Chapter 12

Progress without Panaceas

Throughout this study, I have consistently pointed to flaws in congressional attempts to control expenditures—that is, attempts to exercise the congressional spending power on the basis of relatively predictable results. Now the time has come to make a total assessment of these attempts: whether, on the whole, Congress performs its tasks well or badly and whether some improvements should be made. The bulk of the literature in this regard indicates serious shortcomings, but such criticisms are not by any means unanimous. Writings in the field vary from the sharp criticisms to apologia. Congress itself does not fail to lament its own difficulties, but operating on the principle of legislative conservatism, it generally fails to make significant self-improvements until after these difficulties have become virtually impossible to deal with. Major reforms have come only in the wake of the war-caused turmoil of transacting legislative business: the creation of the appropriations committees after the Civil War, the Budget and Accounting Act after World War I, and the Legislative Reorganization Act after World War II.

Hyneman thinks of the appropriations process as "a searching inquiry into the preoccupations and performance of individual administrative establishments and the relation of what is going on to the public interest, as Congressmen conceive the public interest" and "who is to say that his judgment is better than that of the representative assembly of the nation." Hyneman, however, admits that "the literature produced by academic students of government... is generally in agreement that Congress does poorly what I am convinced it does well."1

Galloway's evaluation of Appropriations Subcommittee in

quiries was that "the questions tend to be of a random, impromptu character... Committeemen are faced by departmental experts, schooled in the art of justifying their requests. Burdened by many other duties, committee members are seldom prepared to make a penetrating analysis of the estimates and tend to appropriate blindly." Hyneman asked for comments with respect to his position compared with that of Galloway from two men who had "long been engaged in the preparation of estimates... and in defending them before Congress." One said that "reductions and increases are made with... astonishingly little knowledge." The other remarked that Galloway underestimated "the capacity of these subcommittees to get at basic considerations involved in the multitude of matters that came before them."

Very few diagnoses of congressional ability to pass on appropriations matters are completely wrong. On the one hand, Congress does a rather remarkable job considering the vast number of issues and problems confronting them. On the other hand, as we have pointed out, much of their action is based on safety first and arbitrary decisions. One thing is certain, however: the problem of congressional control of expenditures does not lend itself to any pat recommendation as a final solution.

Academic studies, especially in the field of political science, are often criticized on paradoxical grounds. Conclusions are either faulty because they are oversimplified, tending to follow diagrammatic lines which "look good on paper but won't work in practice"; or they are so "over-qualified" as to lose their meaning and usefulness. It is difficult for the careful student with comparatively good knowledge of the background and current operations of government to make recommendations without a multitude of qualifications. Yet society is not static and the search for improvements in the operation of government must continue on the basis of adequate analyses and a recognition of practical difficulties.

The role of Congress in the spending process should be one of determining the limits, scope, and direction of administrative programs, and Congress should make this determination in the light of enough data to be able to ascertain the results of its actions. Members of Congress should avoid interfering with the details of administration, but the prerequisite to the exercise of control over spending is often factual and analytical knowledge about such

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stances when he has recommended policies in order to achieve reductions. Harris, however, contends that "despite criticisms by executive officers, the system works, on the whole, quite well in California under present state leadership."

Efforts to Make Use of Section 206

Ten years after its enactment, Congress had not utilized Section 206. A 1949 House report stated: "Up to the present time, no appropriation has been made by Congress to the General Accounting Office to carry out this program,"24 and the same situation prevailed through 1959. At least by December, 1946, General Warren had decided to take action towards implementing Section 206 by initiating an expenditures analyses program among government corporations.25 The supervision of the program was to be under Mr. T. Coleman Andrews, head of the corporation audit division of GAO, who had been brought into the government service to set up the corporation audit program required under the Government Corporation Control Act. Marshall Dimock, then a Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, had been hired as a consultant for the program, as of that date.

According to a statement made in private conversation on December 17, 1946, by Andrews, there was a great scarcity of manpower with experience in management analysis such as was needed for the program. No man of any real ability along these lines would be working for the government, he said, since it was easy to make from $50 to $100 per day as a consultant to private industry. Mr. Andrews estimated it would take years to complete the program simply among the corporations, and stated that it was his intention to proceed along the same lines which had proved so successful in instituting the audit program-hiring very few people of high caliber and relying largely upon the services of private management firms for most of the work. Nothing was to be done at that time toward implementing the new program among the old-line agencies.

