conferences of Governors, mayors, and other leaders for a review of national and regional problems and for the development of new approaches to meet intergovernmental needs. Such conferences and special meetings with the Council's secretariat would be helpful to the Federal Government in getting an up-to-date assessment of regional, State, and local problems. They would be helpful to the States and local governments because they would provide a forum for the airing of complaints and the discussion of new proposals.
Finally, NIAC could provide effective support at the executive level to the regional development commissions and Programs authorized under the Appalachian Regional Development Act -- Public Law 89- 4 – and the Public Works and Economic Development Act of 1965 -- Public Law 89-136. The thrust of this legislation is to stimulate economic development and public improvement in the regions that have lagged behind the Nation in their growth. To encourage greater State and local cooperation, it provides for special regional commissions of Governors and Federal representatives to study major needs, recommend comprehensive plans for program coordination and priority, and determine long range goals for joint action between the Federal Government and State and local jurisdictions. The legislation also provides for subregional economic development districts and authorities, for more localized planning and programing. This is a modern approach toward the administration of Federal aid programs and improvement in intergovernmental relations, but as it is multi functional in nature, its success really depends upon an authority in Washington which can effectuate agency coordination and provide a more direct linkage between the President and the regional and subregional authorities.
At the moment, this joint-action regional development effort is being conducted out of the Department of Commerce, at which level it may be seriously frustrated in its power to obtain full Federal cooperation. Similar frustrations are being felt in the Federal anti poverty program, Agriculture's community development effort, the new Department of Housing and Urban Development's metropolitan improvement programs, and HEW's regional health and education planning.
A national intergovernmental affairs council, I feel, could be the most appropriate type of executive authority to determine the best procedures for obtaining combined agency support for regional development, and better cooperation with State and local agencies and leaders.
THE BURDEN OF THE PRESIDENCY
Mr. President, the toughest job in the world is that of the President of the United States. He is head of State, Chief Executive, our chief foreign affairs spokesman, Commander in Chief of our military forces, and now chief administrator of our explorations into outer space. He works and sleeps always within reaching distance of the "hot line" and the nuclear trigger.
It is the President's constitutional responsibility to keep Congress informed of the problems of the country, and his political responsibility to come up with legislative proposals for resolving them. After he goes through the frustrating and energy-draining experience of guiding his proposals through Congress, he is saddled with the even more frustrating responsibility of making these proposals work. And in the domestic field he must rely primarily for the success of his programs on State and local administrators over whom he has no control. But as the number of Federal programs multiply, the President's administrative responsibility stretches and the inter level tensions become more acute.
No other democratic country on the globe expects so much from its chief executive. None is so quick to complain or criticize when things do not run smoothly. None places so much faith in one man.
It is time, then, that we fully recognize that this one man alone cannot coordinate the Federal Establishment and oversee the implementation of Federal programs at the State and local levels. Constitutionally and politically, we have imposed an inordinate responsibility on the Presidency to administer the laws that are to promote our national goals. But, as Clinton Rossiter has pointed out in his "The American Presidency," the President "has more trouble playing this role successfully than he does any others," for this is the one major area "in which his powers are simply not equal to his responsibilities."
EVOLUTION OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE PRESIDENCY
The difficulties of the President's role as Chief Administrator have been recognized by competent scholars and officials for a number of years. Many have analyzed the problem, and some have developed meaningful proposals that have been adopted, but only a few have concerned themselves with the administrative challenge that confronts the Presidency today.
On the day of Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, President Taft was reported to have told the new President:
I'm glad to be going -- this is the loneliest place in the world!
Later, President Wilson was said to have confided to friends:
The responsibilities of the President are great, and I cannot perform them alone. If I can't have the assistance of those in whom I have confidence, what am I to do?
Largely as a result of the efforts of these two Presidents, a landmark in improved executive leadership was reached. The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 gave to the Presidency, for the first time, the staffing and authority to prepare a coordinated Federal executive budget for submission to Congress, and to develop a central clearinghouse for preparing administration legislative proposals. Up to that time, departments and agencies presented their fiscal requirements directly to Congress, and the President had great difficulty in establishing any system of program priorities. Budget control, then, gave the Executive a strong managerial tool for guiding the operation of the Federal Establishment.
