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trator and shall be performed by him or under his direction and control by such officers and employees of the Federal Security Agency as he may designate." Therefore a bill such as H. R. 3922, expanding these functions under the Children's Bureau, contradicts what the President has recommended. After July 15 it is by no means certain to which Government agency, when the reorganization plan becomes effective, the health and welfare programs of the Children's Bureau will be assigned. Therefore it is an inopportune moment even to consider a bill that cuts across the president's Executive order.

It is clearly impossible, gentlemen, to increase an authority of the Children's Bureau when that authority may terminate within a month.

SIMPLE APPROPRIATION

And why consider a bill whose details are debatable when the important objectives it has in view can be accomplished by much simpler means? The Federal Security Administrator is now empowered to administer child health and welfare. All that is needed to increase the three existing programs is a resolution of the House of Representatives that more money be appropriated at once for each of the three programs to be administered for the interim period by the Federal Security Administrator under the reorganization plan as part of his approach to the new and integrated health and welfare program.

The Federal Security Administrator has so many aspects of this problem to consider that his hands must not be tied in advance. The Congress, for example, has under consideration a national health program. As Senator Pepper said last week concerning his own bill: "Congress, in its consideration of legislation for maternal and child health and welfare must keep in mind that such legislation must fit into the plan for health and medical care of the entire population." Therefore, he recommended the insertion of a new section in H. R. 3922 to make this relationship clear:

"It is further declared to be the policy of the Congress that the special services for the health of children and their mothers during maternity herein provided for should form a part of any national health program to be authorized by the Congress and should be coordinated with and fitted into any such program."

The Federal Security Administrator likewise must be left free to abolish or reorganize the present child-health and welfare programs of the Children's Bureau so that they, too, will be in accord with any new national health measure which the Congress may pass. After all, the Congress may well consider national insurance for maternity care.. Moreover, the child is a part of the family. If the Congress passes a bill for medical insurance, child health would be included in such a measure. These and many other major possibilities, all of which are in a state of flux, make it utterly impractical to do more at this time than to increase the existing grants to the States for child health and welfare by a House resolution and allow the Federal Security Administrator all freedom to administer the funds as he thinks best.

OVERLAPPING STUDY

In addition, gentlemen, the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives is completing its study of the whole Social Security Act, including the Federal welfare program. Surely it would only be courteous to postpone final legislation such as H. R. 3922 until the Congress had heard the suggestions of its own committee.

As far as the future of the administration of child health and welfare is concerned, I should like to present to this committee the opinions of State health and welfare officials. They have the actual contacts with the Nation's children. Hence Federal legislation should seek primarily to facilitate their work and make it more effective.

If we keep our minds firmly fixed on the needs of the child, the family, and the local community, then the rival aspirations of Federal agencies become as unimportant and trivial as they should be.

The Federal Government deals with State health departments largely through the Public Health Service and with State welfare departments largely through the Social Security Board. However, State departments of health and welfare must now also deal with the Children's Bureau because it administers grants-inaid for their three programs of (a) maternal and child health, (b) crippled children, and (c) child-welfare services.

This means duplicate State plans, duplicate reports, duplicate budgets, and duplicate supervision and audits.

The maternal and child welfare bill-if enacted-could potentially result in the creation in the Children's Bureau of a health division larger than the Public Health Service and a welfare division larger than that of the Social Security Board. Two national health systems and two national welfare systems would represent an enormous waste of money for overhead as well as intolerable administrative confusion.

THE STATE VIEW

State and local public welfare officials-through the American Public Welfare Association-have officially gone on record:

"That all welfare programs in which Federal Government participates financially be administered by a single agency at the local, State, and Federal level, the Federal Government's responsibility to be centered in a single combined public welfare administration unit."

The Public Welfare officials are supporting the Forand bill now under consideration by the House Ways and Means Committee. In this bill the State welfare officials-who are actually administering public child-welfare servicessupport a program of expansion of child-welfare services with Federal grantsin-aid to be administered by the Federal Security Administrator through a single welfare administration unit which the President's reorganization plan authorizes him to create.

This proposed expansion of child-welfare services is part of a unified and comprehensive approach to the welfare needs of the States.

The Public Welfare officials take the position that in the welfare field you cannot separate the social needs of the child from that of the family. You must consider the family as a unit.

The State health officials are just as positive in their opposition to multilateral. administration of health in the Federal Government.

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The Association of State and Territorial Health Officers on October 11, 1945, officially went on record as favoring the coordination of all civilian public health activities in a single department, thereby rendering liaison and cooperation with the several States and Territories the more efficient and effective. This, in turn, would bring about an improvement in general public health work throughout the entire country and enable this department to administer any future legislation pertaining to public health with much greater efficacy.

