You also said that OMB must protect the policy of the President, even though it is in opposition to the Cabinet Secretaries' wishes. I agree with that. And that the OMB is always subject to appeal of the Cabinet Secretaries to the President, and must defend its decision. That is true.

I have already commented on the Office of Domestic Council, which I opposed on the basis that it would set up a politically appointed group of about 65 or 70, that would not be amenable to congressional inquiry. They are the ones that are setting the policy which is eventually handed to OMB and to the President. I admit that you do not get to that problem by making the Office of Director of the OMB subject to Senate confirmation.

Now, on the last page of your statement, Mr. Price, you say: "I have no doubt that Congress, by tightening up its procedures and increasing the ability of its own leadership to coordinate their legislative and financial decisions, can exercise more responsible control over our national policies."

I agree with that statement. And I assure that you are referring to the so-called Ullman committee that has been established for the consideration of the congressional budget.

Mr. PRICE. I am just generally familiar with the fact that it has been established. I do not yet know what its recommendations are, if they have been made.

Chairman HOLIFIELD. They have not made any final recommendations yet. But they are studying this very problem that you have brought up. I certainly am in favor of Congress doing that.

There is one more point I want to make, and that is that the Office of Management and Budget is subject to 67 different statutory obligations. So it is not altogether a staff agency. And its functions, while you may not call them operational, if a man goes into the surgical ward of a hospital and he gets half of his stomach cut away, I would call that an operation. This is exactly what happens today to a bill of the Congress. When we send down an inquiry to the Office of Management and Budget, they perform an operation upon that law, and they say that it is not in accord with the policy of the President.

So without putting too much emphasis on the word "operation," I would say that the OMB is no longer just a staff agency, it has 67 statutory obligations to perform, and it has become an operating agency on the programs and the appropriations of the Congress far superior to that of any Cabinet officer, because it operates across the board, and it operates with finality when it operates. It would be naive to consider that the President knows of all the wash-up and the anesthesia that is applied right before the operation, because they do all of the groundwork and analyzing which they should do, of course.

So OMB has become a very powerful agency, and the effect of its actions goes much further in my opinion because of its power of allocation, and because of its power of approval of legislation, than heretofore.

The President does need this type of service, I am inclined to believe, because the job is becoming increasingly complicated. That is the case both for the Congress and the President, and we all have to have more help, I think, than we have at the present time.

Mr. Roback has some questions that he wishes to ask.

Mr. ROBACK. Dean Price, would you say that most of the scholars, academic scholars in public administration, are executive oriented?

Mr. PRICE. I really do not think I would say that today, Mr. Roback. I think one might have said that 20 years ago. You are asking me for an impression of what people in the political science trade are like now in their ideas. I think that many of them are much less interested in the executive side of government, and much more interested in the congressional side than was true 20 years ago.

I do not know how, though, one could give a very definite answer to this. Because I would be inclined to argue that in a more sophisticated sense than the terms I have just been using, there is somewhat more recognition today that you cannot distinguish between the two very well. The most important things that happen are interactions between the legislative process and the executive process. But I do not think today you have among scholars the sort of uncritical attitudes that the legislative process should be ridiculed in the terms that Will Rogers used to use, or that the President is the great white knight who is leading us away from political corruption. That was really an attitude of the late Roosevelt era.

Mr. ROBACK. Dr. Mansfield, do you have any comment on that? Dr. MANSFIELD. I would support what Dean Price had said, or go a little further.

It seems to me, from my acquaintance with teachers in the American Government, that the idealization of the executive branch is of a previous generation, and not now very noticeable.

Chairman HOLIFIELD. I might remark, I think Dean Price mentioned the fact that a lot of the younger scholars and academicians are not so executive oriented. But unfortunately, we do not have any those young ones before us today.

of

Mr. ROBACK. When you say, Dean Price, that the budget director should be the President's man, by that argument should we not logically also have to have the Controller General appointed by the Congress?

Mr. PRICE. It seems to me, Mr. Roback, that the only problem about that is a legal and constitutional problem.