Initially, the Bureau was thinly staffed, and its role was clouded by its incorporation in the Treasury Department. Moreover, under its first three Presidents, the Bureau was largely concerned with retrenchment and cost cutting. The opportunity to develop a budget for creating a unified Presidential policy and for gaging program effectiveness was largely ignored.
The depression period of the 1930's led to a new look at the problems of Presidential control over Federal departments. Initiated by President Roosevelt, the President's Committee on Administrative Management, headed by Louis Brownlow, probed every part of the Federal sector and found that "the President needs help." The Committee described a condition and posed questions that are still relevant:
Our executive office is not fully abreast of the trend of our American times, either in business or in Government. Where for example, can there be found an executive in any way comparable upon whom so much petty work is thrown? Or who is forced to see so many persons on unrelated matters and to make so many decisions on the basis of what may be, because of the very press
of work, incomplete information? How is it humanly possible to know fully the affairs and problems of over 100 separate major agencies, to say nothing of being responsible for their general direction and coordination?
The Brownlow Committee recommended an expansion of the White House staff, and a strengthening of the managerial agencies -- Budget, Civil Service Commission, and National Resources Board. It also called for an improved personnel development program -- including extension of the merit system -- and greater coordination of agency efforts, with reassignment of numerous independent agencies to the major executive departments.
Commenting on the recommendations of the Brownlow Committee in a message to the Congress in 1938, President Roosevelt declared:
The committee has not spared me; 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.
The plain fact is that the present organization and equipment of the executive branch of the Government defeats the constitutional intent that there be a single responsible chief executive to coordinate and manage the departments and activities in accordance with the laws enacted by the Congress. Under these conditions, the Government cannot be thoroughly effective in working, under popular control, for the common good.
The work of the Brownlow committee paved the way for a number of improvements. The White House Executive Office was established and Presidential assistants were provided. The Bureau of the Budget was taken out of the Treasury and put into the Executive Office, and its functions were strengthened. It became a direct consultant to the President on administrative policy, national fiscal policy, program evaluation, and legislative coordination. Later, during World War II, it became a central civilian planning unit for defense organization, and even developed regional field offices. It became thus a major management arm of the President and, to a limited extent, a field coordinator of some Federal programs.
Additional Presidential staff assistance was provided after the war: the Full Employment Act of 1946 established the Council of Economic Advisers to coordinate economic policy; the National Security Council and the CIA were created with independent staffing to assist the President in the coordination of security matters.
Despite these developments, the first Hoover Commission, in its 1948 report, found the executive branch too fragmentized for effective direction, and the line of command through some department heads to middle-management so weak or broken, in some cases, that "indecision, lack of initiative, and irresponsibility" were encouraged. The President and the heads of departments, the Commission noted, lacked the tools to frame coordinated programs and policies, and to frame their execution. The report urged the Federal Government to make aggressive steps to build a corps of administrators capable of viewing the governmental process in its entirety. Many statutes and regulations, it stated, were unduly rigid and should be modified. And new approaches to the budget process were needed to express the objectives of Government in terms of work accomplished, not merely in terms of classification of expenditures.
Two recommendations advanced by the Hoover Commission deserve special note: Creation of the post of Staff Secretary to inform the President on the work of Cabinet committees, interdepartmental and special advisory committees, and policy conflicts and overlapping assignments; and establishment of an Office of Personnel to advise the President on methods of upgrading Federal administrative personnel and improving management effectiveness. These two concepts -- a special coordinating officer directly under the President, and an office concerned with administrative effectiveness -- are embodied in the proposal for a National Intergovernmental Affairs Council.
In 1950, Congress passed the Budget and Accounting Procedures Act, which in addition to providing for more effective accounting and auditing methods, directed the President to use the Bureau of the Budget to develop better organization, coordination and management in the executive branch. An internal reorganization of the Budget Bureau's Division of Administrative Management in 1952, however, left only about one-third of the Division's personnel in the successor office of Management and Organization, thus reducing the Bureau's capacity to deal with interdepartmental planning and coordination, while strengthening the Bureau's analytical capabilities on a function-by-function basis.
