system, thus enabling communities to allocate resources more efficiently and responsively to the total needs of individuals and families. The people served will have their needs assessed comprehensively, and have access to a full range of services. As a result, we hope, they will feel that the machinery of government is working to help, not frustrate, them.

The task of fitting the roles of service providers into a comprehensive whole will be painstaking and time-consuming even for a limited range of services and in a limited geographical area. As the number and geographic scope of included services both enlarge, the necessary planning will become still more complex. And yet there can be no hope of building service networks without gaps or overlaps yet capable of reaching all those eligible unless we acquire the planning capacity necessary to establish clear definitions of authority, responsibility, and territory. The proposed legislation should help to develop the knowledge and experience needed to undertake this final stage in the creation of a truly adequate human services system.

DECENTRALIZATION

IF HEW IS to be of maximum use to the front-line forces engaged in health and education and welfare services, we must not only make our support of those forces as adaptable as possible to community needs, but also see to it that our support is as accessible as possible. It follows that our support functions must be moved up as close to the front as we can get them. This in turn requires that we place increasing reliance on our regional offices.

Under the polite but persistent prodding of the Assistant Secretary for Community and Field Services, a number of concrete steps have been taken to strengthen the regional offices and accelerate the process of decentralization. For example, the newly established Project Grant Review and Control System gives. the Regional Directors an opportunity to review and concur in selected centralized grants before awards are decided. In addition to providing advance knowledge of pending grant awards, the system allows the Regional Directors to hold up for further consideration any proposed grant that seems inconsistent with regional priorities. Even this system, however, is just a precursor to the more effective management systems needed by, and currently under consideration for, the regional offices as stepped-up decentralization takes place.

During the next year, assuming favorable OMB and congressional action, we will expand the management authorities of the Regional Directors. Such staff functions as personnel support, financial management, program analysis, program evaluation, management information, and public affairs will be strengthened. The Regional Directors will also play a larger role in determining how our evaluation and research and demonstration resources are deployed. To increase their leadership capacity, I have asked that their staffing be substantially increased and that they be provided the funds required to support their added functions.

The Assistant Secretary for Administration and Management has identified decentralization as the most important step we can take in our program to improve the management of the Department and has established it as his No. 1 priority for the year.

Under the President's Federal assistance review (FAR) program, we have identified 63 programs suitable for decentralization, but the agencies report that they have so far decentralized only 15 of these. We are determined to quicken the pace in the months ahead, and I am holding each agency head responsible for insuring that decentralization is being aggressively pursued and accomplished in his agency. The final phase of the FAR effort will call upon key individuals who know the process of decentralization and who will be charged with assisting the agencies in accomplishing it.

Relations With General-Purpose Government

One of the most important objectives of decentralization is the opportunity for our regional offices to work more closely with units of State and local generalpurpose government.

Increasingly, HEW must look to these general-purpose units for leadership, advocacy, accountability, and comprehensive planning. As we devise service strategies that cut across traditional agency lines and involve private organizations as well as established public service agencies, we shall come to depend more and more on the participation of general-purpose governments. Only with their help can we solve the horizontal coordination problems at the State and local levels that have for so long been aggravated by our own vertical, categorical relationships with our counterpart agencies.

The list of our present contacts with general-purpose government is already quite considerable, and the Office of Field Management is rapidly extending it:

Building on past experience with the model cities program, the Department is participating in the current experiments known as "Planned Variations." Capacity-building grants to general-purpose governments, a part of last year's services integration demonstrations, will be stepped up this year.

⚫ State and local governments are playing an increasing role in our Operational Planning System.

HEW personnel are serving in State and local governments in seven States, and these contacts will be expanded under the new authority of the Intergovernmental Personnel Act of 1970.

The combined effects of these efforts will be measurably to enhance the ability of the Department to respond to real needs where they exist and to make us more open to the influence of citizens and their elected officials.

ENCOURAGING CHANGE

LIFTING THE red-tape burden, simplifying the grant-in-aid system, and

increasing the capacity of general-purpose governments to integrate services will, over time, make sense out of the relations between HEW and the institutions which bring needed services to people. But how, one may ask—if we do all this-how can HEW still exercise leadership in promoting important national interests?

Insofar as the question implies that effective national leadership depends on multitudes of categories and mountains of paper, it rests on a fallacy. One welldesigned categorical grant-in-aid program can be effective in promoting a defined national interest. Each of several such programs may evoke a positive response. But as the number grows, a point is reached at which the Federal leverage exerted by any given program has been almost completely dissipated. Categorical grant proliferation, therefore, accomplishes no more on behalf of national interests than could be accomplished by an unconditional transfer of resources, minus the amount eaten up by ballooning overhead, prolonged delays, and endless aggravation.

Reducing the number of categorical grants, therefore, will restore, not weaken, national leadership. Fewer categorical grant programs, appropriately divided between the formula and the project approach and with a sharp focus on carefully defined areas of urgent national concern, could exert greater impact than the unwieldy profusion we now have. At the same time, funds would be freed for allocation to State and local governments through less restrictive block grants or through special revenue sharing for broadly defined purposes. The broad definition of a program, in any case, does not preclude the protection of particular national concerns like civil rights or financial accountability through such specific provisions as those contained in our education special revenue sharing legislation.

There are ways of exercising national leadership, moreover, that do not depend on pulling strings attached to Federal funds. One affirmative, noncoercive way is through the kind of capacity-building assistance that our Allied Services legislation would provide. Another relies on providing expert technical assistance to State, local, and voluntary agencies. Significant contributions can also be made by a system of communications capable of disseminating new ideas and enlarging awareness of national concerns. Having already discussed the first of these approaches, I should now like to say something more about the latter two.

TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE

ONE OF THE good results of simplifying the categorical grant structure is that hundreds of HEW people now employed in tending grant-in-aid machinery can be liberated for constructive roles in rendering technical assistance to service providers.

The proposed renewal strategy of the Office of Education is a good example. This strategy will create for the first time a nationwide cadre of education extension agents working directly with local school people, just as agricultural extension agents work directly with farmers-to help them understand and test new ideas, products, and processes.

Equally important in the education renewal strategy will be a new approach to helping local communities assess their own needs and then plan and carry out a comprehensive, long-term effort to change education. HEW will seek to make sure that all those responsible for renewal in each school district have access to the best available ideas and products from which to choose. No longer will it be necessary for a school district to deal with a myriad of Federal guidelines, applications, and funding patterns; time formerly spent on grantsmanship will be freed for improving the education of our children. The result should be a process of reform and renewal in hundreds of school districts and a workable system for installing the best knowledge we have where it is most needed.

A similar capability is called for by our various approaches to the integration of social services, as well as by our efforts to rationalize the delivery of health services. Concurrently with the award of limited funds for planning Health Maintenance Organizations, for example, we are also training specialists who will be able to advise the sponsors of such organizations on the pros and cons of the various options open to them.

Based largely on our regional offices, such technical assistance efforts will complement the President's general as well as special revenue-sharing proposals.

COMMUNICATIONS/PUBLIC AFFAIRS

WHETHER WE ARE trying to raise the level of debate over major issues, report performance, deflate overblown expectations, or bring the latest news from R. & D. to practitioners, we are dependent on communications of one kind or another. We need good communications to increase understanding, to gain support, and to effect change.

In many respects, any distinction between our internal and external communications of HEW is artificial. This is true both because we are trying to say the same things to each other and to our fellow citizens and because our means of communication are just as much external as internal. It is my guess, for example, that most of the people in HEW learn more about what the Department is doing from the news media than through any departmental channel. When we think of communication as a means of creating understanding, gaining support, and

producing change, we should be thinking, therefore, of all the means of communication at our disposal or within our reach.

Measured against the task, HEW's communications system has been woefully weak. For this reason, I have raised the rank of the person in charge of HEW's communications to Assistant Secretary and have asked him to build a communications system that will do the job we need to have done.

This new system, now falling into place, is based on this reality: The size, complexity, diversity, and geographic dispersion of the Department's activities make the centralization of communication activities impossible as well as undesirable.

What is needed is a strong coordinative effort with a modicum of functional control. The responsibility for directing this effort resides with the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs. The Communications Council which he has established is the place within the Department where communications components are melded into a single plan addressing all of HEW's programmatic priorities and paralleling the Department's Operational Planning System.

A primary goal of the new public affairs management system is to communicate the interrelated-and often mutually supportive-nature of the Department's programs to their direct beneficiaries, to departmental constituent groups, to the general public, to the State, local, and private institutions that administer many HEW programs, and to the Department's employees.

A "COALITION" NOT A "CONGLOMERATE"

A FAIR MEASURE of the communications system's success will be the degree to which it dents the public's persistent perception of HEW as a confusing conglomerate instead of as a viable instrument for achieving social progress.

The fact is that the interrelationships among our programs and activities are far more significant than their divergences. The grouping of these functions and activities in a single Department is not haphazard or arbitrary. We are not a "conglomerate." We are a "coalition."

Take a random list of our most urgent concerns: Poverty, drug abuse, alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, mental retardation, child development, the aging, rehabilitation of the handicapped, or any other. Nothing on such a list falls within the exclusive province of any one HEW operating agency. None is exclusively a "health" problem, or an "education" problem, or a "welfare" problem. All involve aspects of each.

Consider mental retardation: Genetics, biochemistry, infectious diseases, psychiatric and psychological diagnosis, residential care, day care, training, special education, public education, teacher training-each has a part either in the prevention of mental retardation, the care of the retarded, or their maximum selfdevelopment.

Or drug abuse: Psychopharmacology, diagnosis and treatment of personality disorders and deficiencies, education as to the dangers of drug abuse, community