leaf through the current appropriation acts to see that, sadly enough, it still is true.

The Hoover Commission-operating under a law sponsored by this committee less than 2 years ago-is, I hear, about to furnish you its report of what needs to be done. As I will go into it a little later, I have every hope that some of the recommendations will be useful, but, in any event, the chairman has been quoted that they will be startling, drastic, and bold.

I intend neither criticism nor alibi for the situation we are in. A country and a government that struggled out of the slough of depression, then took on and licked in global battle the greatest war machines of all time, needs no apology or rebuke. That a multitude of governmental duties have grown up, and a mass of agencies and bureaus to carry them out, is hardly surprising when you think of the job Government has been called upon to do. And now we know there is not to be for us a simple return to the good old days. Government now is asked to be, at home, the conservator of the general welfare, and, abroad, the guardian of liberty in a troubled world. That means we must put our house in order and keep on putting it there. Jobs that have become less important must be relegated to some lower spot in the organization. This unsegregated, sprawling crop of Government functions and functionaries cannot hope to operate efficiently or to do well the job the taxpayers are paying for unless someone can assume the burden of putting like functions together, to make only one or two bureaus grow where dozens grew before.

What is more, reorganizing is not just reshuffling; it is also abolishing agencies and functions. A tree expected to grow must be carefully pruned, for new branches to have life we must cut off those no longer bearing fruit. This bill gives the machinery for the greatest pruning job in all history.

Second, I want strongly to emphasize that what is said here consists of suggestions only as to where duplications may exist and I do not intend to criticize the organizations now existing or to announce a conclusion that any particular permanent organization should be abolished until there has been completed a thorough and detached study of what it does, how it does it, and why. But when it is evident that two or a dozen separate undertakings involve the same general results it is time to pause and inquire whether one of them could not do the whole job better and, inevitably, with a saving of money. Studies of that character can always be undertaken. For example, the President always has such authority. What is needed now is a legislative direction that such studies be continuously carried on and that firm and definite and complete action be taken to achieve results. The figures on agencies dealing in like functions have been before you many times. Ten years ago Senator Byrd found the following patent examples of overlapping and duplication:

To which in that same year I added four more—

You can imagine my reaction the other day to pick up a national magazine article with this headline: "But it took the Hoover Commission to find 28 agencies dealing in welfare matters,” and to find the above figures repeated in the article as something brand new.

When the 1945 bill was before you, I pointed out there were then 75 bureaus, divisions, and agencies of this Government having an important connection with the field of transportation and that during the last dozen years there had been at least nine important committees appointed to recommend policies and outline action to solve the transportation puzzle. That job still remains to be done. The field of public housing, long a favorite football of organization critics, has been pretty well covered by the action taken under the last Reorganization Act. But much that I discussed 4 years ago still remains to be done in the field of labor, public lands, public welfare, Indian affairs, and others.

I think it is proper to point out that many of my previous recommendations to the Congress to eliminate duplication and overlapping of functions have not been acted on. There has not been time now to make an extended study of the matter, but I can recall offhand several examples in the field of Government corporations alone.

The Panama Railroad Company and the Panama Canal each carries on commercial-type functions. Yet, the former is a corporation— specially designed for such functions-and the latter is an agency. Obviously, consolidation of the functions would be more efficient.

In our audit of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, we found and reported that three separate agencies examine insured banks, which could be done with efficiency and uniform results by one agency. Similarly, in the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation audit I recommended a transfer of functions from the Home Loan Bank Board, but nothing has been done.

Of course, some of these problems may be solved by the Hoover Commission's report, but it is too much to hope they can all be worked out at once, by any over-all master plan, and any way some method must be provided to translate into law their valid recommendations. That is why I said, and still, on the whole, reiterate, that the present set-up is a hodgepodge and crazy quilt of duplications, overlappings, inefficiencies, and inconsistencies with their attendant extravagance. It is probably an ideal system for the taxeaters and those who wish to keep themselves perpetually attached to the public teat, but it is bad for those who have to pay the bill. That is why I say the Government should put its own house in order.