Thereafter, the Bureau's overall management role declined, and this development did not escape the attention of the second Hoover Commission in1955:
The Bureau's concept of its broader role as the managerial arm of the President has been limited.
This is particularly true of the area of financial management. The primary emphasis on budget mechanics has tended to obscure the Bureau's broader responsibilities. The Bureau's present title, organization, staffing and operating methods stress its budget responsibilities and subordinate its overall management and policy functions The Bureau has not provided the financial management assistance required of it nor is its management group staffed to review and promote improved financial management organization and practices throughout the executive agencies. In order to carry out its management responsibilities the Bureau of the Budget should be revitalized.
The 1960's have witnessed a revival of the Bureau's activity and influence in fiscal policy and program effectiveness. Its recently developed program-planning-budgeting system is an example of this. It is a prime resource for detailed information about agency operations. Its role in coordinating legislative proposals and establishing a liaison with Congress is exemplary. Its efforts to help departments and agencies improve their internal organizations and make more efficient their functional operations have been encouraging.
But when it comes to developing and implementing broad policies of interdepartmental coordination and planning keyed to solving overall problems on a multi functional basis, it has not been effective. By nature, and by history, the Bureau is not sufficiently oriented to this kind of management responsibility; it has been concerned primarily with budgeting, economy, and functional performance rather than promoting program flexibility and new approaches.
Furthermore, as pointed out by the Committee for Economic Development budgeting for national objectives:
It is thinly staffed, with fewer employees today than in 1948, even though Federal expenditures have more than tripled (and) therefore has not been able to reconcile or coordinate fully the interrelated programs conducted by competing agencies.
Nor has the Bureau developed any effective machinery for dealing with State and local leaders in understanding their major problems, and working out across-the-board solutions. It has only a few professional employees assigned to intergovernmental problems, whose main liaison has been with the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations and with State budget officers, rather than with State and local administrators in the field.
This is not to say that the Bureau of the Budget could not be directed and equipped to fulfill the function of coordination and intergovernmental contact, but I think we need a new dynamic in the Federal executive policy machinery to take on this role,
Indeed, this was the thought generally expressed by William D. Carey, a most experienced Budget official, in his speech at Williamsburg, Va., in 1962. He said:
I think, myself, that our administrative agencies suffer from too heavy a diet of operating responsibility. On the whole, they are too hardened to keeping the treadmill going, too stale to be creative, or even reactive . . . I wonder if, after all, there isn't a case to be made out for the introduction of new policy machinery at the level of the President . . . What public policy needs is a constantly running apparatus for shaking up, disturbing and rearranging the molecules of public policy to produce new combinations.
NIAC is proposed to fill the void which Mr. Carey describes, and which the Bureau of the Budget is apparently neither structured nor inclined to take on.
In addition to the Budget Bureau and other units in the Executive Office of the President, numerous interagency committee and agreements have also been used in an attempt to achieve more effective coordination of Federal programs. According to the latest count, at least 100 of the existing 868 interdepartmental committees, boards, and councils are concerned with domestic programs. This figure, I should add, is smaller than that of 3 years ago. Nevertheless, it indicates that we still rely heavily on this device for resolving interdepartmental conflict and for promoting program coordination.
But how effective is this mechanism? Most knowledgeable observers within and outside the Federal Establishment agree that such committees, boards, and councils are not a satisfactory means of improving coordination or intergovernmental relations. It is my understanding that, during the past 2 years, some 15 Presidential task forces studying various areas of Federal reorganization and administration have come to the general conclusion that these committees are no substitute for a top-level executive unit with the authority to pull the Federal house together, and to see to it that a cooperative Federal policy is implemented and expedited down the line to help States and local jurisdictions better solve their problems. Speaking before a panel at the recent National Conference of Public Administration in Washington, Under Secretary Alan Boyd of the Department of Commerce admitted that a new Department of Transportation was essential because the machinery for coordinating the Nation's transportation policies and programs through the Interagency Committee on Transportation had "frankly failed." He stated:
The committee system, at least in my area, just doesn't work to develop coordination.
