Wasting a Billion a Year

I

RESISTANCE to the centralization of authority and the multiplication of bureaucratic functions in Washington was born with the Federal government. Our constitutional history begins with a definition of the cleavage between the two major parties on this point during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. It is doubly significant, therefore, that voices of warning against our lumbering and top-heavy Federal establishment arise to-day with equal vigor from the Democratic and Republican ranks.

It is easy to imagine Thomas Jefferson shaking a long gnarled finger in the faces of the Hamiltonians in 1800 to admonish: —

Demand has grown up for a greater concentration of powers in the Federal government. If we will fairly consider it, we must conclude that the remedy would he worse than the disease. What we need is not more Federal government, but better local government. From every position of consistency with our system, more centralization ought to be avoided. The states would protest promptly enough anything savoring of Federal usurpation. . . . Once the evasion of local responsibilities becomes a habit, there is no knowing how far the consequences may reach. Every step in such a progression will be unfortunate alike for states and nation.

But it must give the followers of Alexander Hamilton something of a start to realize that this quotation is, in fact, from the 1926 Memorial Day address of the Honorable Calvin Coolidge, then President of the United States by virtue of the largest popular majority ever given a Republican nominee up to that time.

Nor has any Democratic advocate of a general house cleaning in Washington risen to record his jubilation that one hundred and thirty-seven years of development under the Hamiltonian theory at last produced a vindication of the Jeffersonian doctrine by the heirs and successors of the Federalists. For to-day the problem is not an academic discussion between political theorists. It is, rather, a pressing affair of state commanding the serious and patriotic attention, not only of political gentlemen, but of the business world, educators, publicists, economists, and sociologists. Extreme commentators go so far as to suggest that democratic institutions are in the balance. If selfgovernment cannot be made efficient, responsive, less burdensome financially and less wasteful of the busy citizen’s time and energies, this group contends, then democratic forms must give way before the pressure of the age.

From this dilemma the country instinctively recoils. Hence the insistent demand to-day for effective reform. Both parties pledged themselves in their 1928 national platforms to revitalization of the Federal government through departmental reorganization. As further evidence that the problem already is above the status of routine partisan issues it is necessary only to cite, in connection with Mr. Coolidge’s Memorial Day address of 1926, the more recent statement of Representative Louis Ludlow, a Democratic Congressman from Indiana, made in the House on April 28, 1930: —

During the last two decades bureaucratic power has grown by leaps and bounds, until Washington dominates, regulates, controls the nation even in the most intimate concerns of its citizens. Local selfgovernment is vanishing in the rush to let Washington do it. Priceless rights and privileges which the forefathers intended to be exercised locally are being surrendered without a struggle into the vortex of Federal authority. Every day government is being removed farther and farther from the home and fireside into the tentacles of the already overwhelming Federal bureaucracy.

As a member of the Capitol Press Gallery for twenty-eight years, Mr. Ludlow watched the Federal government ‘grow up like Topsy.’ His plea for reorganization grew out of a sincere conviction, he told his colleagues in the House, ‘that bureaucracy ultimately will be the ruin of this country unless something is done to check it.’

Among thousands throughout the country who shouted public hosannas in response to Mr. Ludlow’s demand for a non-partisan, quasi-legislative commission to curb centralization were the governors of seventeen states, eight ex-governors, and nineteen judges of state supreme courts. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison expressed their agreement, as did Nicholas Murray Butler, Owen D. Young, John W. Davis, John R. Commons, George B. Cortelyou, William Allen White, and Charles D. Hilles. In July 1930, the annual Conference of Governors, at Salt Lake City, made the subject one of the chief topics of the agenda. A political or social tendency which commands the attention of such a group of men is more, obviously, than a figment of Congressional imagination.