I would like to think Congress could do this job. No man believes in the legislative process more than I do. During most of my public life, both in North Carolina and in the National Capital, I have been a member of a legislative body. Even now, although heading a great agency, it is an agency of the Congress, and I am an agent of the Congress.

In fact, it is to the reports of Congress itself that I turn for evidence that the task is not one which the Members should be expected to accomplish without aid. Here is what a House committee said:

* * *

The committee soon found that, without a total abandonment of their other representative duties, it would be impossible during the present session to examine all the departments in a satisfactory manner. The public interest demands a rigid and more general investigation. * * * Economy does not consist in withholding supplies which the public safety demands, but in limiting the appropriation of public money to proper objects, and in insuring that it is disbursed with fidelity.

That was not from the reports that came with the 1939 act, or the 1945 act, or any of the many other reports in the last 100 years. It was from a select committee named in 1841 to work out a means of reducing the civil list, either by rearrangement of duties or otherwise. After 11 months of hard work the committee reported what I have just readthat they could not complete a satisfactory examination. And, believe it or not, they estimated the whole departmental force employed in the capital as around 600 persons-hardly more than a respectable section of a single division of a single bureau of a single department today. In 1925, Mr. Herbert Hoover, when Secretary of Commerce, said we never will get reorganization until Congress delegates the job of getting it accomplished. He repeated his plea as President, in the closing days of his administration, and Congress responded with a wide-open grant of authority to President Roosevelt.

Coming down to our own times, the real, practical reason for accomplishing this business by means of the aid of the President, subject to congressional review, was expressed by Senator James F. Byrnes, speaking in favor of the bill that became law in 1939, and describing why this method had been adopted in the 1932 act. This is what he said:

I have yet to talk with reference to reorganization to one man in the Government service who did not make this answer: "Of course, it should be done. I know it should be done, but"-and then, when he joins the great old order of "butters," you will find that he says, "but do not touch my department." He is in favor of reorganization, "but do not touch my department; do not touch my bureau; do not touch my division." If there is the slightest chance that it will be touched, you have a strenuously active man, you have an efficient man, opposing it, for when we talk about the lobbyists who come to Washington and go before the departments, we must remember that the man in the department has the advantage of seeing all these lobbyists and he adopts the most improved method. He is the best of all of them. He profits by experience. As a result, we determined that there was no way to accomplish reorganization except to give to the President the power.

Finally, may I reiterate here my own statement on the same bill made on the floor of the House in 1937:

The House committee knew that it could consider this matter from now until doomsday with all of its various ramifications, and that we would inevitably come back to the proposition presented to you in the bill now under consideration. We know from past experience, indeed from sad experience here in this body, that the Congress will never of its own accord and of its own initiative reorganize the Government of the Nation. Time after time it has been tried, and time after time it has met with failure. Every agency down the street will say that there ought to be a reorganization, but every agency will immediately step up and say, "It is good for the other fellow but not for us.'

Upon that point, right now let me say this: My own agency, the General Accounting Office, is exempted by the terms of the pending bill not because it is sacrosanct or any more angelic than the rest, but

in recognition that it is the creature and agent of Congress, by law a part of the legislative branch. I would invite-not oppose any studies and legislation undertaken by the Congress looking toward improvement of the General Accounting Office. Any time it cannot justify its worth by its accomplishments in the opinion of Congress, it ought to be abolished or drastically changed.

Aside from those considerations, is it not clear that the President is in the best position to have the over-all picture of the Government and its ramifications that is really needed? If it be called a delegation of power, I call to attention that for some years now the power to establish new agencies has been delegated from time to time. What is here proposed is the power to abolish and get rid of those whose time of useful life has passed. But when you consider the three great safeguards in the bill, it is not such a great delegation after all.

The first and greatest safeguard lies in the congressional review and veto provided by section 6. Certainly, no legislative powers can be said to have been abdicated when the two legislative bodies reserve to themselves alone the plenary power to stay the effect of any proposal. The second safeguard is the careful list of limitations, restrictions, and prohibitions in section 5, which prevent, for example, the abolition of any entire executive department or the creation of any new functions or duties. The matter of exemptions of executive agencies is a real problem. I believe in a reasonable concentration under heads responsible to the Executive, who can hold them strictly accountable. Exemptions, of course, are a matter of policy for the Congress to determine, but if you ask my view I would have to recommend strongly that no executive agency of any kind be exempted if you want any real reorganization to be effective.