Secretaries of departments and other top policy officials assigned to these interagency bodies just do not have the time or energy to dig into their varied problems and come up with meaningful solutions. The tendency is to pass responsibility for attendance at committee meetings down the line to subordinates with little authority to hammer out a joint policy. Moreover, each agency representative insists on protecting his department or agency, and rarely gives in to needed policy changes, partly because of a built-in bureaucratic hostility to coordination and partly because he lacks any real power to speak for his department head. As one very experienced sub-Cabinet officer told me:
The Interagency Committee is little more than a discussion group.
Another serious deficiency is that most of these interdepartmental committees are hopelessly understaffed, if staffed at all. In too many instances, staffing is done on a part-time basis by middle management personnel from a single agency, oriented to particular functions, and hardly interested in a broad-gaged approach to administrative problems. Further, these working staffs have virtually no authority to see that the watered-down agreements which have been worked out, are effectively implemented. In short, what agreements are reached are general in nature, arrived at by consensus, with few opportunities for written dissents and for meaningful implementation.
The very alert and experienced junior Senator from Connecticut [Mr. RIBICOFF] saw this general problem firsthand when he was Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. At the hearings on legislation establishing the new Department of Housing and Urban Development, he declared:
I sit here as a former Governor, and on either side of me sit two men who were Governors of their States. I have been a member of the Cabinet. I have a pretty good idea about how all these intergovernmental commissions and agencies work where you have five or six secretaries responsible for one basic problem, and you establish interdepartmental committees and somebody down in the 15th or 20th echelon gets assigned to it and maybe they catch a Cabinet member's ear once a year in a passing moment or so, but nobody has basic responsibility.
Of course there are exceptions: Some committees have succeeded in producing helpful studies, plans, operating guidelines, and so forth, but this has largely occurred in the areas of science and technology, emergency planning, foreign affairs, defense, and the space effort. In the field of economic and social development, the interdepartmental device has been a dismal failure. This failure stems largely from the fact that the mechanism involves councils of peers responsible for administering existing programs and subject to the usual bureaucratic and interest group pressures involved with domestic departments and agencies. A council such as the NIAC could provide the bonding medium for strengthening the more important and effective intergovernmental committees and a means for eliminating those which are ineffective.
The emergence of the Executive Office of the President, and especially the Bureau of the Budget, is one institutional response to 20th-century administrative burdens of the Presidency; the heavy reliance on interdepartmental committees is another; proposals for strengthening the President's Cabinet constitute a third. Some reorganization proposals have made the Cabinet the focus of all reform efforts. Prof. Marshall Dimock has written:
The President's Cabinet should become the center of executive coordination. There are few faults of bureaucracy more serious than lack of coordination . . . there is no alternative but to make the President's Cabinet the means to that end.
The National Planning Association's pamphlet, "Staffing the Presidency," has emphasized that there should be "augmented use of the Cabinet as a vehicle for coordination."
Under President Eisenhower, a real attempt was made to implement these proposals and use the Cabinet as a form of interdepartmental collaboration and advice. Following the recommendations of the Hoover Commission, a formal Cabinet secretariat was formed to organize its work, prepare its agenda, keep records, and follow up on decisions made. Contacts were made between the Cabinet secretariat and sub-Cabinet officials to work out administrative conflicts. Special Cabinet-level committees were formed to deal with special problems. The National Security Council, however, was given major responsibility for coordinating foreign affairs and defense programs, and the Cabinet concentrated primarily on domestic, administrative, and political affairs.
History is yet to render a final verdict on this experiment, but we do know that under other Presidents:
The Cabinet was and is -- in Clinton Rossiter's words -- no longer a body upon which the President can rely for sage advice on great issues of state; it is not even, in its formal composition, a gathering of his most important and intimate associates. It is at best a relic of the simpler past, when department heads were thought to be men of broad interests and held in their own hands the whole power of administration.
In my judgment, the critical point about the Cabinet is that the chiefs of our great departments of Government are much like deputy presidents. They have administrative responsibilities; they have political responsibilities; and they have special constituencies to which they must attend.
Thus they are spokesmen for departmental pluralism, and, as Prof. Francis Heller put it:
Almost as busy as the President, and cannot take too much time for the deliberative tasks.
