Mare's-Nests at Washington
I
MAN does not live by law alone, but the height and girth of bureaucracy are measured by the nth power of the Congressional commas and semicolons after the Enacting Clause. What the law prescribes shall be done, regardless of whether the need has passed, regardless of the present urgency for doing otherwise; and yet it is also a distinguishing mark of bureaucratic organization that no official, whatever the situation, ever may do more than is specifically directed and authorized by the letter of the enabling act.
The Merchant Marine law of 1920 authorized the United States Shipping Board to promulgate such ‘rules and regulations as may appear necessary from time to time’ for the upbuilding of a great American mercantile fleet. As a result of the bureaucratic interpretation of this inescapable legal language we have the formal official announcement of June 16, 1930, that the Board had approved unanimously the application of the Luckenbach Steamship Company to ‘change the name of the S. S. Randor to S. S. Luckenbach.’
In the same manner, the Federal Trade Act of 1915 set forth that the public policy of the national government should discourage, among other things, economically wasteful competitive trade practices. Pursuant to this authority, the Federal Trade Commission announced on June 12, 1930, in all seriousness: —
Manufacturers of mop sticks will hold a trade practice conference Friday, June 18, in Cleveland at the Statler Hotel, with Chairman Garland S. Ferguson presiding.
Other industries invited during 1930 to come to gentlemen’s agreements on trade regulations included the bottlecap manufacturers, producers of woven baby carriages, printers of Christmas greeting cards, sled makers, lightningrod manufacturers, producers of tacks and nails, and the sardine packers. Sandwiched between the chronicles of such vast enterprises came an announcement on April 1, 1930, which read: —
The Federal Trade Commission to-day dismissed its complaint charging the Aluminum Company of America with violation of the Clayton and Federal Trade Commission acts.
As recently as 1927, the Honorable Dwight F. Davis, Secretary of War, subjected himself to possible criminal prosecution and removal from office by slashing through a single ‘provided’ clause to release funds for reconstructing the levees and dikes swept away by the memorable Mississippi flood. Congress, it will be recalled, had adjourned by constitutional mandate on March 4. Some $50,000,000 of river and harbor funds had been appropriated for the fiscal year 1928, to become available on July 1, 1927. Beginning at about Cairo, Illinois, late in March, Ol’ Man River cut a wide swath of death and destruction through nine hundred miles of the valley, and then, in April and May, dumped the assorted wreckage into the Gulf of Mexico. Inasmuch as only one month remained of the 1927 fiscal year, the river and harbor funds immediately available for the emergency were hopelessly inadequate. Before a special session of Congress might be assembled and an emergency appropriation authorized, July 1 would be at hand. Meanwhile, thousands of acres of farm land lay under stagnant pools of backwater. Railroad lines could not be repaired until the levees were closed. Crops could not be sown. The spectre of fevers and plagues winged over the smelly green marshes as far as forty miles back from the river. Should the nation stand helplessly idle amid the ruins until July 1?
It was a problem before which any man of reputation and responsibility might have quavered. The reasonable decision involved nothing less than the criminal act — expenditure of funds without Congressional authority — technically known in the law as the ‘misappropriation of public monies.’
Any public man confronted by the problem could not have escaped the realization that in electing to proceed at once he prepared the record for his being asked at some future Congressional hearing or political assemblage, ‘Did you, or did you not, on or about April 28, 1927, direct the expenditure of War Department funds not then authorized by Congress?’ Looking through the hazy mists of the future, Mr. Davis envisioned himself, trapped and humiliated, answering meekly, ‘I did, sir. The circumstances were . . .’
‘Just a minute, just a minute,’the hostile examiner or prosecutor would interject. ‘If you will be good enough to confine yourself to our questions . . .’ Two hours later the newspapers would scream to the world in their blackest eight-column banners: ‘Davis Admits Misuse of Army Funds!’
