SCIENTIFIC MANPOWER UTILIZATION, 1967 WEDNESDAY, MARCH 29, 1967 U.S. SENATE, SPECIAL SUBCOMMITTEE ON SCIENTIFIC MANPOWER UTILIZATION OF THE COMMITTEE ON LABOR AND PUBLIC WELFARE, The special subcommittee met at 9:40 a.m., pursuant to call, in room 4232, Senate Office Building, Senator Gaylord Nelson (chairman of the special subcommittee) presiding. Present: Senator Nelson (presiding). Senator NELSON. We will continue the hearings this morning on S. 430, the Scientific Manpower Utilization Act of 1967, and S. 467, a bill to create a National Commission on Public Management. These hearings are being held before the Special Subcommittee on Scientific Manpower Utilization of the Labor and Public Welfare Committee. Our first witness this morning is Mr. Arthur W. Barber, Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, Department of Defense. Mr. Barber, we appreciate very much your taking time to come over here and testify this morning. You have a prepared statement, do you? Mr. BARBER. Yes, I do, sir. Senator NELSON. You may read it, or extemporize from it, or present it in any way you see fit. STATEMENT OF ARTHUR W. BARBER, DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY (ARMS AND TRADE CONTROL), INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS, DEPARMENT OF DEFENSE Mr. BARBER. Thank you, sir. I will read it. Thank you for your kind invitation to testify on the application of the "system approach" to our pressing domestic problems. The views I will give will be on my own, and not necessarily a reflection of the views of the Department of Defense or any other organization. As you requested in your invitation to testify, I will comment first on what is being done now in this field and, second, on the roles of and relationships between the Federal, State, and local governments, and private industry. Finally, I will close with some personal thoughts on the question, "What new institutions, if any, are needed?" Perhaps it would be helpful for me to state my experience at the outset, in order that you can more properly evaluate my testimony. I am a physicist by training in the 1940's. I was a digital computer engineer and weapons planner for the Air Force in the 1950's. I am currently working on disarmament and trade problems in the Department of Defense. I have participated in discussions of the President's committee on the technological gap. I am also participating in the Independent Study Board to examine the effects of government procurement policies on regional economic development. This board has been formed pursuant to Public Law 89-136, the Public Works and Economic Development Act of 1965. I understand you played a large part in the enactment of this legislation. In 1964-65, I served on the President's committee on the economic impact of defense and disarmament, with a particular assignment as chairman of the subcommittee on possibilities and policies for industrial conversion. It was my opinion then, and it is now, that American management can readily adapt American corporations to suit the needs of this Nation. If most of our creative talents and intellectual resources are serving our fears rather than our hopes, the problems lie largely in the public sector-not with industry. Let me turn directly now to your examination of the ways in which the Congress can assist in the spread of the "systems approach" to domestic problems. The problems we face were stated by Vice President Humphrey recently when he said: The past few years, in our country, have been years of amazing technological and material progress and innovation. There has been a need for these things, and it has been met. But we also need social inventiveness, and social innovation and we need to create a market for them as well. We have urgent and keenly-felt public needs, most of them coming to a focus in the great urban areas where two-thirds of us already live and an even higher proportion will live in the future. But there has been no place, by and large, where people could go to shop for a better public school system * * *. In short, our problems are money, markets, and management, in the public sector. With respect to the first of these, I believe that our society has the financial resources necessary to solve our domestic problems and to assure for all Americans a life of dignity and expanding opportunity. Although public attention is most often focused on finances the problem is not primarily money. Despite expanded spending in the domestic sector, the application of the "systems approach" to domestic problems is making little or no progress. I think we should be quite clear about that. The reason is simple and basic. No one is buying! While sales of textbooks, blackboards, and erasers, are climbing to alltime highs, no one has been shopping for a better school. The difficulty is that there is a cultural gap between the managers of our corporate society and the managers of State and local governments. The gap is so large that it almost constitutes a language barrier. The dynamic parts of American industry constantly reassess their goals and program objectives. They plan 5 years in advance. They analyze the total costs of programs, both in human and financial resources. They make rigorous analyses of private and public spending over the next 5 years, and longer. They outline and analyze many alternative solutions. While dealing with this kind of professional management capability, the State government executive, however competent, is relatively helpless. He is rarely able to plan 3 to 5 years in advance. He almost never has "thinking money" at his disposal. He cannot make budget tradeoffs, to increase the training effort, for example, in order to reduce welfare costs, or to increase capital spending to decrease operating costs. He can abolish a job, or create new offices only with very great difficulty. He has little budgetary discretion. For example, school superintendents cannot make major changes in their curricula, and most can allocate only 5 percent of the budget available to them. The government program manager cannot begin to achieve the effectiveness that is possible through government-industry cooperation until he is permitted a functional analysis of his job, establishing its goals and programs. When this is done there is no question that dramatic programs will begin to appear across this Nation. I would turn now to the problem of the relationship between Federal, State and local governments. The fundamental problem is not research and development, or systems analysis, but management of the public sector at the State and local levels. As the President said a few days ago to the conference of Governors: The Federal Government itself cannot teach a child, police a street, or rebuild a neighborhood. When we look back at the awesome changes in our society in the past 20 years, it is amazing how little State and local government management has changed. Many governmental units have expanded their budgets 400 to 500 percent, and their personnel by similar amounts, without any reorganization or reexamination of the purposes or functions of government. The result is that we are all the victims of the bureaucracy that emphasizes organizations