The President needs a conciliar mechanism for domestic affairs comparable to that available in foreign affairs. He "needs agencies," as Professor Rossiter has noted, "to coordinate executive policy, in the government-at-large, as in the White House." The record suggests that the Cabinet cannot effectively assume these functions. I believe the NIAC can.
The question may be asked: If the Council is to be made up of Cabinet members, why is it needed? Why cannot the concept of a coordinating executive unit be carried out by a high-level Cabinet committee? The answer can be found in the general ineffectiveness of Cabinet committees in the past. They must rely on the cooperation of department heads who are reluctant to cooperate. They are generally chaired by a Cabinet member whose authority is limited by his equality with other Cabinet members, and who by the nature of his office cannot be objective.
They are inadequately staffed, if staffed at all, and incapable of providing an effective follow up mechanism on the policies and guidelines they develop.
The NIAC is an entirely different concept from a Cabinet committee. It would be a council actively run by the President. Its Executive Secretary would speak for the President in developing policy by which departments and agencies are to be coordinated and intergovernmental conflicts resolved. He would have an independent staff to advise him and the President. Cabinet members and agency heads would be, in essence, advisers to the Executive Secretary in developing policy for Presidential approval. After policy decisions are made, the operating departments are responsible for carrying them out, but the NIAC's Executive Secretary and the staff would be directly responsible to the President for seeing that the job is done in a timely and effective manner. As members of the Council, department heads could, of course, appeal to the President those recommendations of the Executive Secretary and his staff with which they disagreed, but it is hoped that most controversies would be resolved before reaching the President.
The main point of NIAC is that the President would have a special assistant through whom he could pull the Federal Establishment together and direct smoother intergovernmental implementation of Federal aid program .
THE PRESIDENCY AND INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS
In addition to these broad-gaged efforts to strengthen the President's management capability in the Federal domestic program area, specific efforts have been made to alert and assist the Presidency in coping with its growing intergovernmental administrative responsibilities. The first Hoover Commission report noted that:
The development of cooperative Government, based largely upon grants-in-aid, has had a far-reaching effect upon the executive branch. National problems – it continued – cannot be solved by the national Government without reference to the States.
Among other things, it complained that Federal grant-in-aid programs were unrelated, uncoordinated, and "have developed in a haphazard manner without any one agency -- Federal or State concerned with the overall impact." It recommended that such an agency be established on a continuing basis and in cooperation with the Bureau of the Budget.
In 1955, a temporary commission -- the so-called Kestnbaum. Commission -- completed the most comprehensive analysis of intergovernmental relations since the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It charged that the Federal Government did not afford adequate recognition of the national interest in State and local government, and recommended the following:
1) A full-time special assistant in the office of the President, with a staff, as a "coordinating center" on State and local problems;
2) An advisory board on intergovernmental relations, presided over by the President's assistant, which, in addition to making recommendations to the President, would convene meetings with Governors, Mayors, and others;
3) The creation of inter level coordinating machinery for particular fields where a number of Federal agencies are involved in State and local relations;
4) An intensification of the concern of the Bureau of the Budget with the overall fiscal aspects of inter level administration;
5) The designation of assistant secretaries for intergovernmental relations in certain departments;
6) Greater assistance by the Federal Government in helping the States to draft statutes and regulations; and
7) Greater attention by Congress to intergovernmental problems.
These recommendations produced one basic result in the executive branch: the establishment of a two-man staff unit on intergovernmental relations in the Executive Office of the President. The President's temporary and ill-fated Federal-State Action Committee, which many assume was another result, came into being after President Eisenhower's 1957 address to the Governors' Conference at Williamsburg. In 1958, the House Government Operations Committee, in its 30th report on Federal-State-local relations, recommended that the staff unit be strengthened. The report noted:
With the aid of this staff, the President should give concentrated and vigorous attention to the coordination and improvement of Federal grant programs. Particular attention should be directed to the effects of Federal policies on our urban communities and metropolitan areas.
In 1959, as a follow up on another of the House committee's recommendations, Congress authorized a permanent bipartisan Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, composed of 26 members drawn from the three levels of Government and the public at large.