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In this same statement of policy the association pointed out that at the present time the States are required to make reports to both the Public Health Service and the Children's Bureau, present their budgets, and conform with a variety of regulations issued by these two agencies.

THE TRUE EXECUTORS

Gentlemen, these State officials have for some time taken the lead toward a coordinated health and welfare program. They are the responsible administrators of these grants-in-aid. Their wishes, it seems to me, should be decisive.

But let me add to their views that of the Children's Bureau's own Advisory Committee on Maternal and Child Health, and on services for crippled children— experts of the Bureau's own choosing.

In November 1945 the Children's Bureau called the annual meeting of these committees particularly to obtain their advice on this bill. They adopted a report dealing with the basic philosophy and principles pertaining to this bill in which they declared:

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"However, in such a program as envisaged in this major step in the development of a Federal health program, problems of State's responsibilities and relationships with Federal agencies are involved which demand consideration of the qualifications of the proposed agency (the Children's Bureau) for their con duct and consideration of ability to integrate the proposed program with those for the provisions of health and medical services for the remainder of the population.

"The committee (their own committee) recommends that Congress give careful study to the problem of the proper agency to conduct this program and the relationship between governmental agencies concerned with medical and health services."

In other words, the Children's Bureau's own Advisory Committee members told this agency in polite but firm language that it was not the agency most capable 88368-46-18

of administering the program but even if it were capable, the merit of the plan is doubtful.

NATIONAL AWARENESS

If, after hearing the best judgment of these officials and experts, my own opinion as a layman concerned with child welfare is of any value, I would urge that the Children's Bureau should give greater attention to general over-all leadership in developing an awareness throughout the country of our obligations to all children, regardless of race, color, or creed.

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Under the act of April 9, 1912, establishing the Children's Bureau, the bureau is charged with the responsibility to "investigate and report upon all matters pertaining to the welfare of children and child life among all classes of our people, and shall especially investigate the question of infant mortality, the birthrate, orphanages, juvenile courts, desertion, dangerous occupations, accident and diseases of children, employment

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This original mandate of the Children's Bureau is specifically protected under the reorganization plan as the prime function of the Children's Bureau under the direction and control of the Federal Security Administration.

During the war the Children's Bureau neglected this all-important and fundamental reason for its existence. All of its spare energies went into the administration of emergency programs. Since it has taken on these arduous administrative functions, it has been led further and further away from its basic responsibility to develop an over-all program for child care. Instead of being concerned with a comprehensive, Nation-wide program utilizing all the facilities of Federal, States, and local governments, for the stabilization of the family and the protection of the child, it has lost itself in the petty details of its limited activities. These details have been worrisome to the State and local agencies through which the Children's Bureau operates and have prejudiced the opportunity of working out with them a cooperative attack on the destructive forces that impede our social progress. In a situation that demands a wholesale approach to a wholesale problem, the Children's Bureau has been absorbed by the petty details of a retail business.

For example, the catastrophic effects of total war on the children of war workers were apparent to the whole country even before the war production program was in full swing. Yet it was not until nearly the end of the war, March 14, 1945, that Miss Lenroot appeared before the House Appropriations Committee and recommended the appropriation of $95,800 to make a study of the needs of children in critical war areas. She explained that this study was "urgently needed as a basis for understanding the extent and nature of the problems and the measures devised to meet the problem." The appropriation, if granted, would have become available on July 1, 1945-after VE-day. The request for this appropriation was rejected by the House Appropriations Committee as coming too late.

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LAPSE OF FORESIGHT

Obviously it was a bit late then to try to find out what should be done about children in war centers. Should the Children's Bureau not, as soon as the war production program sets millions of people in motion, have carried the torch throughout the country for the protection of our neglected war workers' children? Should it not have made the Congress aware of these needs before March 1945? Who knows how different our wartime care of children might have been if the Children's Bureau, even before the call to man the war factories went out, had had the vision to foresee and to warn the country that social protection of our war workers' families would be essential.

Even now there are vast areas of our country where children have been so shockingly neglected for generations that their condition is pitiful. I have just described in the Washington Post the plight of the Latin-American children in the Southwest, of the Negro child throughout the South, of the miners' children in the Appalachian Mountain region. The Children's Bureau should be doing work of that sort throughout the country and not leave it to the press to call the attention of the country to these disgraceful blots on the Nation's honor. It might well be doing this now were it not still involved in the consideration of administrative operating minutiae.

To arouse the public to the needs of childhood as a whole, to lift our concepts of child care, to lead the States in formulating protective legislation, to improve the lamentable care of delinquent and dependent children in State institutions,

to focus all our education, health, and welfare facilities toward the well-being of the child-these are some of the all-important functions of the Children's Bureau. It is a high and sacred role to be the protectors and the protagonists of childhood. It is a role that can only be fulfilled by an agency of Government that has no axes to grind, no desire for power. The minute the Children's Bureau fights for its own personal aggrandizement, its motives are suspect.