After several days’ fretful contemplation of such considerations, Mr. Davis made his decision. He drew in advance upon the 1928 appropriations! The work of rehabilitation began immediately in the north and moved in stages down to New Orleans about a month behind the crest of the flood. Once more the nation had been saved from the letter of the intent of Congress.
At a press conference on July 1, Secretary Davis observed parenthetically with a convincing note of relief, ‘Well, from to-day on it’s legal for the Department to rebuild those levees. Thus far we’ve been spending money without Congressional authority. I don’t know what may come of it; but it seemed to me the thing to do.’
Because this particular violation of the law hastened succor to some 600,000 flood victims, there was no serious complaint when Congress assembled in December. But had the number of citizens harassed by the letter of the law been only ten, one hundred, or even a thousand, as is the case in most conflicts between the appropriation bill and the reality, no executive agent would have dared authorize any action whatever so much as a week before the day ‘provided’ in the law. Quite naturally, every action of government favors some group or section as against all conflicting interests. The slightest deviation from the letter of the law, therefore, calls up almost automatically the annual Congressional scandal, which is to be, when all the facts are in, ‘greater by far than Teapot Dome.’
Mr. Davis’s personal sacrifice illuminates in striking fashion the core of the problem of bureaucracy: the fact that the rigidity of the legal constructions by which our government now moves precludes that flexibility and accommodation in administration which are the touchstone of achievement in social enterprise.
Only an omniscient Congress, of course, could provide against every ‘Act of God’ during the recess, guard against every human frailty, insure the public funds against every conceivable form of administrative inefficiency. Not many Representatives hold that Congress might eventually predict the exact time and place of incidence for floods, droughts, cyclones, earthquakes, and other major disasters. But even fewer Members subscribe to the principle that legislative authorizations may be risked with less than two ‘provided further’ restrictions for every thousand dollars released from the Treasury for executive activities.
Relief from that world-famous extravaganza, ‘Red Tape,’ now showing continuously in Washington, can come only through a legislative grant of more flexible powers to the executive arm of the government. If history has taught that some executives should not have been trusted with quite so much discretionary power, we should remember also the dictum of biology that the present system of Congressional candling of the administrative eggs before they have developed shells is foreordained to be horribly messy and inefficient.
II
But even in the vital matter of appropriations, Congress does not attempt to candle all the eggs every year. Considerably more than 80 per cent of each annual appropriation bill is constructed in committee by the simple process of clipping the third-reading print of the previous year and pasting it under a new enacting clause. The remaining 15 or 20 per cent of the national budget provides funds for special projects, non-recurring items, and added activities. These alone are put under the microscope in committee. Once a new item passes muster and gets into the engrossed bill, it is repeated from year to year as a matter of form. The general rule in committee is that whatever was approved last year may be continued without question. In relation to items originally approved one, two, or five years ago, the rule probably is valid. But it does not follow that all the functions established thirty years ago are essential to-day. Let the Bureau of the Budget suggest what it will, Congress, in the end, makes the law with its scissors and paste pot.
The Man Who Sits is a case in point. Added to the government pay roll by twos and fours from year to year, this corps has become Washington’s most conspicuous symbol of the wasting disease of bureaucracy. To-day there are literally hundreds of these men up and down the corridors of every government building. Without minute analysis of some 1500 pages of the national budget, no official would attempt to say precisely how many are thus engaged. But even the casual visitor observes that nowhere else in the land are doorkeepers and messengers apparent in anything like such numbers. Stationed in the public corridors, each with his own little table, chair, and bell indicator, the Man Who Sits is, in a legal sense, as much an institution as the Secretary of Agriculture. His position was created by an act of Congress, which defined his duties and fixed his salary. Every year his job is continued by a separate line in the department’s appropriation bill.