II

Only an appreciation of the meaner practicalities of the legislative process in Congress can explain why the difficulties in the path of effective reform thus far have proved insurmountable. The subject has been under investigation almost constantly for twenty years. It has been accepted by influential leaders in both parties for almost a decade that the existing Federal establishment is costing approximately a billion dollars a year more than would be required for the same functions under an efficient organization. Half of this amount would be saved annually in direct appropriations and the remainder in the cost which citizens bear in essential contacts with their government. Why, then, is nothing accomplished?

The preponderance of evidence places the responsibility squarely upon Congress. Unable itself to work out a programme of reorganization, it declines doggedly, nevertheless, to extend the necessary authority to an executive agency. Whenever a specific plan for reorganization is presented in Congress, there immediately leap to arms the original sponsors of every useless bureau and every dead function marked for the grave. The Senator whose sister’s son may be Chief of the Bureau of the Animal Industry will see to it that that agency never is consolidated with the Stockyards Administration. And the venerable Congressman from Michigan who fought for the establishment of the National Commission on Fine Arts will filibuster to the end of his days against any measure to consolidate that organization with the National Capital Park and Planning Commission. Nor will the delegation from Mississippi assent to theabandonment of the Cotton Ginning Laboratory so long as the Wood Products La boratory is to be continued at Madison, Wisconsin.

Thus do personal, political, or sectional interests enlist anywhere from one to a hundred defenders in Congress for every bureau, office, agency, experiment station, and research laboratory. Indeed, inquiry discloses that every R. F. D. route has its little bloc of defenders, who will make certain that Star Route No. 33,817 never shall be motorized before Star Route No. 17,641. In these circumstances, any measure to redistribute the administrative functions of the government induces as much legislative logrolling as a Congressional reapportionment or a rivers and harbors bill.

‘All right,’ runs the Cloak Room bargain, ‘keep the Naval Observatory out of the Weather Bureau, and Keokuk will be made a terminal on the Mississippi Barge Line.'

No other set of forces could have placed the Public Health Service and the Prohibition Unit in the Treasury Department, or maintained the Geological Survey in the Department of the Interior while the Bureau of Mines thrived in the Department of Commerce. No other legislative system could have provided twenty-six separate purchasing bureaus for the Treasury Department.

The whole range of these operations in primitive barter was called into play as recently as May 1930, when Congress took up President Hoover’s recommendation that the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, the veteran relief agency established after the Civil War, and the Bureau of Pensions, which administers the pensions of all warriors on the rolls up to 1917, be consolidated with the Veterans Bureau, which looks after World War service men. Committee hearings developed that the consolidation would save approximately $1,500,000 annually in administrative expenses. Yet only by a series of compromises on unrelated legislation was the consolidation measure rescued from the oblivion of the House Calendar. The President formally proclaimed the consolidation in September 1930.

In the case of the Prohibition Unit, even the compromises could not bring about a reorganization patterned after the predetermined principle. Illicit traffic in non-industrial alcohol is the problem of the Department of Justice, while illicit traffic in industrial beverages remains the charge of t he Treasury.

Congress has had before it since June 1924 the report of the most recent Joint Committee on Reorganization of the Executive Departments. This report shows that construction projects are initiated and supervised by no less than twenty-five separate agencies of the government, seven of which are in the Interior Department. Five others are in the Department of Agriculture, three in the Department of Commerce, three in the Treasury Department, and the remainder scattered from the Panama Canal Office to the Bureau of Immigration. The same committee reported that marine charts are prepared daily by the Bureau of Navigation, Navy Department; Geodetic Survey, Commerce Department; and the Lake Survey, War Department. Twenty-four agencies are engaged in topographical surveys and mapping. Engineering research is carried on by twenty-two bureaus and offices. Fifteen divisions administer rivers and harbors projects.

The captain of an American ship coming into an American port is required to deal with thirteen Federal officials operating in seven different departments before he may land his passengers and cargo. The Public Health Service inspects the vessel at Quarantine; anchorage is assigned by the War Department; the Commerce Department inspects his boilers and life-saving devices; one bureau of the Labor Department helps to sign off his crew and another inspects his immigrants; the Department of Commerce enters the registry of the voyage and the Treasury Department attends to customs on the cargo. The master must go to another bureau for changes that may have occurred in lighthouse signals, to another for charts of domestic waters, and to still another for charts of foreign waters. When his bottom is loaded again, the captain has to go back through most of these formalities to get away from port.