In testifying in 1947 before a House Appropriations Subcommittee on a proposed $1,000,000 to initiate the expenditures analysis, Warren expressed his feeling that the GAO had been assigned "a mammoth... an almost stupendous job." Mr. Warren asked the committee for one million dollars to make "a modest start" at the job and for authority to employ outside management analysts.26 On June 13, 1947, the House Committee on Appropriations

submitted its report on the Independent Offices Appropriation bill for 1948.27 The report recommended "the denial of ... $1,000,000 for a proposed new item having to do with an analysis of agency expenditures authorized by the recent Legislative Reorganization Act.... The committee is of the opinion that this latter proposal should be deferred until a more complete and definite program can be evolved." In view of Warren's statement (given below) that the GAO had "made a detailed study of the section," the committee's recommendation for deferral of the program "until a more complete and definite program can be evolved" would suggest that committee members who had attended the joint meeting of March 1, 1947 with Warren were not satisfied with his plans. Possibly committee members felt that his approach was too narrow.

Despite the adverse action of the House Appropriations Committee in 1947, the sum of $800,000 for expenditure-analysis purposes was included in a Senate-passed Independent Offices Appropriation bill in 1949, but it was eliminated in conference. From then until January, 1956 no further attempts were made to get the program underway. Subsequent developments regarding Section 206 were reviewed by the Comptroller General at hearings held on S. 913, a bill to create a Joint Budget Committee, before the Senate Expenditures Committee on May 17, 1951. Mr. Warren testified as follows:

I neither advocated nor opposed the inclusion of Section 206 in the Legislative Reorganization Act, but as soon as it became law we in the General Accounting Office began to look for ways and means of carrying out the desires of the Congress. We made a detailed study of the section and decided that under the wording the sky was the limit.

That was true then and is true now. In view of this, I felt that before taking any action I should first seek some guidance from the Congress or from the committees that we are required by law to serve, such as the Appropriations Committees and the Committees on Expenditures. I requested an informal meeting with representatives of those two committees, and I met on March 1, 1947, with approximately 25 Members of the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations and the Expenditures Committees of the two Houses. We laid our problem before those gentlemen and I think I am safe in saying that it was the unanimous thought at that time that we should make only a modest beginning.

Based on that meeting, I included in the budget estimates for the operation of the General Accounting Office for the fiscal year 1948,

the sum of $1,000,000 to begin the work required by Section 206 of the Legislative Reorganization Act."

Possibilities of Section 206

There is no doubt that Warren's early plan for initiating a program of expenditures analysis was so narrow as to cause grave questions as to its usefulness. If the principal purpose of the program was to be one of increasing over-all efficiency and economy in the operation of the federal government, several years should not have been lost in experimenting with the government corporations which employ only a fraction of the federal workers and which are probably more efficiently operated than the old-line agencies. Moreover, since these corporations were already subject to the "business-type audits" conducted by Mr. Andrews' division in the GAO, there was really nothing new involved since the Comptroller General was already charged with the responsibility of making constructive suggestions in connection with the audits under the provisions of the Corporation Control Act. Thus it seemed that the program was to be started where it was not necessary and where it would provide the least information.

In addition, the policy of bringing a number of private management firms into the picture to perform most of the work could not have been conducive to uniformity in the application of the program. It certainly could not have made it as easy to spot overlapping of functions and duplication of effort as well as could have been done by only one group working within the government, and thus familiar with all its operations. Personnel from private firms should probably have been used only as consultants on problems relating to the regrouping or reorganization of the agencies, not in the fact-finding process which should have been undertaken first. Perspective on the GAO operations under Section 206 should be maintained. Representative Jones's bill in the 78th Congress called for $20,000,000 to be provided to the GAO for similar purposes. General Warren stated that, after a detailed study of Section 206, "the sky was the limit," and in 1947, requested $1,000,000 to "make only a modest beginning."20 The total expenditures of the Bureau of the Budget are only about $3,500,000, so these estimates seem grossly excessive.

Again, some doubts are raised with respect to the preliminary plans for the implementation of Section 206 by the GAO in 1946.