and procedures and leaves the ends unexamined and unquestioned. We are not coming up with the right answers because we are not asking the right questions. Most urban development deals with highways, crime rates, birth rates, income levels and disease rates, but rarely with the question of what is necessary to create a neighborhood in which a family can grow, prosper, and be happy. Alfred North Whitehead observed many years ago that: The greatest invention of the 19th century was the invention of the method of invention. We must concentrate on the method itself; that is the real novelty which has broken up the foundations of the old civilization. Senator NELSON. Let me interrupt. I notice you were directing remarks to State and local governments. All these remarks also apply to the Federal bureaucracy, do they not? Mr. BARBER. Yes, sir. I agree. Senator NELSON. I noticed you specifically named State and local government. My experience is that we are as bad off as the State and local governments are. Probably the Federal Government is worse off. Mr. BARBER. Despite Whitehead's warning, we have yet to develop effective local political institutions to manage change. The result is that we react to change rather than reflect upon it and shape it to our purpose. The future is not inevitable as long as we are willing to develop a set of goals and work toward them. What can we do to encourage a society organized to meet human goals with all their complexity and variety, rather than the goals of the bureaucracy? First, we must recognize that no national program or series of programs can solve the problem. As Edmund Burke said many years ago: The nature of men is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs. Second, new programs-whether for schools or roads or the rebuilding of slums should be determined and managed at the lowest possible levels in our society. I cannot emphasize this point too strongly. I think it is the heart of our present dilemma. I mean, for example, that the parents and children in a local school district should be intimately concerned with the planning and building of a new high school. Similarly, the people who live in slum areas can and should participate in the planning and rebuilding of the slums. Third, I think there is nothing more important than to convince the people in our great cities and in the suburbs that they have a role in shaping their own future. How can we engage their interests in their own future? There is one important way in which the Federal Government can help. I think we should seriously consider dramatic demonstration programs to set standards of excellence in education, urban renewal, and other major areas of concern in our society. The Federal Government might, for instance, establish an annual award for the best high school, junior high, and elementary school program in the country. The award might be a sum equal to 5 years' operating costs for the program. It would be for the best school program-buildings, curricula, faculty, imaginative use of educational tools, community participation, and bus service-the program which most nearly fulfilled the needs, not of Washington, but of the local community. Such a program would provide for the first time an opportunity to try to blend in a program proposal the multiple and complex talents that can contribute to American education. It would provide a politically responsible method for innovation in education. This would create an opportunity for an educational revolution which I feel certain would exceed our hopes and expectations. The same type of demonstration program could be applied to the creation of an urban neighborhood, or a police precinct. Such an approach, in my view, meets many of the problems in bringing the systems approach to bear on new domestic solutions. Finally, I would like to respond to your question concerning the needs for new organizations. Frankly, I think the primary problem is to introduce both flexibility and planning into existing public institutions. The application of modern management techniques which have been effectively used by American corporations could and should be applied to State and local governments if we are to achieve the diverse human society which can be created within the decade. But efficient manage ment, while necessary, is not enough. There are values above and beyond cost effectiveness. What we badly need is a wider and broader public discussion and participation in the choosing of the alternatives open to American society. It is here that I think there is a limited need either for new organizations or the adaptation of old organizations. Specifically, I think there is a need for institutions free from both government and industry influence to bring to the attention of the public the issues and alternatives that lie before our society, in the decade ahead. Let me give you an example of an unexamined alternative which has not been consciously addressed in our society. I understand that it is now possible to orbit an equatorial satellite which would transmit 10 television channels directly to home receivers. Further, at the super-high-frequency bands where these satellites would operate, a total of 80 to 150 parallel television channels could be broadcast simultaneously to our homes. The cost of procurement and 5-year operating costs would be roughly $200 to $300 million for a program to bring 100 channels of television to every home in the Nation. To be sure, there would have to be new home receivers and antennas, but I understand that the basic receiver would be available for less than $300 and a number of receivers could be fed by one antenna. Just think of a daily choice of 100 channels. Everyone would want his own television receiver to maintain family peace. Inasmuch as international television will be even more widely used, we might have a choice of skiing in the Tyrol, opera in Vienna, Kabuki theater from Japan, a Mexican fiesta, the Bolshoi Ballet, three or four news programs, 10 different sporting events, five to 10 soap operas, 20 educational programs, and 50 late movies. We may never build such a system, but my point is we could if we wanted to. If the national community wants it, the demand must be expressed and translated into action. Looking back with 20-20 vision, we can see that our failures have not occurred because of conscious decisions, but through omission. We never decided to permit pollution of our streams and air. We never decided to permit urban ghettos. We tended to ignore these problems until they no longer could be ignored. I consider it extremely important that some small nonprofit corporations and the universities bring to the attention of the public the alternatives that lie before us. Thomas Jefferson once said: I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it away from them, but to inform their discretion. I trust that your hearings and the bills under consideration by this committee will contribute to better public understanding of these issues. Thank you. Senator NELSON. Thank you very much, Mr. Barber. I suppose the question before us is whether or not we can effectively use the techniques of the systems engineered to solve social problems. |