Seven years have elapsed since these symptomatic facts were laid before Congress by a special committee specifically created by Congressional authority to report them. But nothing has happened.

III

Woodrow Wilson once likened the structure of the United States Government to an old plantation house he had known as a boy, in Georgia. In early Colonial days the structure had begun as a single square room of hand-fashioned red brick. Three years later a log cabin had been attached at the rear. Another five years saw the old brick façade extended in two directions, with bricks of another size and color. The second generation ran out a wing from each end of the newer brick additions and graced the whole with a spacious and fashionable porch sustained by imposing white columns. Another generation replaced the old log portion with still a fourth style of brick, lifted the building from the ground, dug out a cellar, and underlaid the whole with a foundation of stone and mortar. It was, in the end, a very substantial building, which served quite well as a plantation homestead. Especially striking was it to those who knew that it had been designed in the first instance as a mere prospector’s shack beyond the Fall Line.

It was his own hope, Mr. Wilson explained in the 1912 campaign, that he might bring about this final phase of modernization and unification as applied to the Federal government. There were, to his mind, ‘a great many old lean-tos which need to be ripped away, so that the light and air of the modern world may enter the central structure.’

The World War, of course, frustrated this hope, and the old homestead stands to-day as it stood in 1912 — with some twenty more lean-tos added in the interim. So rambling and disconnected is the edifice to-day that even the inhabitant is unable to find his way beyond his own little nook. In many sections the air remains the unwashed ozone of 1789.

Our generation remembers the debates which culminated in the establishment of the Department of Labor in 1913. But few recall that the entire governmental organism came into being by the mere process of adding chunk upon chunk to the prospector’s shack of the Fathers through one hundred and forty-one years of national history.

Following the adoption of the Constitution, separate acts of Congress in 1789 created the Departments of State, War, and Treasury. The fourth member of the Cabinet was the AttorneyGeneral, but he headed no department. He was merely a professional consultant for the executive branch. A temporary Postmaster-General was authorized in September 1789, but the Post Office Department was not created until 1794, and its head did not become a member of the Cabinet until 1829.

Some four years after the creation of the Post Office, the naval functions of the military establishment were transferred to the new Navy Department. For more than fifty years the organization of the executive arm remained on substantially this basis.

The second generation of American statesmen added the Department of the Interior, in 1849, and the Department of Justice, in 1870. Two years later the Post Office was raised to the rank of equality with all other departments, its present footing. The Commissioner of Agriculture, an emergency officer authorized by Congress in 1862 to ensure food supplies during the rebellion, became the head of a department equal in rank twenty-seven years later, in 1889.

In the next addition to the structure, in 1903, the Department of Commerce and Labor was created by a compromise between two evenly matched Congressional groups, one of which wished to foster commerce and the other to advance the interests of the worker. In 1913 these two functions were divided between the Department of Commerce and a new Department of Labor.

Far more significant than the chronology of the development, however, is the analysis of the haphazard legislative processes by which the new departments came into being. Forever experimenting in new fields of governmental activity, Congress early in the nineteenth century hit upon the commission as the ideal administrative agency for its successive ventures. Set up at the rate of four or five during each session of Congress after about 1850, these scattered commissions were, at intervals of about twenty years, swept pell-mell into new departments.

When the Department of Commerce and Labor was established in 1903, there were transferred from the Treasury such widely scattered functions as the Lighthouse Establishment, Steamboat Inspection Service, Bureau of Navigation, Bureau of Standards, Coast and Geodetic Survey, Bureau of Immigration, and the Bureau of Statistics. The Interior Department contributed at the same time the Census Office, and the State Department the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce. Two independent agencies created since the organization of the Department of Agriculture in 1889 completed the new branch of the government. These were the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Fish Commission.