I think the General Accounting Office is clearly a congressional staff agency, I think that if there were any real interference with its operations, or any way in which the Executive could interfere with it, it would be a disgrace that ought to be stopped immediately. I would not know how to get around the legal logic that led to the President's appointment of the Comptroller General. And of course I think the 15-year term is the one thing which guarantees that once the Comptroller General is appointed, the Executive will not interfere with him.

It seems to me that to have two clearly distinct staff agencies, one on the Executive and one on the congressional side, mutually independent, is a very effective relationship.

Chairman HOLIFIELD. You do not necessarily think, then, because Mr. Staats was confirmed by the Senate, that the confirmation was a degrading process?

Mr. PRICE. I am glad that it was my colleague and not I that used that phrase.

Mr. HORTON. He did not use it, I was the one that used it. I am concerned that we are degrading the House of Representatives by letting the Senate confirm all these appointments.

Mr. PRICE. I do not propose on this issue to get caught in the middle. Mr. HORTON. That is the reason I did not want to attribute the word "degrading" to my colleague, I did not want to offend his tender sensibilities.

Mr. PRICE. This is another case of the political authorities letting the civil servants take the responsibility for their own differences.

Mr. ROBACK. The Chairman emphasized in his opening statement on Monday when you were not present that historically the central budgeting has been something which serves the needs of the Congress. Too often, I think, there is a sense in the testimony that this budget is now a proprietary item of the President. Conceivably you could revert to the process of agencies submitting their budgets to the Congress directly. And there is some tendency in this direction, not only in requiring submissions simultaneously from the agencies to the Congress, but in proposals that are now pending, for the creation of an office of budget in the Congress.

Now, regardless of the merit of those proposals, is there any reason to suppose that the budget is any more the President's effort than it is that of the Congress?

Is it not really something that is a recommendation to the Congress, and that the Congress has to be in a sense more interested in the budget than the President is?

Mr. JONES. Are you addressing me, Mr. Roback?

Mr. ROBACK. I am addressing all of you.

I might say that Mr. Jones, having been in the Bureau, is a biased witness. And I say that in the sense that people in the Bureau look upon congressional demands as a kind of nuisance.

Is that not so, Roger?

Mr. JONES. No, sir; that is not so; definitely not so.

Chairman HOLIFIELD. We will withdraw the remark that you are a biased witness. You may have strong views as a result of your affiliation with the budget, but I would never let that remark stand in the record that you are a biased man, because we have too much respect for you.

Mr. ROBACK. Mr. Chairman, it is a bias that derives from loyalty to an institution.

Mr. JONES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for those comments.

I take no exception to Mr Roback's use of the word he used. I think biases of a sort are created over a period of time. Sometimes they become convictions.

But let me say a couple of things.

No. 1, and again relying on the experience of the last 40 years. I see no difference between the budget of the United States and any other law which the President proposes, or legislative proposal. It must be enacted because no money can be spent, except in accordance with an appropriation made by law.

The President is the Chief Executive, and he does have the responsibility for recommending measures to the Congress for their consideration. And I think the budget as a fiscal matter falls in the same

category as a housing bill or an amendment to the Social Security Act or an amendment to the Securities Act or anything else by way of a legislative proposal.

So I believe there is a great reason for the Congress having before it the judgment of the President as to what the fiscal plan of the Government should be. I think if we reverted to the situation that prevailed in the days when the Controller of the Currency, of all people, took all of the estimates and pumped them down to Congress just as they came in to him, that we would find ourselves at both ends of the avenue in a situation which was pretty close to chaotic. The problem of authorization versus appropriation would once again become one of paramount concern.

I think the Appropriations Committee would find itself in a almost impossible position vis-a-vis the substantive committees. So there is a great case in my judgment for an Executive budget. In fact, I think it is implicit in the whole concept of our constitutional set of responsibilities. But I do not believe that there is any reason in the world why the Executive budget cannot be subjected to whatever degree of scrutiny, examination, or decision the Congress may wish to give it in order to carry out its equally constitutional function of deciding on appropriations, Mr. Roback.