A single corridor in the State Department gives occupation to twentytwo of these superannuated guards. A low fellow, indeed, is the subofiicial who has no man outside his door. And let no one presume for an instant that the doorkeeper for the Secretary of State functions interchangeably with the messenger to the Secretary of State. Ah, no! The messenger to the Secretary of State, it appears, is a messenger, after Webster; while the doorkeeper is, as we say, a doorkeeper. Concerning such details there never can be any confusion, for an entire section of the Congressional Directory is devoted to the precise definition of the ‘official duties’ of all public servants, from the President down to the grade of Chief Clerk and Disbursing Officer. From this last strata downward the definitions are continued in the various departmental registers, and in the Civil Service Regulations.
At the Supreme Court quarters in the Capitol — originally the Senate — a Man Who Sits is posted at the door of each Justice and another guards the entrance to the Courtroom. With a cord of red plush attached to the brass handle of the door, this lone sentinel takes his post daily, regardless of whether or not the court is in session. Half-dozing in a pillowed chair tilted against the wall which once echoed the thunder of Webster, Hayne, and Calhoun, he catches the form of the Solicitor-General a hundred yards down the corridor. Meticulously timing his efforts so that the door will be fully open as the official swings up, the attendant manipulates the red plush cord with a minimum of energy. The door, happily, closes itself.
On the same floor in the new Senate wing of the Capitol a broad stairway leading from the main lobby is guarded by a sign, ‘ For Senators Only.’ Despite the fact that Senators seldom walk up or down stairs, a uniformed guard is on duty constantly at both top and bottom of this passage to prevent its use by any commoner. The luckless citizen who might escape the guard at the bottom is trapped by the officer at the top. He must be sent down, to approach the Senate floor, if he still desires, by the public stairway a hundred feet beyond. Similarly, every entrance to the House of Representatives and every committee room in the Capitol is guarded by a Man Who Sits.
Every year in forbidding executive session, the House Committee on Appropriations clips the long lists of messengers, doorkeepers, and guards from the previous year’s departmental authorizations and solemnly pastes them in the new bills. Passed by a pro forma vote in the House and Senate, the new law of the land is ready for the signature of the President of the Unit ed States. Under a series of Supreme Court decisions, the President is obliged to accept or reject the bill in toto. He may not strike out particular items. A Chief Executive disposed to consolidate the functions of doorkeeper, guard, and messenger in the Navy Department, for example, is confronted, when the annual appropriation bill comes to his desk, with the choice of approving all things as they are or stranding the entire navy for twelve months without pay, rations, ammunition, or fuel.
Messengers and guards, of course, are a relatively unimportant agency of government, but the system under which they became institutionalized challenges the attention of patriots. For such is the process by which Congress spends annually more than three billion dollars of public money.
III
In its more paternal aspects, bureaucracy is essentially a state of mind sustained by annual appropriations. The particular state of mind so organized in the government of the United States is that of the retired colonel of the Civil War who lives tranquilly on his shaded and spacious front porch, occupying himself as he awaits his monthly pension check by plucking dead leaves from the forsythia, picking pins out of the rugs, and, in the languid summer months, whitewashing the walls of the coal bin. Again, the Washington bureaucracy projects into Federal functions the attitude of the solicitous maiden aunt who is eternally in quest of proper methods for keeping the children from barking their shins at hockey.
There are literally hundreds of men and women in the Federal service whose sole duty is to find new subjects for how-to-do-it pamphlets, and then to devise appealing popular approaches for their scholarly works. More than four hundred writers, research workers, editors, and statisticians devote themselves exclusively to government publications, which explains why the Government Printing Office last year consumed more than 50,000,000 pounds of paper in some 75,000,000 books and pamphlets.
So perfectly attuned to the slightest wish of the nation is this vast nervousaunt mechanism that the wife of the bankrupt Dakota farmer may send to the Department of Agriculture to-day for Bulletin No. 1180, Housecleaning Made Easier, or No. 1516, Window Curtaining. For the rustic who boasts plumbing in his house there is offered the economy of Bulletin No. 1460, Simple Plumbing Repairs. Another of the 2000-odd agricultural bulletins carried in stock is No. 943, Haymaking.
The Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration of the Department of Agriculture, which devotes much of its time and energy to analysis of fraudulent anti-fat composts, published on April 24, 1930, its studied conclusion that ‘careful dieting and proper exercise are the only safe methods of weight reduction known to the Department of Agriculture specialists.’
A week later, Farmers’ Bulletin No. 354-F, Onion Culture, came off the presses. It was introduced to a breathless world by a mimeographed announcement headed: ‘Israelite and Pyramid Builder Tempted by Delicacy of Onions.’ This release is so perfectly symptomatic of bureaucratic efficiency in its pristine form that to quote the first half of it is to present a thumb-nail outline of the entire governmental organism to-day. It reads: —
Home ties no less strong than the lowly onion pulled at the Israelites during their sojourn in the wilderness. Moses reported that they constantly longed for this delicacy of diet left behind in Egypt.
Records show that the onion flourished in the fertile Nile Valley before the building of the pyramids, and doubtless slaves worked more willingly placing block on block of stone with the realization that an appetizing dish of onions awaited each at the end of the day’s labors.
Watered by the same Nile River, swayed by the breezes in the South Sea Islands, favored in many regions of America, today the onion grows successfully throughout the world, according to Farmers’ Bulletin 354-F, Onion Culture, by . . .
The author of this bulletin is listed on the Civil Service rolls at $4600; the man who announced it to the world, at $4800; the stenographer who typed the announcement, at $2200; the clerk who mimeographed it, at $1800; the messenger who delivered it, at $900. There came from the Treasury, in addition, pay for typesetters, printers, binders, money for white paper, postage, and envelopes. And now Onion Culture is immortalized in the index of the Library of Congress — and moth-eaten in thousands of copies on the shelves of the Public Printer, where a stock of some 30,000,000 pamphlets of all sorts always is on hand.
Nor does the Department of Agriculture hold the American farmer competent to administer such commonplace equipment as the milking machine. As recently as September 16, 1930, the Department published Cleaning Milking Machines, an illustrated bulletin devoted to ‘the necessity for proper cleaning of milking equipment, the parts of the equipment which require special attention, the heat treatment for killing bacteria, the effect of heat on the rubber parts, and variations of the heat method.’
Because hay, cotton, and wheat are graded partly by color, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics assigned a group of technologists to the task of developing mechanical color-measuring equipment. The purpose of this costly scientific undertaking was outlined in an official communique which set forth that, ‘since color is an important grading factor, it is necessary that a measure be made of color itself.’ Success crowned the eighteen months’ experimentation, and we now have in this most horseless of all the ages seventeen official colors in hay.
‘Standards may thus be kept constant from year to year, the real importance of color as a factor of ut ility may be determined, and the intervals at which color gradations are fixed in the standards may be specified according to such determinations,’ says Bulletin No. 154-T.
The commercial practicality of the machine is not treated. Indeed, there is nothing in the pamphlet to suggest that such a question ever was considered. Nor was the social utility of the venture appraised before the project was launched.
As a part of its Extension Service programme, the Department of Agriculture initiated in 1926 a national encampment of leaders in the 4-H Clubs, organizations of farm boys and girls devoted to the rehabilitation of rural social life. The fourth annual encampment, comprising about one hundred and fifty high-school students from thirty-nine states, assembled in Washington on June 16, 1930.
Living in a tented city on the velvety lawns of the Administration Building, the youngsters were the guests of their government. The following summary account of the four-day encampment has been compiled by arranging into narrative form a series of excerpts from official bulletins published by the Department of Agriculture between June 10 and June 20: —
The Department is preparing to receive the selected group of young people who will attend the camp. Two boys and two girls from the 4-H Club membership of each state, accompanied by one or more club leaders from the Extension Division of their respective states, may come to camp.