The record does not show that anyone suggested at the time that labor, commerce, lighthouses, fish, and statistics presented a rather wide scope of activities for a single department of the government. Yet this case epitomizes the system-atology of our governmental structure.

And the system explains that rarefied form of bureaucratic floundering witnessed to-day in the Bureau of Reclamation’s spending millions of dollars every year to bring into fertility thousands of acres of reclaimed land, while the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Farm Board send their agents to the far corners of the country preaching the gospel of acreage reduction for every major crop. It explains, too, the phenomena of the Forestry Service, Department of Agriculture, spending thousands of dollars monthly in conservation propaganda while the Wood Utilization Committee, under the Department of Commerce, searches intensively for new uses for lumber and new methods by which wood may be substituted for metals in industrial construction. Similar instances of two agencies of government working at cross-purposes might be cited in every department.

Never in our national history has there been a general realignment of functions according to a unified administrative plan.

IV

‘First the blade, and then the ear, then the full corn shall appear,’ runs the Scriptural genesis of bureaucracy: First a commission, then a bureau, eventually a new department. There is no other definition of the Federal province to-day. Those things which have been turned over to some bureau, commission, or office are matters of Federal concern; those which have not been delegated remain matters for the states. The political forces and processes which from time to time produced these new agencies of regulation go far toward explaining the present-day chaos in our constitutional theory.

As national development presented new problems, demand arose for a measure of governmental control. In the state legislatures the control efforts in all economic affairs were frustrated immediately by the argument that economic forces are not confined by state boundaries. The issue went, therefore, to Congress.

Unable to determine upon a new national policy in a single session, Congress created a commission to investigate and administer the new problem and report, with recommendations, at the ensuing session. In the next session the commission was continued for a second year, the report indicating that the new problem had many ramifications. Quite naturally it came about in the vast majority of cases that the division between those who wished to give the new problem over to the Federal government and those who wished it to remain in the old legal status was deep-rooted and about equal in point of votes. Thus a clearly defined national policy seldom was achieved. Gradually the commission expanded its activities from year to year, gaining increasing appropriations easily as a compromise between the two opposing Congressional groups, and so entrenched itself as a new independent establishment of the government. The Post Office began as an independent establishment in 1794, and was not recognized as a department until 1872. The Department of Agriculture began as a commission in 1862. The Department of Labor began as the Bureau of Labor, in the Interior Department, in 1884.

But it was not until the last half century that the national urge toward new commissions developed alarming symptoms. The revolt against the spoils system called into being the Civil Service Commission in 1882; the evils of railroad rebating gave birth to the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. These were among the first commissions, in the present-day meaning of the word. They were new agencies of government vested by Congress with quasi-judicial authority, created specifically to administer some particular phase of national life. The important departure in each case is found in the fact that such agencies are responsible to no elective or administrative authority; their spheres of operation are broadly defined by Congress in the respective organic acts; the appointive terms of the actual administrators are fixed by law. As a result, these administrators are, for all practical purposes, above political accountability. A department head who is found to be an unfaithful public servant may carry down a President. Or he may be brought to trial in the courts. But it is axiomaticin Washington that, right or wrong, an administrative commissioner is as strong — or weak — as the group which sustains him in Congress.

From about 1890, the mania for boards, commissions, and joint committees developed rapidly. Theodore Roosevelt’s administration brought nineteen new boards and fifty-seven new commissions into being between 1901 and 1909. President Taft’s four years recorded the launching of thirteen additional commissions and thirty-two new boards.

Counting every sort of board, commission, committee, joint committee, and special delegation, 492 independent administrative and legislative agencies were created between March 4, 1901, the beginning of the Roosevelt era, and March 4, 1929, the end of Mr. Coolidge’s administration.

