July 11, 1966
Page 15073
COORDINATION OF FEDERAL COOPERATION WITH STATE AND LOCAL
GOVERNMENTS
Mr. MANSFIELD. Mr. President, as the Nation grows, and the programs passed by Congress increase in scope and complexity, the need to exercise effective control over the Federal establishment and to coordinate Federal cooperation with State and local governments takes on added urgency. This is particularly true in view of the outpouring of new legislation in recent years, especially by the 89th Congress.
It is reassuring to note that many Members of Congress and committee chairmen are giving serious thought to these matters since a responsibility in the development of administration for this legislation vests in the Congress. A leader in the search for effective coordination and control is Senator EDMUND MUSKIE, whose Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations has spent 3 years studying these problems. His recommendations are embodied in legislation to establish a National Intergovernmental Affairs Council, which he described in some length on June 15 on the Senate floor.
More recently, an article entitled "The Challenge of Creative Federalism," written by Senator MUSKIE, appeared in the Saturday Review. I ask unanimous consent that that article, along with an editorial by the Wall Street Journal of July 8, be printed at this point in the CONGRESSIONAL RECORD.
There being no objection, the article and editorial were ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
[From the Saturday Review, June 25, 1966]
THE CHALLENGE OF CREATIVE FEDERALISM
(By EDMUND S. MUSKIE, U.S. Senator from Maine)
Federalism is everyone's concern -- from the President, who is ultimately responsible for making our system work, to the individual citizen, whose way of life depends upon good government. There is nothing dull or abstract about the subject of federal-state-local relations, since they directly involve people: their health, their homes, their jobs, their rights as citizens, and their security as free men. And when our governments at each level do not apply their laws or allocate
their resources effectively -- when they do not cooperate to bring the full force of their programs to bear on social and economic problems -- it is the people who suffer, and the nation that loses.
During the past five sessions, Congress has developed the most impressive package of federal legislation since the Depression to attack poverty, ignorance, urban blight, discrimination, and other human problems. It cuts across departmental and agency lines both in the federal sector and at state and local levels; it requires special skills and technology for effective administration. Thus, this legislation is only as good as the machinery which administers it.
Today this machinery, molded and tempered by a century and three quarters of evolutionary development, is under its greatest stress. While in the past we have concentrated primarily on the policies of government, the spotlight now must be turned on the procedures of government. Here is where the Great Society will succeed or fall.
What are some of the problems?
First, there is the emergence of big government -- at all levels. The scope of government today has become enormous and complex, and it involves far more than federal activities.
In 1946, state and local governments spent a total of $11 billion to meet public needs, and they had a combined debt of $16 billion. This year they will spend approximately $84 billion, and their total debt will rise to $100 billion. This represents a 528 per cent increase in state and local outlays in the past twenty years.
By contrast, the federal government in 1946 spent $894 million to help the states and localities augment their public programs. This year that expenditure will rise to more than $14 billion and will involve more than 170 separate aid programs administered by some twenty-one federal departments and agencies. Projected ahead to 1971, state and local annual expenditures are expected to escalate to $120 billion, while total federal expenditures -- barring a war or depression will reach $110 to $115 billion.
The accelerated growth of public employment parallels this dramatic expansion of budgets and programs. Here, it is getting increasingly difficult to tell the players by the numbers, let alone keep track of the score. State and local public employment has risen from 3,300,000 in 1946 to 8,000,000 in 1965. The federal government -- despite the popular myth that its rolls, too, are expanding -- has reduced its employment by 100,000 during the twenty-year period, but it still accounts for 2,600,000 workers.
These statistics tell us a great deal about the pressures on our federal system. They highlight the strenuous effort that state and local governments have exerted and must continue to exert to meet the demand for more and better public services. They certainly dispel the notion that expanding federal power has undermined the capacity of these jurisdictions to govern themselves. And they show clearly how complicated the task ahead will be of coordinating our joint economic and social action programs.
A second major intergovernmental problem area is the "management muddle" -- the overall quality and efficiency of administration of public programs. The Senate Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations, which I am privileged to chair, recently completed a three-year survey of federal, state, and local administrators to learn their views and attitudes about our federal system.
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 "empire-building." We learned that too many federal officials, particularly at the middle management level, were not interested in, and, in fact, were 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 that 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 responsible for building the Great Society. Confronted with urban congestion, slums, water pollution, air 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, patronage-oriented personnel systems which hinder the hiring and keeping of good people.
We found that unfavorable working conditions, low pay, and excessively 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, which results 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 manpower crisis in state and local governments 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.
