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Table A-5

Growth Trends of Major New and Expanded Federal Programs: Housing and Community Development(a)

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Table A-6

Growth Trends of Major New and Expanded Programs: Health, Labor, and Welfare, (a) Fiscal Years 1955-1968

Program

New

(Millions of Dollars)

1955

1956

1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968

Est.

Est.

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4

13

25

28

24

158 167 189 195
4,200 4,481 4,715 5,381 5,797
62 204 320 670

73 56 73 107 136
2,165 2,462 2,631 3,042 3,841 3,650

Note: Detail may not add to totals because of rounding.

* Less than $500,000.

Grants-vocational rehabilitation services
Communicable disease activities
Hospital construction activities

Total expenditures, health, labor, and welfare
Total for new programs since 1955

(a) Administrative budget only. New programs enacted in the years after 1955 (including, those proposed in 1968) appear above the double horizontal line in the body of the table. Data below the line apply to legislative extensions of programs in effect effect prior to 1956.

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Table A-7

Growth Trends of Major New and Expanded Federal Programs: Education(a)

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377

343 437 541

732

866

5

102 171

943 1,076 1,244 1,339 1,544 2,834 3,304 263 337 355 422 498 479 549 1,716 2,108

2,816
1,481

Total expenditures, education
Total for new programs since 1955

Educational assistance

National Teacher Corps

Higher education activities

Arts and humanities educational activities
Civil rights educational activities

Foreign language training and area studies
Educational television facilities

Research and training - education

Educational improvement for the handicapped elementary and secondary activities

NDEA

NDEA - higher educational activities
NDEA other aids to education

Libraries and community services
College housing loans

Expansions

maintenance
construction

Impact area school aid
Impact area school aid
National Science Foundation

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elementary-secondary

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(a) Administrative budget only. New programs enacted in the years after 1955 (including those proposed in 1968) appear above the double horizontal line in the body of the table. Data below the line apply to legislative extensions of programs in effect prior to 1956.

[From the Public Interest, winter, 1967]

EXHIBIT 44

THE BUREAUCRACY PROBLEM

(By James Q. Wilson)

The federal bureaucracy, whose growth and problems were once only the concern of the Right, has now become a major concern of the Left, the Center, and almost all points in between. Conservatives once feared that a powerful bureaucracy would work a social revolution. The Left now fears that this same bureaucracy is working a conservative reaction. Annd the Center fears that the bureaucracy isn't working at all.

Increasing federal power has always been seen by conservatives in terms of increasing bureaucratic power. If greater federal power merely meant, say, greater uniformity in government regulations-standardized trucking regulations, for example, or uniform professional licensing practices-a substantial segment of American businessmen would probably be pleased. But growing federal power means increased discretion vested in appointive officials whose behavior can neither be anticipated nor controlled. The behavior of state and local bureaucrats, by contrast, can often be anticipated because it can be controlled by businessmen and others.

Knowing this, liberals have always resolved most questions in favor of enharcing federal power. The "hacks" running local administrative agencies were too often, in liberal eyes, the agents of local political and economic forces-businessmen, party bosses, organized professions, and the like. A federal bureaucrat. because he was responsible to a national power center and to a single President elected by a nationwide constituency, could not so easily be bought off by local vested interests, in addition, he would take his policy guidance from a President elected by a process that gave heavy weight to the votes of urban, labor, and minority groups. The New Deal bureaucrats, especially those appointed to the new, "emergency" agencies, were expected by liberals to be free to chart a radically new program and to be competent to direct its implementation.

It was an understandable illusion. It frequently appears in history in the hopes of otherwise intelligent and far-sighted men. Henry II thought his clerks and scribes would help him subdue England's feudal barons; how was he to know that in time they would become the agents of Parliamentary authority directed at stripping the King of his prerogatives? And how were Parliament and its Cabinet ministers, in turn, to know that evetnually these permanent undersecretaries would become an almost self-governing class whose day-to-day behavior would become virtually immune to scrutiny or control? Marxists thought that Soviet bureaucrats would work for the people despite the fact that Max Weber had pointed out why one could be almost certain they would work mostly for themselves. It is ironic that among today's members of the "New Left," the "Leninist problem"-i.e., the problem of over-organization and of self-perpetuating administrative power--should become a major preoccupation.

This apparent agreement among polemicists of the Right and Left that there is a bureaucracy problem accounts, one suspects, for the fact that non-bureaucratic solutions to contemporary problems seem to command support from both groups. The negative income tax as a strategy for dealing with poverty is endorsed by economists of such different persuasions as Milton Friedman and James Tobin, and has received favorable consideration among members of both the Goldwater brain trust and the Stundents for Democratic Society. Though the interests of the two groups are somewhat divergent, one common element is a desire to scuttle the social workers and the public welfare bureaucracy, who are usually portrayed as prying busybodies with pursed lips and steel-rimmed glasses ordering midnight bedchecks in public housing projects. (Police officers who complain that television makes them look like fools in the eyes of their children will know just what the social workers are going through.)

