In 1900, there were approximately 200,000 Federal employees operating 42 executive branch offices, departments, agencies, and commissions. In 1970, there are over 3 million Federal civilian employees and they are operating 239 separate such organizations. In the last decade alone, two new Cabinet departments and some 25 new offices, agencies, and commissions have been established.

FROM 40 DOMESTIC PROGRAMS TO 400

When President Eisenhower left office in 1961, there were roughly 40 domestic programs operated by the Federal Government. In January 1969, when President Lyndon Johnson returned to Texas, he left an array of well over 400 such programs on the books.

Thus, although we are just beginning to recognize it institutionally as a Nation, the Presidency of the United States has undergone a dramatic and qualitative change. The Federal Government now reaches into the smallest of neighborhoods with poverty programs and VISTA volunteers, and the most intimate of personal relationships with welfare programs now proposed to encourage mothers to leave their children and go to work, and birth control programs to limit the size of American families.

PRESIDENT NEEDS NEW DOMESTIC AUTHORITY

In the domestic area, I have long believed the President needs new authority. The experience of the Johnson administration, in which I was privileged to serve, provides numerous examples of the difficulty that even a strong President had in effectively operating the various programs of the Federal Government.

TWO EXAMPLES CITED

Let me give two examples of the need for executive coordination and evaluation:

If the President were to decide as a matter of national policy that every man and woman in this Nation capable of working and desirous of working would be given the necessary training and employment, the intelligent implementation of that decision would involve a host of Federal programs and agencies. There are a number of manpower programs in the Labor Department and the Office of Economic Opportunity. There are vocational education and work-study programs in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The Veterans Administration is deeply involved in the training and rehabilitation of veterans for fruitful employment. The Department of Defense now has a major project-Project 100,000-to assist in job training for soldiers about to be released to civilian life. And we cannot overlook the importance of such agencies as the Economic Development Administration to assist depressed areas, or the Department of Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in their roles in the area of job discrimination. No national policy to train and employ every American can be successful unless all of these programs and many others conducted by the Federal Government are planned and coordinated so that they operate effectively together.

COORDINATING PROGRAMS

Senator RIBICOFF. On that, that is very interesting. One of the problems that concerns the Finance Committee the most in the President's new welfare program, which I am for, is just this, the uncertainty in our minds as to how you are going to pull together all these training and employment programs to make them work if you are going to put people to work or increase their skills. This is a good example of why it is important to have some coordinating agency to pull them together, because they cannot do it now. And then, of course, you are not going to, and many of these programs will fail.

SOME PROGRAMS NOT WORKING

I look on the domestic council, too, to eliminate many programs. I would say of the many programs that President Johnson passed with best intentions, some are not working. Some are successful, some are not. There should be an ongoing place in the Federal Government where you evaluate those programs and if they are no good, get rid of them. If they should be downgraded, downgrade them. If they should be made bigger or better, let us do it. But at the present time, you pass a program and Congress does it on an individual programatic approach instead of an overall approach, and we keep on passing all these programs, we spend all this money, and neither Congress nor the Executive has a place where these programs are being evaluated. I think that we are wasting billions of dollars in money that we do not have that we could be using for better advantage because our machinery of government is so antiquated, both on a congressional level and an executive level. That is why I was so anxious to get such a program into law.

Mr. CALIFANO. I agree 100 percent, Mr. Chairman.

PROBLEMS TO BE SOLVED

One other example in that connection might be helpful. Let us assume that the Nation decides as a matter of national policy that we want to provide the optimum human development for every child from the moment of conception through the early school years. What is the right mixture of programs to achieve this goal? Medical and dental care and education for the children are obviously involved. The importance of the family as a basic unit of society must be considered and in that connection it may be essential at least to provide employment for the father, to say nothing of the families plagued by alcoholism and drug addiction. Certainly clean and sanitary housing is a part of the problem. And with housing, there are problems of transportation to work, sewer systems and a variety of public services.

A COMPLICATED MATTER

To achieve the best cost-effective mixture of programs is an enormously complicated matter. Obviously, once again an array of Federal Government agencies and programs would be involved. The men operating these programs-particularly Cabinet officers and agency heads for the most part regard themselves as peers. The bureauc

racies over which they preside are significantly more parochial than the problems they are trying to solve. This is not because the men who sit in our Cabinet or run our Government agencies are ill-intentioned; it is because they are human beings with enormously difficult problems within their own departments and with the inevitable tendency to become loyal to the bureaucracies which they run.

Theoretically all of these agencies report to the President and he coordinates their efforts. More often than not, these organizations, particularly the independent agencies, become independent fiefdoms, responsive to their own relatively limited constituencies.

PRESIDENTIAL LOYALTY

In this day and age, a President needs both the organizational mechanism and the staff directly responsible and loyal to him to help in the establishment of priorities, the setting of national policy in the domestic area, the planning of programs and then the implementation of those programs.

REORGANIZATION PLAN IS A SIGNIFICANT STEP

Equally important, the Budget Bureau must be strengthened and its role broadened as an instrument of presidential policy. I believe that the reorganization plan proposed by the President represents a significant step in achieving both a stronger Budget Bureau in its proposed Office of Management and Budget, and a central staff to help develop and implement national policy in its Domestic Council.

DANGER OF OVERCENTRALIZATION OF POWER

Superficially, these thoughts may appear to be contrary to the general popular trend toward further and further decentralization, and I am not unaware of the danger of overcentralization of power in terms of individual freedom. We must recognize, however, that some problems do not lend themselves primarily or even essentially to local solution. Mass transit problems do not honor arbitrary jurisdictional lines drawn on the basis of nineteenth century geography or political issues. The congestion in New York City, as you well know, Mr. Chairman, cannot be solved without acting as well in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. Nor can the problem merely be left to the Mass Transit Administration in the Department of Transportation. We are all too well aware of the enormously complicated social problems such as housing, location of industry, educational facilities and hospitals, that are an integral part of mass transit problems.

AN INTENSE NATIONAL CONCERN

The environment is currently a matter of intense national concern. This certainly is an area where purely local action or action by a single department or agency is likely to be marginal at best. The rivers of our Nation run through several States, cities, and counties. A presidential program can no more clean part of a river than a doctor can cure leukemia in part of a blood stream. We know now that air moves

in air sheds, which unfortunately have not been informed of jurisdictional lines the Pilgrims drew 200 years ago. Once again, pollution cannot be handled by one department, such as Interior. There are major problems involving, for example, American business and the Commerce Department; health and safety, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; legal enforcement issues and the Department of Justice.

The gentlemen who run these departments, as well-intentioned as they may be, must have a higher authority to whom they can realistically look for guidance and coordination. I believe that the proposed Domestic Council combined with a strengthened Office of Management and Budget can help fulfill this role.

APPROVAL OF PLAN URGED

I would urge this committee to recommend approval of the President's proposed reorganization plan. The plan may not have every provision that you, Mr. Chairman, on the basis of your wide experience in public life as a Governor, a Cabinet officer, a Senator and Congressman, or I, on the basis of my experience as a White House aide, would like to see. On the whole, however, I believe the pluses so far outweight any minor deficiencies that the plan should be approved. For myself, I might have wished the President had gone much further beyond mechanics and into substance.

EXAMPLES OF WHAT THIS NATION CAN DO

World War I and World War II and to a lesser degree the Korean war are examples of what this Nation can do when it truly makes a great national commitment to solve its problems. The only times our Nation has been willing to put into the hands of the President extraordinary powers are in times of war, when our Nation has been endangered from outside forces. I have increasingly become convinced that the problems that our Nation faces at home are so severe that the President should seek and use extraordinary powers to deal with them, to allocate resources for our domestic needs, to reorganize Federal departments and agencies and to reshape domestic programs. I believe our national security is no less threatened by our domestic crisis at home than it was during those earlier periods of international crisis. We must, on an urgent basis, face up to the fact that our President may need extraordinary powers to deal with our emergency domestic needs and problems, if we are to have a Government responsive to all the people.

PRESIDENTIAL POWER

It is a shocking commentary on the greatest democracy in the history of mankind that the President's power to commit our Nation to new wars and foreign alliances is greater than his power to rebuild cities, modernize schools or medical delivery systems or clean up the environment. No greater contrast exists to support those who charge that the inverted nature of our national priorities has reached Alicein-Wonderland proportions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator RIBICOFF. I thank you very much, Mr. Califano. Your statement reflects your experience that you had working with President Johnson. And it is certainly qualified by a pragmatic expert. I am sorry, too, that we met today with the shadow of House disapproval hanging over this proposal.

Thank you very much for consenting to come here. I do appreciate it.

Mr. CALIFANO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator RIBICOFF. The President's Advisory Council on Executive Organization-I do not know what members are here.

We do appreciate you gentlemen coming here. I do not know whether it is a useless exercise in view of the action yesterday by the House committee which can kill you dead without any help or assistance from us here.

I like what you did. I personally believe it very important if we are going to help solve our problems. There is a feeling of deep frustration in the country from young people, who feel no one listens to them and no one understands what is going on. I think what you are trying to do here is make the Presidency a more meaningful instrument that can work in the complex problems of our domestic life today. I am sorry you come here under a shadow, which we did not place here.

STATEMENT OF ROY L. ASH, CHAIRMAN, PRESIDENT'S ADVISORY COUNCIL ON EXECUTIVE ORGANIZATION; ACCOMPANIED BY ANDREW ROUSE, ACTING EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR; JOHN B. CONNALLY, MEMBER; GEORGE P. BAKER, MEMBER; AND ROGER A. GOLDE, SENIOR STAFF ASSOCIATE

Mr. Asн. Mr. Chairman, we appreciate all your comments; we appreciate them very much.

Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, we welcome the opportunity to appear before your subcommittee in support of Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1970.

Before proceeding further I would like to make it clear that I am speaking on behalf of all of the members of the President's Advisory Council on Executive Organization, and I introduce those with me.

Hon. John B. Connally, who I am sure you know well, and Dr. George P. Baker on my left.

Walter Thayer also intended to be here, but he is now suffering a bad case of pneumonia and his doctor ordered him not to travel. He asked me to express his deep disappointment at not being here today.

Our Council supports the President's plan without reservation. We believe the plan represents a significant opportunity for improving the functioning of not only the President's Office but that of the whole executive branch.

Mr. Chairman, I am ready to read my full statement, or, if you prefer I will submit the statement for the record and get right on with the dialog.

Senator RIBICOFF. I think it would be better. Let us put the entire statement in the record as if read.

(See exhibit 3, p. 71.)