What can be done? Where do we begin?
First, we must start by putting the federal house in better order. We can hardly expect state and local jurisdictions to coordinate their services and plan their communities if Congress continues to pass inflexible programs and if federal administrators maintain their traditional aversion to program coordination and comprehensive planning. What we need is a new policy of coordinating federal aid programs and new machinery in Washington and in the field to see that such a policy is carried out.
This is why I have recently proposed that permanent machinery be established in the Executive Office of the President to produce specific new guidelines for coordinating and planning federal programs, and for working directly with state and local leaders to encourage them to coordinate and plan their programs. This is not being done today, not by the Bureau of the Budget, not by the Council of Economic Advisers, and not by the more than 100 inadequately staffed interagency committees, boards, and councils which have been set up in the federal establishment to solve specific problems and which, for lack of authority, have ended up doing virtually nothing.
What the President needs in his impossibly busy and exhausting job is a personal ombudsman, a watchdog for crisis, a central domestic information agency, and an inspector general for program effectiveness. This can be achieved by creating a new and broadly based interdepartmental council with a "working secretariat" of top-level generalists not wedded to any department; or it can be achieved by strengthening the authority of the Bureau of the Budget in this area..
Secondly, we must find a more flexible way to grant federal assistance to the states and the communities that would encourage joint programing and longer-range comprehensive planning.
Four recent bills are steps in this direction:
The Economic Development Act, passed last session, provides in part for establishment of regional economic planning commissions composed of federal representatives and Governors of states that have related programs and problems to recommend regional plans and coordinating programs, establishing priorities, and allocating expenditures.
The Intergovernmental Cooperation Act, which unanimously passed the Senate last summer and is now pending before the House, would establish a coordinated intergovernmental urban assistance policy to significantly strengthen the basis of regional and local planning.
The Demonstration Cities Act, recently advanced, would provide incentive funds to cities to come up with their own coordinated programs for renewing blighted areas on a multifunction basis -- welfare, schools, urban poverty, housing -- as well as supplemental assistance for federal programs included in the demonstration program.
The Urban Development Act would give special supplementary funds for projects that are part of a metropolitan-wide development program being coordinated by a public area-wide planning agency.
The emphasis in all four of these bills is on marshaling federal, state, and local resources, in coordination, to achieve a meaningful impact, rather than on the traditional program-by-program, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction approach -- which too often has led to confusion, waste, and delay in overall urban development.
Some of my colleagues would abandon -- wholly or in part -- -the federal grant-in-aid approach, and seek to stimulate overall development at state and local levels by allocating federal revenues with the states or by making block grants on an unrestricted basis. This is becoming a popular cause whose advocates include a curious coalition of conservatives, moderates and liberals.
The pitfalls of unrestricted revenue allocation are too many and are sufficiently complicated to warrant extensive examination by a top-flight panel such as the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. In general, however, states vary so extensively in their attitudes and machinery for providing their own revenues, planning for their needs, administering their programs, and ensuring the civil and economic rights of their citizens, that any kind of federal revenue sharing that ignores the uneven pace of efforts to modernize state and local tax, planning, and administrative policies would provide windfalls to some states and inequities to others.
Third, we must develop a new federal program for helping state and local governments improve the competency and efficiency of administrative personnel. These people carry the bulk of the responsibility for making the Great Society work, and it is Congress’s responsibility to help them.
I recently introduced legislation, the Intergovernmental Personnel Act of 1966, which helps to discharge this responsibility. The measure extends the merit system requirements to more grant-in-aid programs (only nine at present are covered); it makes matching grants and technical services available to state and local governments for the improvement of their overall personnel administration; it encourages cooperative efforts in recruitment and training, on an intergovernmental and interstate basis; and it makes available federal training facilities and also provides grants and technical assistance for training. Modest as these changes are, they at least can be a start in the necessary direction.
Encouraging the state and local governments to plan for expanding needs and make creative use of their own resources and of federal programs is admittedly a difficult task. Some observers feel that the traditional anti-federal biases and apprehensions in these jurisdictions make this task impossible. I disagree. Governors, county commissioners, mayors, and other public officials are serious about wanting to provide better services to their constituents. Politicians know the political mileage that is gained by bringing effective, modern programs to their communities. And most citizens want to see their tax money spent soundly.
Encouraging federal administrators to realize the long-term implications of their programs and to recognize the necessity for greater inter-level coordination and cooperation is also difficult. Far some, the traditional professional, stand-pat bias of middle-management executives who administer grant programs makes this task impossible. President Johnson, however, and the top management of this administration do not despair of the task.
