teen in 1972, and having a decisive impact upon the administration's programs in health, welfare, energy, and revenue sharing.20 "Then there's national growth," added a council staff member in an interview with John Kessel; "People aren't say ing, 'What's the greatest problem in the country? National Growth. But that's the sort of thing that he [Nixon] wants something done about regardless of what the public wants."21

If these early reports are true, they record an auspicious start for an institution designed to give the President managerial capabilities that had been sought since the 1930s. Whether the DC would actually provide a full Planning capacity or not, the study of goals/alternatives/policy formulation/policy coordination/policy review promised in the March 12 message, was a matter for time and the Nixon people to decide.

4

Nixon and Ash then turned to the rest of the unfinished business from Roosevelt's encounter with administrative reform, and proposed a reorganization plan of their own. The Ash Committee, a sort of institutionalized presence of modern corporation management within the new government, had been appointed in early 1969. In this Nixon was just a step ahead of the liberals. Senators Ribicoff (1968) and Muskie (1969) had both put in bills to establish a new Hoover-type commission. At its peak workload the committee employed 47 staff, and it sent 13 reports to Nixon from August 1969 to November 1970. Based on their work, Nixon in the 1971 State of the Union Address promised an early message on reorganization. The message came on March 25, 1971, and it is hard to disagree with Congressman Chet Holifield that it was "the most far-reaching reorganization of the executive branch that has ever been proposed by a president of the United States."22

Nixon's message rang notes familiar to the handful of people who knew the tradition implied by the names Brownlow,

:

Hoover, Rockefeller, Heineman. The President had found the executive branch "a series of fragmented fiefdoms" where "the capacity to do things. . . is exceedingly fragmented and broadly scattered throughout the federal establishment."23 For example, there were nine departments and twenty agencies involved in education, seven departments and eight agencies in health. This meant not only duplication of effort but diffusion of responsibility, defeating all hope of clear lines of accountability.

The President's answer was reorganization around basic goals. Nixon proposed to abolish seven existing Cabinet departments, and to substitute for them four new ones: the Department of Natural Resources (made up of parts of Interior, the Forest Service, Soil Conservation, the planning and civil functions of the Corps of Engineers, the civil power responsibilities of the AEC, etc.); the Department of Community Development (made up of parts of Commerce, Agriculture, Transportation, and HUD, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the REA, some of OEO, etc.); the Department of Human Resources (most of HEW and OEO, the Women's Bureau from Labor, etc.); and the Department of Economic Affairs (most of Agriculture, Labor, Commerce, and Transportation).

An impressive parade of bipartisan support came forward to urge congressional acceptance. Ben Heineman, who had headed the reorganization study committee for Lyndon Johnson, told a House committee that he found "a great similarity" between the Nixon plan and his committee's views. Johnson's Budget director Charles Schultze was a witness in support of the reorganization, as was Joseph Califano of Johnson's White House staff, who spoke of the "cacophonic confusion" of agencies competing for the President's attention and congressional appropriations. The parade of Democrats included Robert Weaver, Johnson's HUD secretary, John Gardner of HEW, and John Connally, then a Democrat and Nixon's secretary of the Treasury, who told the House committee: "Believe me, the crying need in this government is to consolidate on a functional basis." Support also came from the American Institute of Architects, from an

IBM executive, and a representative of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States. Reorganization, apparently, was neither a partisan nor an ideological issue.24

Roosevelt had found that reorganization was, however, an issue among his own official family of bureaucrats, and he had not been able to get the support of several of them, including the secretary of war. Nixon presented a united administration. Even Cabinet heads whose departments would be dismembered and replaced came down manfully to recommend their own bureaucratic assassination. George Romney of HUD, for example, worried not about HUD but about the Domestic Council, which was bogged down in putting out fires of inter-departmental conflict in the unreorganized system of 1971. In the absence of reorganization, he argued, the DC was "constantly being distracted from matters of high policy by the need to focus on administrative details of . . . conflicting programs administered by scattered bureaucratic units." The new Department of Community Development, which Romney came specifically to endorse, would provide a framework within which most disputes were resolved by the secretary, leaving the DC "to take its intended place alongside the NSC as a presidential instrumentality specializing in policy coordination . . . free from operating chores."'25