Among the more important new agencies created in the pre-war years were the International Waterways Commission and the Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors, in 1902; the Joint Army and Navy Board, 1903; Crop Reporting Board, 1905 (since combined with the Department of Agriculture); Inland Waterways Commission, 1908; International Joint Commission, 1909; Federal Reserve Board, 1913; Federal Trade Commission, 1914; National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, 1915; Council for National Defense, United States Shipping Board, United States Tariff Commission, and Farm Loan Board, 1916.

With the outbreak of the World War, every agency of the government was suddenly burdened with added duties, and a score of new independent establishments were created almost overnight to administer the problem of sustaining about half the world with food and munitions. Between June 30, 1916, and June 30, 1918, the number of civil employees in the Federal service increased from 438,057 to 917,760, more than 109 per cent.

Purely military functions were lopped off rapidly after the Armistice, but the trail of post-war problems, administered by such agencies as the Veterans Bureau, Railroad Administration, Allied Debt Funding Commission, and the Alien Property Custodian, imposed upon the Federal machinery a burden which at once routed all hope of a return to the pre-war personnel basis. The low point of the post-war deflation of the government pay roll was reached in 1923, when the civil list was reduced to about 550,000 persons. Since that time it has swung upward rapidly to more than 700,000.

Meanwhile, the march of the commissions has continued. The Federal Power Commission came into being in 1920; the Federal Narcotic Control Board and the German Mixed Claims Commission in 1922; the American Battle Monuments Commission, the Personnel Classification Board, and the Mexican General Claims Commission in 1923. The next year brought out the International Water Commission, the Interdepartmental Board on Simplified Office Procedure, the Board of Tax Appeals, the Inland Waterways Corporation, the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, the Pueblo Lands Board, District of Columbia Memorial Commission, United States Commission for the Celebration of the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of George Washington, the Federal Oil Conservation Board, the Alaskan Game Commission.

Between the end of the Wilson administration, March 4, 1921, and the inauguration of President Hoover on March 4, 1929, no less than thirty-two new boards and sixty-two additional commissions were called into being, either by Congressional resolution or by Presidential proclamation. Many of these, of course, were of the fact-finding type, which have reported and disbanded. It is true, nevertheless, that in no fiscal year since 1920 has the number of independent establishments listed in the annual budget been fewer than in the preceding year.

Reduced to a sentence, all the facts mean simply that, over a period of some thirty years, a governmental establishment commanding a personnel of some 700,000 men and women faced, on the average, three major enterprises every two months which required the creation of special agencies.

Nothing could be more eloquent, of the need for reorganization to provide for the United States a twentieth-century system of government.

V

The history of bureaucracy demonstrates that there is about a newly established agency of government only one certainty — it will grow! The Department of Agriculture’s appropriation for 1889, its first year as a Cabinet branch, was $1,134,000. For the fiscal year 1930 the Department’s budget was $154,232,000. In 1912 the Children’s Bureau was established with an appropriation of $25,000; last year’s budget was $1,020,000. The Federal Trade Commission began in 1914 with $75,000, and last year got $1,289,000.

A stenographer here, a new survey there, an emergency enterprise, a special conference — the working out of this inevitable tendency in some twoscore agencies of the government accounted for the addition of some $15,000,000 to the Civil Service pay roll within the District of Columbia alone between 1928 and 1930.

The general administrative budget of the Secretary of the Interior, for example, which covers salaries, printing, and similar routine expenses, increased from $939,885 in 1928 to $950,500 in 1930. The same group of expenses in the Department of Justice were $4,197,498 in 1928, $4,624,000 in 1930. General appropriations for the Department of Labor were $712,454 in 1928, $735,922 in 1930.

Even larger increases are encountered in the Budget Bureau’s reports covering the various branches of the Navy Department. The Bureau of Supplies and Accounts was allotted $152,000,000 for ‘pay, subsistence, and transportation’ in 1930, against $141,000,000 in 1928. No increase in naval personnel had been authorized in the interim. The Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics received $31,000,000 in 1930, as against $22,000,000 in 1928. In the same interval civil salaries in the Navy Department increased from $315,000 to $400,000 a year.