In his Budget message the President said “ . . . Many of our critical new programs involve the federal government in joint ventures with state and local governments in thousands of communities throughout the nation. The success or failure of those programs depends largely on timely and effective communications and on readiness for action on the part of both federal agencies in the field and state and local governmental units. We must strengthen the coordination of federal programs in the field. We must open channels of responsibility. We must give more freedom of action and judgment to the people on the firing line. We must help state and local governments to deal more effectively with federal agencies.”
The President's concern with improved intergovernmental relations is critically important to the task ahead. The concern of governors, state legislators, county executives, mayors and other public officials is no less significant. Cooperative federalism, after all, expects the expanding role of state and local governments to take on greater political and administrative responsibilities as the nation grows, while relying on an effective federal role to provide incentives and resources to these jurisdictions to promote common goals.
The pattern of sharing that is so characteristic of contemporary intergovernmental relations is not new. It came into being during the three decades following the adoption of the Constitution -- largely under the successive, masterful leadership of three Cabinet officers, Hamilton, Gallatin, and the younger Calhoun. The program of reform that I have described here merely updates the traditional approach, as must be done if we are to meet the challenges of the last decades of the
twentieth century.
[From the Wall Street Journal, July 8, 1966]
Coordinating A Colossus
After three years of studying the inter-workings of the Federal, state local governments, Senator Edmund S. Muskie has concluded that things are pretty much of a mess. His appraisal -- confirmed by this week’s Governors Conference -- is indisputable but the Maine Democrat's proposed remedies raise a few questions.
At all three levels of government, the Maine Democrat said in a Senate speech, his Intergovernmental Relations Subcommittee found “substantial competing and overlapping of programs . . . sometimes as a direct result of legislation and sometimes as a result of
bureaucratic 'empire building.' We learned that many Federal officials . . . were just not interested in -- in fact, were hostile to -- coordinating programs within and between their departments." The committee found similar deficiencies in the states and localities.
A number of Senator Muskie's suggestions have merit; among them are ideas for improving the quality of state and local government and for easing communications between various administrative levels. He also is wise enough to see that any attack on the problem should start in Washington.
“We can hardly expect state and local jurisdictions to coordinate their programs and improve their services,” he comments, “if the Federal house is not in better order." Unfortunately, however, his proposals at the Federal level mainly involve new methods for managing the house; actually, the structure itself is in need of some basic alterations.
In the first place there should be a realistic realignment of Federal responsibilities. To cite only one of the more glaring examples, transportation activities are scattered among the Department of Commerce, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Agency, the Department of the Interior and the General Services Administration.
The proposal for a new transportation agency could be a first step toward simplification though the plan -- as it now stands, anyway -- would leave too many related activities outside. If the new agency is ever to serve its proclaimed purpose fully, its jurisdiction will have to be clear and complete.
Moreover if a new transportation agency is to operate efficiently it must be more than a rickety new framework placed atop a number of existing and still largely independent units. The folly of that approach should have been adequately exposed by the early misadventures of the Department of Health, Education And Welfare,
If these difficulties can somehow be surmounted, not only in transportation but in other areas, the way will be cleared for improved management and planning. Here, Senator Muskie offers some ideas that are provocative.
At the moment, the Senator notes, there are at least 100 interagency committees charged with coordinating domestic programs that in one way or another affect the states and localities. Obviously enough, many if not most of these groups are ineffective and should be eliminated..
As a replacement for the interagency committees, Senator Muskie proposes a National Intergovernmental Affairs Council, chaired by the President and composed of the Vice President and the agency heads whose programs impinge on state and local governments. With a strong staff and the use of Presidential power, the NIAC could compel coordination at the Federal level and strongly encourage it elsewhere, keep tabs on existing domestic programs and serve as a forum on the need -- or lack of same -- for new ones.
While the NIAC plan has much to recommend it, there's at least one major argument against it: The Council would do what the Budget Bureau already does, or if adequately staffed, surely could do. And we're afraid we don't share the Senator's feeling that the Bureau's usual emphasis on "budgeting, economy and functional performance" would be a handicap.
Furthermore, a beefed-up Budget Bureau would have an advantage in its breadth of approach. It could set up reasonable priorities not only in programs that touch states and localities but throughout the whole wide and expanding range of Washington's activities.
If there’s ever enough will to coordinate the Federal colossus, in sum, a way can be found. Senator Muskie's analysis of intergovernmental confusion is further evidence that unless the will is found soon the alternative could be complete chaos.