The third safeguard lies in the very carefully drawn set of legislative purposes and standards and the requirement of a definite finding that a proposed plan will carry out one or more of those standards. In summary, Congress just cannot be expected to like to do such an unpleasant job, and it is, perhaps, an unfair burden to be thrust upon the individual members of any committee. Rather, Congress can give the taxpayers their first break in a long time by giving the President the authority he asks for. Any bureau can put up a case, at least to suit itself, why it should be retained. Congress can set up a "Bureau for the Edification of the Three Blind Mice" or for the "Rehabilitation of Humpty Dumpty," and within a year those who head them can come in with glowing accounts of their work.

I do not advocate abolition of anything that is proper or necessary, although with a $260,000,000,000 debt I hope I am not to be considered as too old fashioned if I say it is time we draw in our belts; to see that the Government at least gets value for its huge expenditures, and to weed out inefficiencies and hold those in charge with a responsibility that cannot be dodged or evaded.

Finally and here is where I start on the unpleasant things-you will hear all sorts of far-fetched rumors of the transfer of this or that important function or of some other getting the knife. Arguments by what I call the method of imaginary horribles. Nobody is going to abolish the veterans' facilities established to care for him who has borne the brount of the battle." What we must be after is this monstrous Frankenstein, created under the name of bureaucracy or anything else you please, but already in some instances becoming

bigger than Congress, its creater. As I have testified before, at times it arrogantly snaps its fingers in the face of Congress and openly defies it. And a real test will arise when agencies that are not one whit quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial, but belong only under the President, come seeking and demanding an exemption from this very bill. I say we should return to the ideals of Jefferson, who had this to say about a reorganization plan away back yonder in 1802:

Our predecessors have endeavored by intricacies of system and shuffling the investigator over from one officer to another, to cover everything from detection. I hope we shall go in the contrary direction, and that by our honest and judicious reformations, we may be able, within the limits of our time, to bring things back to that simple and intelligible system on which they should have been organized at first.

* * * Let us deserve well of our country by making her interests the end of all our plans and not our own pomp, patronage, and irresponsibility.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Warren, on page 7 of the bill, section 6, as a Congressman and from your experience, do you consider that the method provided there for the taking effect of the reorganization deprives the Congress of any of its constitutional rights?

Mr. WARREN. On one phase of that—and that phase was merely called to my attention this morning-I would like Mr. W. L. Ellis, one of my assistants, to answer that phase only.

Mr. ELLIS. Mr. Chairman, I assume that you raise the question as to whether that amounts to an overdelegation of legislative authority contrary to the settled line of Supreme Court cases, such as the Schechter case the "sick chicken" case-and the Panama Refining against Ryan case. That is law with which we are all familiar.

The answer is that two Federal courts have passed upon an even stronger provision and have fully sustained its constitutionality as far as delegation of power is concerned. I will be brief in discussing those. They both arose under President Roosevelt's reorganization plan, Executive Order 6166 of June 10, 1933.

That was set up under the law which was first passed June 30, 1932, and amended on the last day of President Hoover's administration pursuant to his recommendations, and the amendment provided this with respect to the taking effect of those reorganization plans; this is what it said:

Whenever the President makes an Executive order the order shall be submitted to the Congress while in session and shall not become effective until after the expiration of sixty calendar days unless Congress shall by law provide for an earlier effective date.

In other words, I say that the law was stronger by far than the present bill, because the plan in those days would become effective within 60 days unless a new law changed the situation, which would have required not only, of course, the concurrent action of both Houses, but also the approval of the President, or else passage over his veto. That is why I say that the law at that time was far stronger than the present bill.

Also, of course, that law had no restrictions, practically no prohibitions. Anything could be done under that reorganization.

As I say, under that law a number of reorganizations went up under that Executive order. A very important one was this transferring of an important rate-making function of the United States Shipping Board from the Shipping Board to the Secretary of Commerce. Acting under that transfer the Secretary of Commerce issued certain rate