Nor is the administrative branch the only yeasty agency. Between 1928 and 1930 the annual outlay for the legislative establishment increased from $16,402,048 to $19,520,299.

In the last analysis, full responsibility for this tendency toward constant uncoördinated expansion rests upon Congress. If the drain of ever-increasing pay rolls, traveling expenses, and printing bills ever is checked, Congress must do it. Congress holds the purse strings. Until both House and Senate awaken to the menace of bureaucracy, the nation can hope for no relief from its present burdensome taxes.

But a hint as to the sort of mountains which are yet to be removed is found in the recent remarks of Representative Samuel A. Kendall, of Pennsylvania, ranking Republican member of the House Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads. After a conference with President Hoover at the Executive Offices late in November, 1930, Mr. Kendall told newspapermen he had called to express his ‘uncompromising opposition to the efforts of the Postmaster-General to wipe out the postal deficit.’

‘I wish the deficit were twice as large,’ Mr. Kendall elaborated. ‘That would mean generally improved service, more people at work, more rural routes. If they want to save money, let them start on the Navy, or the Army, or the Department of Agriculture.’

‘Have you, as a member of the Committee, made any investigation to determine whether the postal budget might be reduced without impairing the service?’ Mr. Kendall was asked.

‘No,’ he replied without hesitation. ‘Congress created the Post Office Department, and when Congress decides to change it, it will do so without a lot of investigating.’

Let thoughtful citizens pause to consider that, under the existing seniority rules of the House, it is only a matter of time until Mr. Kendall will be chairman of the powerful Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, which appropriates about one billion dollars of public money every year.

He, perhaps, was a little more frank than most of his colleagues would have been in expressing their views for publication; but his statement reveals rather fairly the current mine-run mental processes of members of the House of Representatives on the grave national problem of bureaucracy. Mr. Kendall knows very well, of course, that the same argument is advanced every year by the chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee against reduction in the naval budget, by the chairman of the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry against any curtailment in the Department of Agriculture — and so on through the entire Federal budget. Meanwhile the postal deficit continues at about $80,000,000 annually.

If this order ever is to be changed, the people of the nation must speak for themselves. The nation has few spokesmen in Congress to-day.

VI

During the first two years of Mr. Hoover’s term, seventeen commissions, committees, or boards were established — which compares with forty-six new agencies set up during the last two years of Mr. Coolidge’s administration. The most important of the new Hoover commissions were the Federal Farm Board, the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, the President’s Commissions on Conservation of the Public Domain, the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, the National Business Survey Conference, the Emergency Committee on Employment, the National Negro Memorial Committee, and the Commission on Social Trends. Only one of these, the Farm Board, is a permanent agency of government. The remainder are fact-finding committees.

Once chided that soon he would appoint a new commission every day, President Hoover replied, ‘That is wrong — I shall probably need to appoint two a day.’

He explained: —

My conception of government leads me to the firm conviction that we have arrived at a time in our history when, because of the increasing complexity of our civilization and the delicacy of its adjustments, we must make doubly certain that we discover the truth. It is necessary that we make the fullest use of the best brains and the best judgment and the best leadership in our country before we determine upon policies which affect the welfare of a hundred and twenty million people. And I propose to do it. . . . By his position the President must, within his capacities, give leadership to the development of the moral, social, and economic forces outside of government which make for betterment of our country. If we are to curtail the extension of the arm of government into the affairs of our people we must do it by inspiration of individuals, by coöperation with voluntary organizations, that they, through their own initiative, through their own actions, should remedy abuse and initiate progress. Self-government comprises more than political institutions. It is more than municipal governments and state governments, legislatures and executive officers. The safeguard against oppressive invasion of government into the lives and liberties of our people is that we shall cure abuse and forward progress without government action. That is self-government in the highest form which democracy conceives it — self-government outside of government.

