The 20th thing you need to know before your first day in office.

Organizational change after World War II leads to today.

In 1946, after World War II ended, the federal government needed to streamline, reorganize, and consolidate on a large scale. A succession of presidents and members of Congress had created many government organizations to address the two World Wars framing the Great Depression. As the second war ended, government needed prepare for a peacetime economy.

Reorganizing a national government is a risky undertaking. The special interests, more concerned about the narrow needs of their constituencies than they are about the government as a whole, or the nation, work relentlessly, often successfully, to shape the changes to preserve, and even better, to increase their profits. In addition, both political parties must agree with any recommended changes; however, obtaining agreement to reorganize the government is problematic because Democrats and Republicans have sharply different ideas of the role of the government; and who should get what piece of the national pie.

Recognizing the issues dividing the parties, President Harry Truman, following the Lodge-Brown Act of 1947, assembled the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, later known as the Hoover Commission. The commission’s job was to recommend administrative changes in the government. Truman, a Democrat, appointed former President Herbert Hoover, a Republican, to chair the new commission. Six Republicans, including Hoover, and six Democrats served on the commission. They were well-known political figures of the era—Secretary Of State Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal, and Joseph P. Kennedy, father of future president John Kennedy.

In early 1949, the Commission forwarded its findings along with 273 recommendations to Congress in a series of nineteen separate reports. Six years later, a  follow-up study reported that the government had fully implemented 116 of those recommendations and had partly implemented another 80.

Its work complete, the commission dissolved in June 1949.  As he accepted the report, President Truman said, “Good management and good organization require far more than the transfer and consolidation of bureaus,” ( ed. Similar wisdom was lacking in 2002 when Congress and the White House rushed to consolidate 28 agencies and create the Department of Homeland Security in response to the 9/11 disaster in NYC). Truman went on to say, “The commission’s reports reflect this point of view. We all recognize there are no easy shortcuts. The solution does not lie in any one action of the Congress or any one order of the president.”

Seven major recommendations of the First Hoover Commission.

·        Give the president more power.

·        Give agency heads more power while holding them accountable for their performance.

·        Establish a General Services Agency to centralize housekeeping duties across the government.

·        Create what we now know as the Department of Defense.

·        Consolidate foreign affairs responsibilities and reorganize the State Department.

·        Realign functions between the Commerce Department and the Treasury Department.

·        Transfer the development and manufacturing of weapons systems from the government to the private sector to create a defense industry.

Congress created a second Hoover Commission in 1953 during the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Former President Hoover headed this one as well; and his second commission sent its final report to Congress in June 1955.

The first Hoover Commission, and to a lesser extent the second one, created the government we have lived with more or less successfully, until today. Following the advice of the commissions, the government, years later, when creating new agencies such as the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and NASA, it authorized only skeleton crews of government employees supplemented by large numbers of contract employees. By 2010, the Department of Homeland Security for example, had 200,000 contract employees compared to 180,000 career employees.

Another Hoover-like Commission is needed, but is unlikely

Our government struggles to work within an industrial age structure inadequate for the age of globalization, technology, and terrorism. The government looks and acts tired and as worn out as an uncared for 25-year old automobile, rusted, faded, cracked, and leaky because the government’s numerous vertical stovepipe agencies are inappropriate requiring too much effort to meet today’s challenges requiring cross-agency solutions.

We expect too much of today’s government, poorly organized to handle today’s issues. Leadership needs to take a “whole of government” view. We need a Government without Boundaries to work with issues not within silos where protection of the status quo is a major priority, but horizontally across agencies, a need so evident daily in cases such as in Hurricane Katrina, in the underwear bomber case in 2010, and in all cases involving the 16 intelligence organizations.

Unfortunately, the needed change is unlikely to occur for seven reasons.

·        The ever-increasing numbers of unqualified appointments made by each new White House.

·        Contracts with the private sector prohibit consolidation without financial penalty during the life of the contract.

·        Congress savors its power and committee chairs barring even modest cross-government consolidations. When Congress created the Department of Homeland Security combining 28 agencies into one Department, members were unwilling to give up any authority. Consequently, the Department gets its marching orders from more than 100 committees and subcommittees continuing to fragment the government’s efforts to integrate its response to the threats of terrorism and other national emergencies. In addition, there are some 51 federal agencies monitoring the flow of money to terrorist organizations.

See: Gideon Rachman, “Declare victory and end the ‘global war on terror,’ ” Financial Times, May 31, 2011, page 13.

·        President Obama in his State of the Union speech to the nation on January 25, 2011 drew a laugh when he commented that the Department of the Interior regulates salmon in fresh water and the Department of Commerce regulates salmon in salt water, and it,  “… gets even more complicated once they are smoked,” he said.

·        The government is hampered in its efforts to control the increasing attacks of salmonella in contaminated eggs because the responsibility for egg safety is divided between the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration depending on whether an egg is inside the chicken, or has been laid, and whether the egg is whole or has been cracked open. After an outbreak of the virus, the Centers for Disease Control entered the picture involving a third federal agency. Congress, to protect its powerful committee chair positions, maintains the divide between these agencies despite the difficulties and health risks it poses to the agencies trying to deal with a serious national health problem.

 

The salmonella outbreak in 2010 in 17 states caused nausea, vomiting, and fever, and death in people with weakened immune systems. In this book, I emphasize the need for government agencies to collaborate and consolidate across their boundaries to address today’s problems. While the government has not done that, the salmonella case points out that the egg industry has consolidated on a massive scale.

The Wright County Egg company with its five “farms” in Iowa produces hundreds of millions of eggs, which the company redistributes to 18 distributers in the nation under such heart-warming names as Farm Fresh, James Farms, Pacific Coast, Lucerne, Sunshine, Hillandale, and Dutch Farms. So, if you think your fresh eggs are coming to you from one of these firms with a farm fresh name. Think again, they all come from the Wright County Farm in Iowa, a massive example of consolidation, and too big to fail among many examples in the major industries in the U.S.

Powerful special interests, including thousands of non-governmental organizations and the media, work every day to influence the affairs of government.

·        Interest groups employ large sums of money to influence the direction of government, often to keep things as they are.

·        Successive presidents of both parties are disenfranchising the career workforce, which, in the past, provided a good balance between inexperienced political appointees and their influence on government programs.

·        Except militarily, America is becoming less dominant in the world, making it problematic to plan change in this transitional period.