Now that everybody seems to agree that we ought to do something about the problem of bureaucracy, one might suppose that something would get done. Perhaps a grand reorganization, accompanied by lots of "systems analysis," "citizen participation," "creative federalism," and "interdepartmental co-ordination." Merely to state this prospect is to deny it.

There is not one bureaucracy problem, there are several, and the solution to each is in some degree incompatible with the solution to every other. First, there

is the problem of accountability or control-getting the bureaucracy to serve agreed-on national goals. Second is the problem of equity-getting bureaucrats to treat like cases alike and on the basis of clear rules, known in advance. Third is the problem of efficiency—maximizing output for a given expenditure, or minimizing expenditures for a given output. Fourth is the problem of responsiveness-inducing bureaucrats to meet, with alacrity and compassion, those cases which can never be brought under a single national rule and which, by common human standards of justice or benevolence, seem to require that an exception be made or a rule stretched. Fifth is the problem of fiscal integrity— properly spending and accounting for public money.

Each of these problems mobilizes a somewhat different segment of the public. The problem of power is the unending preoccupation of the President and his staff, especially during the first years of an administration. Equity concerns the lawyers and the courts, though increasingly the Supreme Court seems to act as if it thinks its job is to help set national goals as a kind of auxiliary White House. Efficiency has traditionally been the concern of businessmen who thought, mistakenly, that an efficient government was one that didn't spend very much money. (Of late, efficiency has come to have a broader and more accurate meaning as an optimal relationship between objectives and resources. Robert McNamara has shown that an "efficient" Department of Defense costs a lot more money than an "inefficient" one; his disciples are now carrying the message to all parts of a skeptical federal establishment.) Responsiveness has been the concern of individual citizens and of their political representatives, usually out of wholly proper motives, but sometimes out of corrupt ones. Congress, especially, has tried to retain some power over the bureaucracy by intervening on behalf of tens of thousands of immigrants, widows, businessmen, and mothers-of-soldiers, hoping that the collective effect of many individual interventions would be a bureaucracy that, on large matters as well as small, would do Congress's will. (Since Congress only occasionally has a clear will, this strategy only works occasionally.) Finally, fiscal integrity-especially its absence is the concern of the political "outs" who want to get in and thus it becomes the concern of "ins" who want to keep them out.

Obviously the more a bureaucracy is responsive to its clients-whether those clients are organized by radicals into Mothers for Adequate Welfare or represented by Congressmen anxious to please constituents-the less it can be accountable to presidential directives. Similarly, the more equity, the less responsiveness. And a preoccupation with fiscal integrity can make the kind of program budgeting required by enthusiasts of efficiency difficult, if not impossible.

Indeed, of all the groups interested in bureaucracy, those concerned with fiscal integrity usually play the winning hand. To be efficient, one must have clearly stated goals, but goals are often hard to state at all, much less clearly. To be responsive, one must be willing to run risks, and the career civil service is not ordinarly attractive to people with a taste for risk. Equity is an abstraction, of concern for the most part only to people who haven't been given any. Accountability is "politics," and the bureaucracy itself is the first to resist that (unless, of course, it is the kind of politics that produces pay raises and greater job security.) But an absence of fiscal integrity is welfare chiseling, sweetheart deals, windfall profits, conflict of interest, malfeasance in high places-in short, corruption. Everybody recognizes that when he sees it, and none but a few misguided academics have anything good to say about it. As a result, fiscal scandal typically becomes the standard by which a bureaucracy is judged (the FBI is good because it hasn't had any, the Internal Revenue Service is bad because it has) and thus the all-consuming fear of responsible executives.

If it is this hard to make up one's mind about how one wants the bureaucracy to behave, one might be forgiven if one threw up one's hand and let nature take its course. Though it may come to that in the end, it is possible-and important— to begin with a resolution to face the issue squarely and try to think through the choices. Facing the issue means admitting what, in our zeal for new programs, we usually ignore: There are inherent limits to what can be accomplished by large hierarchical organizations.

The opposite view is more often in vogue. If enough people don't like something, it becomes a problem; if the intellectuals agree with them, it becomes a crisis; any crisis must be solved; if it must be solved, then it can be solved-and creating a new organization is the way to do it. If the organization fails to solve the problem (and when the problem is a fundamental one, it will almost surely fail), then the reason is "politics," or "mismanagement" or "incompetent people," or "meddling." or 'socialism," or 'inertia."

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