Its aim should be the welfare of children, not the authority of the Children's Bureau. Only if it is above the battle and holds aloft the highest objectives for all children, can it keep its role in our national life constructive. But such a role, conceived and carried out with disinterested vigor, would make the Children's Bureau the pivot of progress in the new coordinated Federal health and welfare program.

The purpose, as I understand Senator Pepper's bill, is to attain for the Nation the coordinated health and welfare program that we all desire. But these objectives, which we all share, would be defeated by H. R. 3922. In its piecemeal approach, in its distortion of administrative arrangements, this bill would plant insuperable obstacles in our way, at the very moment when the prospect of a real national welfare program is in sight.

Mrs. MEYER. But, we need not only the coordination of health and welfare programs. We need the integration of both with the public school system. Education is now seen as much more than instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic. There is a Nation-wide growing tendency to see in education a social function that will give our children physical and emotional as well as mental development. The postwar unrest is even more trying to children than the chaotic war conditions, as is indicated by the ever-mounting number of youthful criminals and child delinquents. Piecemeal attacks on the social causes of bad health among the youth of the country, piecemeal attacks on the social causes of youthful crime and delinquency, are doomed to failure. What is needed is a coordinated community health, welfare, and educational program which will focus all of our local public and private welfare programs upon the school and the preschool child.

Harnessing related activities; the coordination of these related activities on the Federal level will require study and consultation among the responsible officials. It will come about practically in response to the authority the reorganization plan gives the Federal Security Administrator, and the obligation it places upon him to build an integrated agency to deal with such acute social problems as I have outlined. He must be free and empowered to weld together the variety of services which are provided by each of the several Federal agencies which have heretofore operated with relative independence and in isolation, one from the other. Their respective desires and ambitions to maintain their independence and separation should, manifestly be disregarded since it can be maintained only at the expense of those for whom their many services are created. In building the integrated new department, the Federal Security Administrator must take care to clarify the Federal-State relationship. He must keep in mind the administrative independence of State and localities since health, education, and welfare services can never be succesfully administered except on a local basis.

Because of the urgent need for the integration of these social services, I wish to urge the approval of Reorganization Plan No. 2. It is a first essential step toward the establishment of a national Department of Health, Education, and Welfare with Cabinet rank. Such a national department is needed to ennoble those services in the eyes of the people. Moreover, only a Cabinet officer would have the prestige to give the various Federal agencies and the country the dynamic

social leadership we need in a period of great upheaval. Only an official of this caliber and rank can lead all the States and their communities in the development of standards of health, education, and welfare services worthy of our democratic American ideals. This Cabinet officer can and must join with the State officials in pointing out to Congress the need for legislation to provide Federal aid for essential services and for equality of opportunity throughout the country for all of our citizens regardless of race, color, or creed. If such a democratic objective became a reality, its mere possibility would have the greatest psychlogical effect upon our distressed and confused population. It would tend immediately to hold out new hopes of security; it would soften racial, religious, and class rivalry. Eventually it would forge a social solidarity that would check the dangerous, ever growing isolation of the individual, in our migratory, trailer-minded civilization.

The new Cabinet officer; as a result of the report called the Road to Community Reorganization, which I have already mentioned, a bill has been drafted for submission to Congress under bipartisan auspices "to create an executive department of the Government to be known as the Department of Education, Health, and Welfare." This bill has been submitted to the Federal agencies, including the Bureau of the Budget, for criticism. It has received the attention and support of many national religious, educational, health, and welfare organizations.

For example, the Federation of Women's Clubs and the CIO labor unions have taken great care to educate all of their local divisions on the merits of the reorganization plan.

It awaits only senatorial and congressional sponsorship to be introduced into Congress. I cannot recommend too urgently that it come up for hearings as soon as possible.

I am convinced that the rapid and efficient expansion of our educational, health, and welfare systems throughout the land along lines that have long been accepted and are familiar to us, will give the Congress a little more time to consider carefully its permanent plans for medical care and the extension of social insurance to all people. Personally, I am convinced that the best medical care is prevention and the best social insurance is education. Both can be brought to the people if our Federal and State governments collaborate in a wellrounded program of community organization.

The new Cabinet officer should be an outstanding executive, a person with appreciation of the professional skills in each area and therefore an ability to coordinate the social implications of these programs in terms of general human well-being. He should have at his disposal a research staff of the best and most progressive minds in the country, people with vision and courage, who realize that in self-defense we must achieve throughout the Nation ever-improving standards of education, health, and welfare.

I should like to urge that the first administrator of this important post be a man rather than a woman, as has been frequently suggested. The fields of education and welfare are already overfeminized. Only through a proper balance of male and female influences can a strong democratic system of culture be achieved. We emphasize an already serious weakness in our educational system and in welfare work by

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