. . . 4-H in the name of these organizations is an abbreviation for ‘Head, Heart, Health, and Hands.’ . , . General Assembly meetings are to be held in the Auditorium of the New National Museum, which is a short walk across the Mall. Camp-fire meetings closing the day’s programme will be held on the camp quadrangle. . . .
At the morning assemblies each day, the encampment will be addressed by nationally known speakers, including Ray Lyman Wilbur, Secretary of the Interior; Arthur M. Hyde, Secretary of Agriculture; Judge Florence Allen of the Supreme Court of Ohio, and James C, Stone, Vice Chairman of the Federal Farm Board. . . .
In welcoming the club members at the morning assembly, Dr. C. B. Smith, Chief of the Office of Cooperative Extension Work, outlined the reasons for the encampment and mentioned some of the interesting features of the week’s programme planned for the visiting boys and girls. He said in part: ‘You have come to Washington to see and learn, and get something healthful to take back that will help you along toward a successful life. Washington represents the beauty and strength of a great nation. George Washington selected the site. You will see his home this week. If you never wanted to be a farmer in your life, you will want to be a farmer when you see Mount Vernon.’ . . .
The incorporation of boys and girls into a great general movement to produce a perfected type of agriculture and rural life ■was emphasized as a fundamental objective of 4-H Club work by Dr. C. J. Galpin, Agricultural Sociologist of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. . . . Ray Lyman Wilbur, Secretary of the Interior, talked to the members this morning on ‘The How and Why of Things.’ He described the working organization of a colony of bees — how they find shelter, distribute their tasks, safeguard the health of the hive, provide food for the group, and ensure protection for the colony. . . .
Nils A. Olsen, Chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, U. S. Department of Agriculture, discussed opportunities in American agriculture at the final morning assembly.
At night, two boys and two girls participated in a nation-wide radio broadcast from the central court of the new Department of Agriculture Building. The programme took the form of reports to the Secretary of Agriculture from the four sections of the United States. . . . The reports were followed by a pillow fight, described over the radio by Morse Salisbury, Chief of the Radio Service of the Department. . . . The Club boys have evolved some variations on the old battle-royal style of pillow fighting. By mounting each pair of contestants face to face on a slim and cranky pole suspended to keep their feet ten inches off the ground, knock-outs are scored quickly in each bout. A contestant is considered knocked out if he varies more than ninety degrees from the vertical, . . . The contest was to determine the champion pillow fighter of the camp. . . . Arthur M. Hyde, Secretary of Agriculture, then addressed the boys and girls and led a candle-lighting ceremony, which symbolized the taking home of the light of information and inspiration from the national club camp.
How much did Simple Plumbing Repairs cost? What was the total outlay for the hay and bean color finder? From what fund does the Department of Agriculture take money for the nation-wide broadcasting of its annual pillow fight? If an inquirer should approach the Department in quest of such information he would be told by some division chief, assuming the usual order, that there is no method for determining the cost of any particular departmental project. Upon pressing his inquiry, he would find that nothing short of a cumbersome Congressional investigation ever could strike a balance as between outlay and advantage of these and similar enterprises. That slow and costly method, obviously, can be applied only in specific cases of national importance. There is, therefore, no influence operative in the national government to-day which serves as a check or restraint upon bureaucratic ‘service.’ Created by law, sustained by ever-increasing appropriations, too large and complicated to be watched by any single administrative official, the great bureaucratic Juggernaut lumbers on and on, grinding out its daily grist of letter-perfect routine, untouched by human imagination, unflavored by human feeling, cold, lifeless, extravagant, and stupid.
IV
As bureaucracy writes, compiles, edits, so it counts. No administrative agency in the world tabulates and records as many items as the government of the United States; no other government spends half as much for statistical services. Our annual Federal outlay for commercial, financial, and social statistics is computed by the Bureau of the Budget at approximately $50,000,000. Although the Bureau of the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics were established exclusively for such services, independent statistical organizations also are maintained in the State Department, Shipping Board, Interstate Commerce Commission, Federal Reserve Board, Department of Agriculture, Federal Trade Commission, Department of Commerce, and United States Tariff Commission.