Mr. ROBACK. Not equal, but superior, because really the President does not have any appropriation power.

Mr. JONES. NO; I say equal constitutional responsibility in the sense that the one proposes, the other disposes, if you will, to use the old cliche about constitutional equality of the branches.

Mr. ROBACK. The designation of the Budget Director as Assistant to the President for executive management governmentwide, does that make any difference to his responsibilities as you have outlined them?

Mr. JONES. I do not think so, Mr. Roback; no. This is an added responsibility given in this instance by this administration to this Director, I think, to some extent to his predecessor, although it was not so specifically spelled out. This is an authority which could be transferred to almost anyone else at any time. And I do not believe it is at all beyond the realm of possibility that another President in another setting with a different method of operation might decide that his administrative manager would be somebody other than the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, despite some of the implications of the reorganization plan which was approved, or not disapproved, by the Congress in 1970.

Mr. ROBACK. Do you have any observations, Dean Price?

Mr. PRICE. NO; I just think that it is so obvious that the power of the Congress over appropriations is supreme that it never occurred to me to make much of a point of this.

The reason I think the President has the ability to prepare and submit a recommended budget, aside from the fact that the Congress mandated that he do it, is a broad political one. There is no other action which so effectively sums up the total policy of the Government as a whole as putting it all together in a package in concrete terms-this is what we are going to spend the money on.

That, of course, is the one big act for which the voters every 4 years ought to hold the President responsible for his recommenda

tions, and the Members of Congress responsible for their action on those recommendations.

One big reason why I think it is up to the President to put those recommendations together is that the act of thinking them through and reconciling the conflict with each other is something that requires a measure of executive discipline, which his power of appointment and removal and his other constitutional duties gives him a chance to do.

So I see it as a series of stages in which the first stage must be the President's, and the second and authoritative stage the Congress'. Now I cannot address the issue that Chairman Holifield talked about, which is really this issue of impoundment. That seems to me to be the real source of worry at the present time, rather than the ostensible reason for our discussion today.

Mr. ROBACK. Have you commented on impoundment? Do you believe that the President has gone over the threshold of constitutional restraint here?

Mr. PRICE. It seems to me that the essence here is probably political wisdom and tolerance and the comity between the two branches. And from the heat that I have discerned on this, my personal guess is that he has gone much too far.

Now, I think that impoundment is in many cases, within narrow limits, a very useful practice. It seems to me it would be easy to stop it if you did not mind throwing away a lot of money. You could simply change the language of appropriations bills to make it mandatory that the money be spent, which appropriations bills do not now do, and in many cases it would be wasteful and irresponsible. Whether it would be better to get at it by some selective process of legislative veto, such as I gather from the newspapers that the Speaker said the other day was going to be considered, it would at least seems to me a reasonable way to start thinking about it, and much preferable to the more sweeping provision that the Senate seems to be discussing.

But this is an off-the-cuff opinion that I have not thought through. And I mention it only because it seems to me that this is worth a lot of hard thought and attention, and not outside the ballpark.

Chairman HOLIFIELD. As chairman of the subcommittee I certainly want to thank you gentlemen for being here today. You have given us some very fine testimony, and we are certainly going to consider it very carefully. I have no doubt that there will be segments of your testimony quoted on the floor of the House, such as the word "ripper." And there might be even an allusion to the fact that the so-called "ripper" amendment is a constitutional way for the Congress to proceed if it wants to attain a certain end.

Mr. HORTON. As a matter of fact, the sponsor of the bill is named Jack Brooks, Jack the Ripper.

Chairman HOLIFIELD. Thank you very much, gentlemen. We will

excuse you now.

Mr. HORTON. Mr. Chairman, you received a letter from William Capron, who is associate dean of the Harvard University John Fitzgerald Kennedy school of government. I think it might be appropriate to put that in the record.

Chairman HOLIFIELD. Without objection, it will be received.