During the past 6 years, the Commission has issued 28 reports containing 200 recommendations for improving Federal-State-local program administration and financial organization. Many of these recommendations directly involve Federal administrative or legislative implementation.
Regular contacts for the Advisory Commission with the executive branch are still largely restricted to the three departmental members of the Commission, a Presidential Assistant for Intergovernmental Relations, and a small unit in the Bureau of the Budget. Last May, the Senate and House Subcommittees on Intergovernmental Relations held joint hearings on the 5-year record of the Commission. One of the most frequently expressed complaints made by hearing witnesses was the failure of the Federal executive branch to participate in, concern itself with, and make more effective use of the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations.
It is particularly encouraging, however, that President Johnson, in his budget message this year, noted that the success or failure of critical new programs depends largely on effective communications and a readiness for action among Federal agencies in the field, and State and local governmental units:
We must open channels of responsibility – he declared – we must give more freedom of action and judgment to the people on the firing line. We must help State and local governments deal more effectively with Federal agencies.
The recognition by the President of the need for a more flexible, but more efficient approach to administering joint-action programs highlights one of the basic goals of creative federalism. It represents a top-level awareness of the critical roles which State and local administrators and legislators must play in the economic and social development of the country. It could lead to a new, more productive relationship between the executive branch and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. And finally, it is the kind of thinking which I feel underscores the need for a National Intergovernmental Affairs Council.
THE ADMINISTRATIVE CHALLENGE OF THE SIXTIES
The foregoing historical survey indicates that, despite some recent improvements, the administrative machinery of the Presidency today still resembles its predecessors of nearly two decades ago. But is our Federal system today the same as it was 20 years ago? Are the administrative burdens of the Presidency today comparable to those of previous Chief Executives?
The answer to both questions is an emphatic "no." American federalism has been subjected to radical changes, and the administrative responsibilities of the President are incomparably greater. During the past 6 years we have added entirely new dimensions to the continuing problem of executive control. One of these involves numbers -- expanding programs, soaring budgets, proliferating administrative jurisdictions, and increased governmental manpower. The statistics tell the story:
First. The population explosion, coupled with increased urbanization, has skyrocketed the need for more and different public services.
Thirty years ago, there were some 120 million people in this country, 50 percent of whom lived in our cities. We now have reached the 195-million mark, with 70 percent of our citizens crowded into 227 metropolitan urban areas occupying less than 10 percent of our Nation's surface. By 1975, total population is expected to increase to 225 million and over 80 percent will be urbanized.
The potential chaos of too many people crowding into too limited space is already with us. There is urban, suburban, and exurban sprawl. There is increasing emphasis on improved central city living. Moreover, no matter what the development pattern, metropolitan concentration multiplies the volume and costs of public services, creates an unending drain on public financial resources, and requires an almost impossible effort on the part of elected officials and public administrators to plan and coordinate Federal, State, and local programs.
Second. The total Government response to these burgeoning public needs is already a massive one, involving a wide variety of programs and services.
Twenty years ago, the Federal Government spent less than $1 billion annually to assist State and local development. Ten years ago, that figure had risen to $4 billion. Today, there are over 170 Federal aid programs, administered by over 21 Federal departments and agencies, involving an annual outlay of over $14 billion. Projected to 1975, the Federal contribution could reach the $50 billion mark. However, the lion's share of the financial burden for public services continues to be borne by the State and local governments. In 1946, they spent a total of $11 billion to help meet public needs, and this year their combined outlay will reach $84 billion. Projected to 1975, State and local jurisdictions may well have to increase their annual expenditures to over $120 billion.
Furthermore, in 1946, State and local governments had a combined debt of $16 billion. Now, 20 years later, this total indebtedness will reach the $100 billion mark. The projection of this encumbrance for 1975 is beyond speculation.
Third. There has developed in our country a haphazard complex of local governing jurisdictions, many of which duplicate or conflict with each other and provide serious obstacles to effective planning and administration.
Today there are over 91,000 of these units operating in our 50 States -- General-purpose governments such as counties, cities, boroughs, towns, and villages, with general public powers; and special-purpose districts such as school, fire, water, soil conservation, sewage, and urban renewal districts, with more limited functions but nevertheless having their own independent taxing, planning, and administrative powers. And these special districts usually have jurisdictional boundaries that do not coincide with those of general-purpose districts.