A random example of the essential nature of these enterprises is found in an official bulletin of September 2, 1930, summarizing one herculean labor as follows: —
The Bureau of the Census announces that, according to data collected to date in the census of manufactures taken in 1930, the total value of macaroni, vermicelli and noodles made in 1929 by establishments engaged primarily in the manufacture of these products amounts to $47,931,408, an increase of 8.3 per cent as compared with $44,279,544 reported for 1927, the last preceding census year.
In May an official paper announced that farm wagons manufactured in 1929 numbered 40,547, against 57,081 in 1928. Similarly, the country was appraised, in December 1929, that during the previous month 5962 windmills of domestic manufacture were sold in the United States.
Daily, almost hourly, the Bureau of the Census, by explicit Congressional mandate, completes some new count. Among those announced during the first half of 1930 were ‘Domestic Pump and Water Systems,’‘Caskets, Burial Cases, and other Morticians’ Goods,’ ‘Steel Barrels,’ ‘Carbon Paper and Inked Ribbons,’‘Bluing,’‘Needles, Pins, Hooks and Eyes, and Snap Fasteners,’‘ Flavoring Extracts and Flavoring Syrups,’‘ Domestic Water-Softening Apparatus,’‘Envelopes,’‘Lead Pencils (including mechanical),’‘Baby Carriages.'
The census of honey bees and icecream production, however, is the labor of the Department of Agriculture; but the Treasury, through the Public Health Service, is responsible for the annual Key Catalogue of Parasites Reported for Monkeys, with Their Possible Public Health Importance.
Every month, the Interior Department reports the national production of electrical energy, in kilowatt hours, and the total tourist visitations to the thirty-eight national parks and shrines. Weekly figures on coal, pig iron, and petroleum are reported by telegraph to the Bureau of Mines, and the Bureau of Agricultural Economics reports daily on shipments of live stock, butler, cheese, eggs, watermelons, potatoes, and spinach. Annual statistics on marriage and divorce are tabulated by states and counties in the Bureau of the Census, as are annual revenues and expenditures of some two hundred municipalities and forty-eight state governments. The weekly tabulation of communicable diseases is from the mimeographs of the Public Health Service. With a view to avoiding public alarm, however, these figures are withheld when they indicate regional or general epidemics.
How much freight is transported annually in the United States? Someone ought to have that very important figure, says the economist in search of an all-inclusive index of commercial trends. Upon his arrival in Washington he finds that coastwise freight is tabulated by the Commerce Department; intercoastal traffic by the Panama Canal Office, War Department; river tonnage by the Inland Waterways Corporation, War Department; foreign tonnage by the Shipping Board; and, finally, land-fine freight tonnage by the Interstate Commerce Commission — exclusive, of course, of movements over the government-owned Alaskan Railroad, which is administered by the Department of the Interior.
Some eight years ago it required a formal opinion by Attorney-General Harry M. Daugherty to decide whether the Alaskan Railroad was obligated by law to submit monthly statistical reports to the Interstate Commerce Commission on forms prepared for the use of private carriers. Mr. Daugherty ruled, in effect, that the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 implied no legislative intent that the government should report its own activities to itself on forms prescribed by Congress.
The economist who seeks precise information on employment conditions must gather segments of the story from seven different agencies scattered over an area of approximately five square miles. Farm labor is reported by the Department of Agriculture; railroad pay rolls by the Interstate Commerce Commission; shipyard employment by the Merchant Fleet Corporation; mine labor by the Bureau of Mines; manufacturing pay rolls by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In addition, the Detroit Factory Employment Index is reported weekly by the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce. Nowhere in the government are all these activities so coordinated that a national picture of the conditions of labor supply and demand is available on a given date. Some bureau tabulations are published on the fifteenth of the month, others on the third, twentieth, or twenty-seventh. The Labor Department’s Monthly Employment Bulletin, which might gather all these tables into one pamphlet, long ago adopted the policy of publishing no figures whatever, not even those of the Labor Department. The monthly survey comprises merely condition and trend reports from all the states and principal cities.