Early in the administration of President Harding, the then Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, interested himself in the problem of departmental reorganization, going so far in 1923 as to prepare a detailed outline of a ‘ functional grouping’ which he submitted later to the Joint Committee on Reorganization. The principle of ‘ functional grouping’ implies merely that the Secret Service Division is quite remote from the chief purposes of the Treasury Department, and that the administration of Alaska and Hawaii falls as naturally to the Department of Labor as to the Department of the Interior, to which both possessions now are assigned.

To use Mr. Hoover’s own language, the principle means simply ‘that all administrative activities of the same major purpose should be placed in groups under single-headed responsibility. . . . There is no worse agency of government than commissions and committees for executive action. Action requires undivided mind and undivided responsibility.'

Testifying before the Joint Committee on Reorganization on January 22, 1924, Mr. Hoover set forth that ‘our industries and business are badgered to death for duplicate information by a host of non-coördinating agencies.’ As evidence of how badly the functions of government are scattered, he offered a chart showing that the complete reorganization of the executive arm, to bring all related activities under unified responsibility, would necessitate the transfer of fourteen fragments of educational functions from three departments; six health fragments from five sources; eight aid-to-industry segments from four sources; and sixteen public-works agencies from five sources. As a means of coördinating all the scattered public-welfare activities of the government, he advocated the creation of an eleventh department, to be known as the Department of Education and Relief, with one assistant secretary for education, one for public health and child welfare, and a third for veterans’ affairs and pensions.

Significant from the standpoint of practical considerations is the fact that this programme does not open the question of the legitimate bounds of Federal activities. It confines itself instead to the single point that, whatever the Federal functions may be at a given date, the manifest duty of Congress and the President is to provide that they shall be administered efficiently, economically, and with that wholesome flexibility which is so sadly lacking in our bureaucratic organization to-day. But the question, for example, whether maternity aid is a proper function of the national government does not, for the moment, arise.

Mr. Hoover again urged reorganization — this time without details — in his first general message to Congress, on December 3, 1929. He said on that occasion: —

This subject has been under consideration for over twenty years. It was promised by both political parties in the recent campaign. It has been repeatedly examined by committees and commissions — Congressional, executive, and voluntary. . . . The conclusions of these investigations have been unanimous that reorganization is a necessity of sound administration, of economy, of more effective governmental policies, and of relief to the citizen from unnecessary harassment in his relations with a multitude of scattered governmental agencies. . . . There is no proper development and adherence to broad national policies and no central point where the searchlight of public opinion may concentrate itself. . . .

A second broad principle which should govern the reorganization, Mr. Hoover suggested, was that ‘all administrative activities should be separated from boards and commissions and placed under individual responsibility, while quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial and broadly advisory functions should be removed from individual authority and assigned to boards or commissions.’

These principles were put forward by the President as ‘the distillation of the common sense of generations.’

But broad schemes for reform had been presented to Congress many times before. With bills to bridge the Kissimmee at Okochobee, they have been referred to committee. And that, as the Congressman from North Carolina had said so often to the Congressman from South Carolina, was that. It was these considerations that prompted the President to add to his message: —

With this background of all previous experience I can see no hope for the development of sound reorganization of the government unless Congress be willing to delegate its authority over the problem (subject to defined principles) to the Executive, who should act upon approval of a joint committee of Congress; or with the reservation of powers of revision by Congress within some limited period adequate for its consideration.

To date Congress has taken no action on these recommendations. Neither has it submitted any other programme. Meanwhile, a new, and larger, national budget is upon the land — and the dead hand of bureaucracy is cooling in rigor mortis upon the throat of democracy. Before our very eyes, in the words of Lord Hewart of Bury, the Lord Chief Justice of England, in his recent slashing attack upon Great Britain’s bureaucracy, ‘ the whole system of self-government is being undermined, and that, too, in a way which no self-respecting people, if they were aware of the facts, would for a moment tolerate.’

To which there echoes everlastingly above the vulgar din of logrolling and back scratching on Capitol Hill the warning of Woodrow Wilson, uttered as long ago as 1912: —

The history of Liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the concentration of power, we are resisting the processes of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties.