constituency encouraging proliferation at the local level; and (7) the overhead costs are increased. A community, unified in its approach to manpower problems, knowledgeable concerning the various programs, their funding arrangements and eligibility rules, skilled in the art of grantsmanship and competently represented in Washington, has dangled before it an impressive variety of federal supports, some of which are distributed by fixed formula and others requiring community initiative. The community which lacks sophistication about the maze of programs and regulations may never discover the handles that turn on the spigots of federal aid. For instance, funds for outreach can be sought from nine manpower program sources, adult basic education from ten (in addition to general education sources), prevocational training and skill training from ten and work experience from five. On-the-job training can be subsidized by five programs and supportive services can be funded from nine sources. Income maintenance is also available to participants under nine programs. The eligibility rules, application procedures, allocation formulas, expiration dates and contracting arrangements vary as widely as the funding sources. There may be, therefore, little relation between need and the amount of funds that the community may actually receive. Though most of the funds appropriated under the programs discussed in this paper are distributed by the federal government on the basis of a fixed formula, the law also provides that unused funds available under programs requiring initial local application can be redistributed at the discretion of the administrator. As a result, some communities have received more than their share of funds on the basis of their population and need, while others-particularly rural areas-which have not acquired the technical expertise to file applications have been slow in getting their share of manpower funds. Even communities which master the art of grantsmanship find it difficult to piece together effective and comprehensive programs. The different sources of funds place serious, if not insurmountable, obstacles to integrated local manpower programs. The project-by-project approval, typical of the new programs, is cumbersome and time consuming. It results in delays which may discourage clients and in dissipation of well-conceived projects due to the loss of carefully recruited and scarce instructors and other personnel. However, without the project-by-project approach, the federal government has little means of controlling quality of services and assuring that the most needy are served. At the local level, the initiative for developing programs can come from diverse sources. On-the-job training may be promoted in a community by federal, state, local and private contracting agencies. Adult basic education courses may be initiated and the needed funds sought by the schools, welfare agencies, vocational rehabilitation counselors, community action agencies and public or private contractors of demonstration projects. Skill training may be administered either by the public schools or by private educational institutions, but it may be initiated by various agencies, including local public employment offices, public or private welfare organizations, community action agencies and vocational rehabilitation agencies. The other programs may have a similar multiplicity of sponsors. Some coordination is provided by the traditional role of the state employment service and the public schools. The former is the primary recruiter for MDTA training courses for out-of-school Neighborhood Youth Corps and for men's Job Corps centers. Inschool Neighborhood Youth Corps projects, most adult basic education and skill training are handled by public schools. But other local participants are numerous. The multiplication of public and private manpower agencies and contractors at the local level cannot be attributed solely to the federal programs. Fragmented local governments are engrained in our political system, but the multitude of federal funding sources tends to make a bad situation worse. Program proliferation and multiplicity of funding sources have also created serious inequities among the clients. The "pay structure," if it may be called that, provided under the various programs is especially in need of revision and can best be accomplished by establishing a single funding source. Different pay is provided, for example, for in-school youth under the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the College Work-Study Program (now in the Higher Education Act of 1965, but originally also under EOA), and the Vocational Education Act. The secondary school youth enrolled under NYC receives an hourly rate of $1.25 and can work for a maximum of 15 hours a week. The pay provisions of the Vocational Education Act are more frugal, limiting monthly pay to $45 and to $350 a year. The Work-Study Program leaves it to each participating college to determine the rate of pay, and in some communities the locally determined hourly rate paid to the college student may be lower than the pay received by his high-school brother under NYC. The school dropout enrolling in the Neighborhood Youth Corps may receive $40 for a maximum of 32 hours a week, but his parent with several more dependents qualifying for enrollment under the Work Experience Program (also part of the Economic Opportunity Act) may receive less in a number of states. On the other hand, the same parent participating in an MDTA course, would receive a weekly allowance equal to the average state unemployment insurance benefit (U. S. average $40) plus $10 for expenses and $5 per dependent up to a maximum of four. The out-of-school youth with less than two years labor force attachment, who qualifies for an MDT course, receives a uniform rate of $20 weekly, but, if he is referred to the course from the NYC rolls, he is eligible to receive the weekly unemployment insurance rate in the state. Unification of the federal manpower program funding sources would not eliminate local fragmentation but it would shift federal influence from encouragement of proliferation to encouragement of local consolidation. Despite the administrative difficulties, the few independent evaluations that have been made of some of the manpower programs have shown the benefits to exceed the costs by a substantial margin. The question is not the worth of the manpower programs as a whole but the improvements which can be made. Only the federal agencies and Congress can bring order and coherence out of the existing chaos. Experiments in Coordination The difficulties in administering manpower programs must not be overstated. Faced by the practical necessities of day-to-day operation, administrators at federal, state and local levels have developed machinery, both formal and informal, to coordinate the efforts of the numerous agencies and institutions involved. None has provided a complete answer because coordination is at most a second best solution. It is difficult for equals to coordinate