Every consideration seemed to reflect credit upon the new reorganization plan, every scrutiny of the existing system bared glaring defects. But Nixon learned again what Congress had taught FDR, that a cogent reorganization by function, supported by thoughtful students of public administration and most high-level bureaucrats, was not welcome on Capital Hill. Long-standing arrangements between congressional committees and constituency-oriented agencies were threatened by any reorganization, particularly by one so sweeping. The typical congressman's lack of enthusiasm was matched by organized interest groups who had worked their way to close relationships with their old buddies in the Bureau of Mines, or the Bureau of Land Management, or the Farmers Home Administration-examples of the many agencies that would be rudely uprooted

from comfortable surroundings and thrust into new environments where their merits would perhaps not be appreciated.

The Nixon-Ash theory was that departments ought to be organized for delivery of services. The old organization, while not based on any clear theory, was best justified as an expression of the lobbying or representation concept. Every major group ought to have its department-farmers, labor, business, even oilmen (who enjoyed the helpful support of the Department of the Interior). These groups were not charmed by the proposal for change. Nixon encountered especially stiff opposition from farm groups, and in November 1971 he caved in and exempted the Department of Agriculture from the reorganization. On a revised organization chart he stuck Agriculture up on a little shelf of its own, segregated from the others for some undisclosed peculiarity. Since no rational argument could possibly be made for exempting Agriculture from the new architecture, it was suspected that Nixon might be driven to other compromises. As Congressman Erlenborn asked a triumphant Agriculture secretary Earl Butz when he came to the Hill in January 1972 to report the President's concession, if Agriculture were saved from being broken up just so that angry farmers could retain their very own department, how were businessmen and labor to be reconciled to losing theirs?26 Nixon admitted that he had yielded on Agriculture to gain support in Congress for the rest of the reorganization. Thus he led neither a gallant fight nor a successful tactical retreat. The concession confused the issue and encouraged other groups to resist. Reorganization did not move through Congress, and Nixon went into the 1972 campaign without it.

But he and Ash had spread considerable light. The reorganization plan clarified the irrationality of current organization, and educated those interested in such matters by offering a model for organization around delivery of services rather than traditional interest-group representation. An irritated Nixon in March 1972 told Congress that "the sand is running in the glass, and the hour is growing late, for enactment of a critically needed reform."27 Perhaps never had Richard Nixon said any

thing more likely to be judged profoundly true by all students of American government, perhaps even by future generations who are likely to remember him mostly for activities of less unerring wisdom.

5

We have sketched the highlights of the Nixon administration's commitment to strengthening the government's capacity for social management. These events must fall into the category of unexpected. Just as it was not anticipated that the most conservative president inaugurated in twelve years would end his first term having increased the federal deficit by $100 billion, so it was at least as unexpected that this lifetime enemy of federal power would create within the executive branch an institution for policy planning, would send to Congress the most radical reorganization plan in our history, would call for a national growth policy, would appoint a commission on population growth, and suggest a national population policy. Yet he had done all these things in the first term. If there had been anyone in Washington deviant enough to have the word "Planning" in his working vocabulary, these steps would have been identified as steps toward Planning. This startling idea will require more attention. But the focus so far has been too limited. Others were moving in that same direction at a pace that at least matched that of the executive.

The origins of a major expansion of national control over social development, the Environmental Policy Act of 1969, were in Congress. The Act had many sponsors, pre-eminent among them the liberal senators Jackson and Muskie and Congressman John Dingell. The act made it public policy to maintain and restore the environment, and set up institutions-a council (CEQ) and annual report-modeled on the 1946 Employment Act. This apparently went beyond what Nixon thought necessary He had established the Cabinet-level Environmental Quality Council in May 1969. Congressional environmental forces decided,