This proliferating pattern of local government jurisdictions has produced chaos in several metropolitan areas; chaos in planning, in governing, and in administering public services to the people who need them most. Many respected public administrators, scholars, and political leaders view these spawning special districts -- which in most instances are not directly responsible to the electorate -- as a genuine threat to democratic government and effective program coordination and planning.
Fourth. The extraordinary expansion in the number of public employees has paralleled the expansion of budgets and programs, making more difficult the task of developing effective policies of program coordination, innovation, and personnel improvement.
State and local public employment has risen from 3.3 million in 1946 to 8 million in 1965. The Federal Government, on the other hand -- despite the popular myth that its rolls, too, are expanding -- has reduced its employment by 100,000 during the 20-year period, but it still accounts for 2.6 million workers. While total Federal employment has remained remarkably stable, there has been a substantial shift from blue collar to white collar occupations, providing a more complicated manpower mix, and greater problems of coordination and policy implementation at the middle-management level.
While these quantitative problems add one dimension to the President's administrative burdens, certain qualitative problems -- especially with respect to the attitudes and caliber of officials administering joint-action programs -- constitute another. The Senate Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations, which I am privileged to chair, recently completed a 3-year survey of Federal, State, and local administrators to learn their views and attitudes about critical intergovernmental issues. We found substantial competing and overlapping of programs at all three levels, sometimes as a direct result of legislation and sometimes as a result of bureaucratic empire building. We learned that many Federal officials, particularly at the middle-management level, were just not interested in -- in fact hostile to -- coordinating programs within and between their departments, and were reluctant to encourage coordination and planning among their State and local counterparts.
At the same time, Federal-aid officials complained that State and local administration was understaffed, lacking in quality and experience, unimaginative, and too subject to negative political and bureaucratic pressures. They found a variety of archaic State constitutional and legal restrictions which continue to block effective application of Federal-aid programs, and hamstring State and local administrators in developing their own programs.
Perhaps the most serious indictment coming out of the survey concerns the caliber of State and local administrators ultimately responsible for building the Great Society. Confronted with urban congestion, slums, water pollution, juvenile delinquency, social tension, and chronic unemployment, public administrators today must be professionals in every sense of that word.
Yet we found that too often they are not, mainly because of the antiquated and patronage oriented personnel systems which hinder the hiring and keeping of good people.
We found that unfavorable working conditions, low pay, and excessively restrictive bureaucratic rules and procedures discouraged both prospective employees and careerists. Personnel development programs, including opportunities for job mobility, in service training, and educational leave, appeared to be minimal, except in some of the larger jurisdictions. We found a noticeable lack of effective merit systems, thus resulting in the loading of some agencies with unprofessional, uninspiring, and often unfit personnel. Finally, responsible administrators complained that inflexible rules and regulations -- dictating whom, when, and how they could hire, promote, or fire -- frustrated their efforts to develop effective staff support. In short, there is a serious crisis in the public service at the State and local levels which, if not confronted, may contribute more than anything else to a weakening of the States, their localities, and the Federal system as a whole.
The extraordinary growth in Government at all levels, accompanied by an equally staggering need for financial assistance and administrative expertise, indicates the scope of the governing burden which rests with State and local leaders, and also with the President. We can no longer isolate major economic and social problems as being a purely local, State, or Federal responsibility. All levels are responsible for reducing racial tension, for seeking better housing and community services, for educating our young people, for reducing crime and disorder, for helping the poor, and for building the Great Society. This is the approach of the traditional grant-in-aid system. And this is the approach of creative federalism -- a recognition of the expanding roles of State and local governments as planners and builders of better and more secure environments for our expanding population, and a strengthening of the Federal role as a source of new ideas, incentives for reform, and financial and technical resources to help the States and the local communities better meet their needs.
But the initiative for a creative federalism must start with the Federal Government. We can hardly expect State and local Jurisdictions to coordinate their programs and improve their services if the Federal house is not in better order.
Nor can we expect them to modernize their governmental structures and more effectively plan their development if Federal administrators involved in intergovernmental relations are hostile to these goals.