equals. While all believe in cooperation, many define it as "you coo while I operate." Yet, without the efforts which have been made, there could have been no manpower policy. The experience is worth examining to assess the need for a more satisfactory approach. Coordination-Federal Level The most effective coordination efforts at the federal level have been ad hoc arrangements between what one subcabinet officer has called the "loyal underground of civil servants." The least effective have been those at the cabinet level where Congress has affixed conflicting grants of interagency supremacy and where search for personal preeminence is added to jurisdictional defenses. In between are a number of formal interagency agreements which are as vulnerable as any unenforceable two-party treaties but which tend to survive because they are mutually convenient. Coordinating mechanisms have proliferated even more rapidly than manpower programs. Title I of MDTA was viewed by the principal architect of the legislation, Senator Joseph S. Clark, as giving the Secretary of Labor a special position as manpower advisor to the President, separate from his departmental duties. To enhance this role, the President's Committee on Manpower was created in 1964 by Executive Order. This Committee is chaired by the Secretary of Labor and consists of 14 cabinet members and independent agency heads concerned with various manpower policies. Another Executive Order created the Interagency Committee on Education to coordinate various education programs, many of which overlap into the manpower field. The Economic Opportunity Act assigned to the Director of OEO the responsibility for coordinating all anti-poverty efforts. The Economic Opportunity Council, another cabinet level committee, was created by law to perform the task for the federal agencies while the community action agencies were to coordinate local activities. The authorizing legislation charged the new Department of Housing and Urban Development with the responsibility for coordinating all federal programs in urban areas. In addition, HUD has executive authority to convene ad hoc task forces from among federal agencies to deal with specific urban problems. The Department of Agriculture has similar convening authority and its Bureau of Community Development has sought legislative coordinating responsibility for rural areas. Under the 1966 amendments to the Economic Opportunity Act, agency heads were directed to coordinate through the President's Committee on Manpower "all activities relating to the training of individuals for the purpose of improving and restoring employability." And the proposed Manpower Services Act, as it passed the Senate, would have given the Secretary of Labor an even broader coordinating role. The coordination problem is neither new nor exclusive to the manpower field. Attempts to coordinate the efforts of federal agencies with overlapping responsibilities have a long and frustrating history and little record of success. The latest entry in the history of Congressional and Presidential coordinating efforts is a proposal by Senator Edmund S. Muskie for a National Intergovernmental Affairs Council, chaired by the President, to coordinate all agencies and departments and resolve intergovernmental conflicts." By the end of 1966, the coordinating mechanisms established by Congress and the Administration in the field of manpower showed no greater promise than those of the past. The Office of Economic Opportunity concentrated largely upon its operating responsibilities, and the Housing and Urban Department, preoccupied with putting its new house in order, had not taken any discernible action affecting other agencies. The President's Committee on Manpower has made an important contribution in the encouragement of joint funding of several local manpower programs, but, paradoxically, its most impressive accomplishments have been in promoting local rather than federal coordination. 7 Senator Edmund S. Muskie, Press Release on S. 3509, November 16, 1966. Obstacles to effective coordination stem not only from the natural tendency of officials to guard their respective jurisdictions, but also from outside groups with special interests in the activities of various departments and bureaus. Even at the intra-agency level, private and public lobbies provide independent power bases for bureaus which make them nearly invulnerable to control by their own agency heads. For instance, the Secretary of Labor, in 1964, established a Manpower Administration to consolidate the activities of the Bureau of Employment Security, the Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training, and the Office of Manpower, Automation and Training (the Neighborhood Youth Corps, Kennedy-Javits and Nelson-Scheuer, programs were added later), all sharing responsibility in various manpower programs. A management consulting firm's recommendation that the separate bureaus be replaced by an integrated functional organization died aborning. Opposition by the Interstate Conference of Employment Security Directors and the Building Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, which have close ties with BES and BAT, respectively, and influence with Congressmen and Senators, was sufficient to suggest that the recommendations not be taken seriously. On the pragmatic level of day-to-day operation, a number of ad hoc interdepartmental agreements have been negotiated. The intent of the agreements is essentially to protect agency jurisdictions and as all treaties among equals, these agreements are subject to revocation by either party. Nevertheless, the agreements have provided for joint operation of programs, transfer of funds or the purchase and exchange of services. Possibly, most significant was the agreement negotiated in December 1966 between OEO and the Labor Department which delegated to the latter the operation of the Kennedy-Javits and the Nelson-Scheuer programs in addition to the Neighborhood Youth Corps, already administered by Labor. The agreement provided that regulations governing the above programs would be issued jointly by the two agencies and that local projects will be planned and operated through community action agencies. Other examples are the agreements negotiated between OEO and Labor for the employment service to recruit and screen Job Corpsmen and "outstation" counseling and placement personnel in neighborhood centers. More important in light of the conclusion that multiple federal spending sources are central to the coordination problem are about 200 agreements, equally divided between joint funding and coupling of contracts for specific projects. Under the former, one or more federal funding sources transfer funds to a single agency which acts as sponsor of a local project. Conversely, the coupled contracts involve negotiations by a local agency with a number of funding sources for the operation of a single project. An example of joint funding is project TRY in New York City involving the transfer of funds from Labor and OEO to HEW, the latter contracting |