So insistent is the demand of employers and labor leaders alike for some instrumentality to coordinate all this vast labor statistical service that in each of the last four sessions of Congress a bill to create a national labor survey has been presented. Because of the reluctance of any department to relinquish its own work, however, such efforts thus far have been futile.
In certain cases it is impossible today to arrange even for the interchange of information between two agencies of the government. The Department of Commerce includes in its monthly survey of department-store sales the reports of a few scattered chain stores. In the Federal Reserve Board’s survey, however, a sharp distinction is made between local-unit establishments and chain stores. The Commerce figures, therefore, never are countenanced in any Federal Reserve publication. For at least four years, this interdepartmental feud has smouldered around the vital question whether sales in a chain of ninety-four department stores should be tabulated as chain-store sales or department-store trade.
Nor is all the evidence of pompous futility and entrenched inefficiency encountered in the executive departments. Beneath the very dome of the Capitol, the visiting citizen finds, in the professional tourist guides, the last category of organized incompetence. Dispensers of all the historical misinformation which cloakroom banter has woven into ‘The Legend of Our Capitol,’ the guides conduct throngs through the long marble corridors and tortuous passageways of the House and Senate wings for the nominal sum of twentyfive cents a person. They are not on the government pay roll. They are not supervised by, or responsible to, anyone. The government does not vouch for any part of their historical lore. Permission to adorn the taxi driver’s cap with the badge of the ‘Official Guide’ is granted by the Architect of the Capitol to those who present recommendations from Senators and Representatives of the majority party. The scale of collections is fixed by an unofficial agreement between the Capitol authorities and the guides’ guild. During the peak of the spring tourist season, collections average considerably more than $500 a day, distributed about evenly among twelve or fifteen guides. Several determined efforts in recent years to uproot this governmentsanctioned ‘two-bits racket’ by legislation establishing a corps of official free guides have suffered the unrecorded fate of the Free Silver bill. Verily, a little free patronage in these days of Civil Service examinations and eligibility lists makes a very sacrosanct institution of even an assemblage of incompetent elevator operators and cast-off hackers.
In the final analysis, no one can say even approximately how many millions of dollars are squandered annually in ridiculous governmental activities, in overlapping functions, administrative inefficiency, utterly indefensible inquiries, investigations, surveys, and promotional activities, and in such miscellaneous enterprises as may be grouped under the general head of ‘pillow-fight broadcasts.’ Congress can have no idea whatever concerning such matters, for every departmental supply bill is written by a different subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations; and there is not on record a case of either a Senator or a Representative who, in a given session, scrutinized during debate every item of every major appropriation measure. Members of both houses are forever being surprised by new and curious manifestations of bureaucratic activity. They find, upon inquiry, that the labor which arouses their momentary indignation was authorized in the most recent supply bill of the department involved. The subcommittee, of course, knew all about the item at the time, but considered it hardly worthy of special mention in its report. The conclusion to which these facts point is inescapable — when Congress has completed an appropriation session, it has, collectively, not the remotest idea what, in particular, it has done.
Reorganization of the Federal government to adapt it to the needs and methods of the age is, at best, a matter of five years, perhaps ten. It has been suggested seriously that as an interim measure the nation should establish at once a Bureau of Coordination and Control, responsible to the President and Congress, jointly, to sit in a watchtower over the entire governmental structure, picking flaws wherever possible and so focusing the attention of authority upon the weaknesses of the organism. Unfortunately no formula has been discovered as yet by which such theoretically non-political functions may be established and maintained free of political interference. But to-day the search appears to be more earnest, more determined, than ever before in our national history.