In short, these new dimensions of the President's role as chief administrator present a double challenge: first, to develop adequate machinery for pulling together the Federal establishment to assist the States and local areas in meeting major problems on a multi-functional basis; and, second, to establish a close and effective liaison with State and local leaders to identify their particular needs and better allocate Federal resources to help them build their communities.
CONCLUSION
The foregoing suggests to me certain conclusions with respect to the President's general responsibility as chief administrator of domestic programs, and his specific role as manager of the 170 grants-in-aid. In reaching these conclusions, I am completely aware that there are limits to what can be accomplished by institutional changes at the top level. Departmentalism -- and the pluralism of American life which sustains it -- will never be suppressed by mere procedural innovation. And proposals that ignore these facts of administrative and political life are doomed to failure.
I am also aware of the danger of carrying the institutionalization of the Presidency so far that, as Professor Rossiter put it:
The man who occupies it will become a prisoner of his own house, a victim of too much and too rigid organization.
As I see it, however, this danger is more prospective than actual, since any vigorous President -- and the present occupant of this position indeed is such a man -- would not permit himself to be smothered by confining custom, legislation, or staff organization.
Finally, as the above suggests, I am fully aware that the Executive Office and other coordinating instrumentalities must be left sufficiently flexible to meet the various uses to which the President wishes to put them. Reform efforts here may appear to be supremely rational, but they will fail if they rely only on rigid prescriptions. The entire function of staff assistance, after all, is to preserve the President's range of choices and freedom of action.
I am still convinced, however, that certain organizational and procedural innovations are needed.
First. There is still the need to enact S. 561, which passed the Senate unanimously last year and now is pending before the House. This measure would establish a coordinated Federal urban
assistance policy and provide greater focus to and coordination of Federal urban development efforts.
Second. There is the need for a full-time special assistant to the President for intergovernmental relations; at present this responsibility is shared by four or five assistants responsible for various program areas.
Third. There is need for additional staff in the Bureau of the Budget to provide more continuing attention to intergovernmental problems, and, as Dean Stephen K. Bailey pointed out in a recent article in the Reporter, "to perform management surveys and to recommend administrative reforms."
Fourth. As the 30th report of the House Committee on Government Operations pointed out 8 years ago, and as the Senate subcommittee's survey of Federal aid officials recommended last year, there is a need at the departmental and agency level for assigning full-time responsibility for coordinating grant programs on departmental, interdepartmental, and intergovernmental bases to an assistant secretary or undersecretary
Fifth. Finally there is a need for a new executive unit for coordinating domestic programs in the Executive Office of the President -- a National Intergovernmental Affairs Council. This would provide the President with the backstopping he has long needed in dealing with this country's economic and social development. He has a National Security Council and the CIA to advise him on policies relating to our national security; a National Aeronautics and Space Council to help him coordinate our space programs; a Council of Economic Advisers to recommend policies on economic growth and stability; and an Office of Emergency Planning to deal with domestic emergencies and catastrophes; but he has no comparable unit for one of the most critical areas -- Federal-State-local programs designed to meet our social, economic, and resource problems. The President needs a corps of generalists -- not wedded to specific agencies or individual programs - - in his office to help him develop new policies for program coordination and to check on their implementation. He needs a staff to give him a continuing report on the status and effectiveness of combined Federal-State-local programs. He should know at all times what is being done through these programs to meet our needs in economic development, community improvement, social welfare, education, and resource management, what is not being done, and what must be done. He needs a unit which can help him work more closely with State and local leaders and help them to better carry out the goals of the Great Society on a total basis. He needs a continuing source of new and constructive ideas regarding intergovernmental finances, for improving economic and social development programs, and for upgrading public administration all along the line -- from Washington to the local scene. This need is met by the legislation I introduce today.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill, together with a section-by-section analysis and certain materials relating to this important subject, be inserted in the RECORD immediately following my remarks.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The bill will be received and appropriately referred; and, without objection, the bill, analyses and material requested will be printed in the RECORD.
The bill (S. 3509) to establish a National Intergovernmental Affairs Council, introduced by Mr. MUSKIE, was received, read twice by its title, referred to the Committee on Government Operations, and ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows: