United States should on the day he is inaugurated have available for his use the powers of reorganization.

The present act, as I think has been pointed out already, expires in April 1953. For all practical purposes, it expired in this Congress already because of the 60-day waiting period.

The President-elect would have 2 months before he comes into. office which is for the first time, I suppose, in the history of the United States that a new President does come in that way. And he will have lots of problems as President-elect. And it would seem to me that in the first few months as President he will have so many issues to determine that he may well not be able to get around to reorganization. If that is so, he will then have to wait for the Congress to give him the authority to send down reorganization plans. That might be advisable if this were a new technique, but we have had this technique of reorganization plans for 13 years now, I think since 1939. It seems to me that it is acceptable enough to the Congress to be nonpartisan.

My feeling is whatever political party label the President may wear, he should have this power.

I would like to go a step farther and remind the committee about the Hoover Commission recommendations.

The Congress did not go all the way with the Hoover Commission on reorganization.

The Commission recommended, first, that this power of the President to submit reorganization plans to the Congress should be a permanent power of the Presidency.

It also recommended that a reorganization plan should be approved unless it is disapproved by both Houses by concurrent resolution.

It also recommended that there be no exemptions of any agencies. Congress accepted the last recommendation and allowed no exemptions. And of course it did not accept the other two.

I would like to renew my belief that the Hoover Commission recommendations were correct and suggest that the act be extended to be a permanent power of the President and that a reorganization plan be regarded as approved unless disapproved by a simple majority of both Houses.

Unless the committee would like to ask questions on that particular item, I will turn to my second item. And that is the general management of the executive branch. I shall try to make this as brief as possible.

It is a fairly long bill. In general, what it would do is to state, I suppose as the sense of the Congress the administrative management principles of the Hoover Commission. For the most part, I do not see that it goes any farther than that.

Mr. Hoover, in his letter, has suggested that it be made explicit that this is a permissive power rather than a mandatory power. I think that is already in the bill.

Other than that, I should like to make some comments on the particular items that would be created by the bill.

Mr. Hoover has suggested nothing be done about the office of personnel. I would agree to that at this time.

He has suggested accepting the Committee of Economic Advisers, instead of having the Office of the Economic Adviser. It would seem to me that ultimately, if not now, it would be an excellent idea

to have one adviser rather than a body of three and that that adviser should be a staff man to the President and should not be confirmed by the Senate.

I should particularly like to emphasize, however, the point about the office of staff secretary. Mr. Hoover has suggested that now is a favorable time to put that into effect. There is a little background on that I think is interesting.

Essentially the staff secretary idea came from Secretary Forrestal's study of the British Cabinet secretariat. He became quite impressed with the efficiency of the British in handling their top-level executive problems through this kind of a Cabinet secretariat. And as the years went by he talked a great deal about it, created a great deal of interest in it and eventually there was considerable talk about a Presidential secretariat of this nature.

The Commission suggested a staff secretary which in effect is a beginning, really an experiment which might or might not lead toward a Presidential secretariat.

The

The theory of it is that you would have in the White House a man who would be called staff secretary who would be a career man. theory would be that he would continue through all administrations, irrespective of their politics.

In many ways there was such a man in the White House for many years in Rudolph Forster, who has been dead for some years, but who came in with Theodore Roosevelt and served with every President until he died during, I think, the third Roosevelt administration.

The theory is that you would have a feeling of continuity about top problems which I think is necessary rather than training a great number of new men to come in with a new President.

There are many jobs the Hoover Commission suggested such a man would do. One thing, he would try to keep an agenda exactly of what happens in the executive branch. Perhaps, the best example is when a new problem comes up, someone suggests there should be a Cabinet committee or even a sub-Cabinet committee to work on the particular problem. The President will order that done. The committee will go off and work and no one really knows what happens. The subcommittee itself may think it is not a very good idea and they never come back and no one will ever know that they did not come back.

In foreign affairs you have 30 or 40 of such committees operating. No one actually knows what they do or what they do not do.

There is also a tendency, if you create a committee of this kind, that it may become permanent, go on and on for years and years and create work for itself.

A staff secretary would in effect police that sort of thing for the President.

By the wide definition he would never have anything to do with policies, so he would have to be a rather remarkable man dealing at that high level, who would have sufficient self-restraint to keep his nose out of policies.

I think there are such men available.

It would seem to me that the Congress might well give the new President such an office if he wishes to use it. It seems particularly appropriate at this time because whoever will be President is new to the job and has not yet formed any working patterns, which all

Presidents do in the White House. That seems to me the most important and the newest part of this particular bill.

The rest of it, I think, has been covered in the Commission reports and has been discussed in the Congress for some time.

The CHAIRMAN. What is the number of the bill you were speaking for?

Mr. RowE. That is H. R. 3674, Mr. Chairman.

Turning to my third item, which is the regulatory commission bill, this merely gets a measure of uniformity into the various quasijudicial or regulatory commissions, or whatever you wish to call them. You will remember there were several reorganization plans passed for certain of the commissions and some of them were rejected for the other commissions. In effect, this bill, which is H. R. 3678, tries to bring uniformity as to the commissions in general. It does not include in its provisions the recommendation of the Hoover Commission that the President appoint the chairmen.

I, personally, am in favor of that, and would suggest that this bill be amended to include that for those commissions which do not already have it.

What the bill does in summary is that it would allow the chairmen of the following four commissions to be the administrative head of the commission. They are the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Labor Board, and the Federal Reserve Board.

The bill also provides that there should be a hold-over provision for those commissions which do not have it. I am talking in general about nine commissions here, and you will find that five commissions, for instance, already have this hold-over power which is that when a commissioner's term expires he remains in office until the President has nominated and Congress has confirmed another man.

The four commissions which do not have that power are the Power Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, Communications Commission, and the Civil Aeronautics Board.

That becomes important, I think, when you have a situation such as you are about to have in the Federal Power Commission. Chairman Buchanan's term, I think, expires in the next week or so and he automatically ceases to act. 'There are four commissioners sitting, so you do not have a problem of a quorum, but in past years in the Power Commission and other commissions you got down to three, and if one man gets sick your commission just stops. That is the purpose of it.

Another recommendation in this bill is that the usual provision that the President cannot discharge a Commissioner except for nonfeasance, malfeasance, or inefficiency, should be applied to the Federal Power Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Communications Commission.

I feel a little embarrassed testifying in favor of this at the moment because I dissented to it in the Commission's report on it. I frankly do not feel it is a matter of great import one way or the other whether that provision is in there or not. I would have no great objection. to it. And you would have uniformity throughout all of your commissions if it were included.

The other provision of the bill is the so-called political majority provision. As you know, all of the commissions, with two exceptions,

must have no more than three members or a majority of the members of one political party, and the minority must be represented. Today that is not true as to the Labor Board, and it is not true as to the Federal Reserve Board.

This bill would merely include that provision in the statutes. creating those two boards.

I think, Mr. Chairman, those are all of the comments I have on the two bills, unless there are questions..

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Rowe.

Mr. RowE. Thank you.

The CHAIRMAN. Your prepared statement will be made a part of the record.

(The prepared statement of James H. Rowe, Jr., is as follows:) STATEMENT OF JAMES H. ROWE, JR., ATTORNEY, FORMER MEMBER OF THE HOOVER COMMISSION

Whoever the candidates may be, and whichever party wins the November election, the next President of the United States should, on the day he is inaugurated, have available for his use the powers of reorganization. The present act allowing the President to submit reorganization plans to the Congress will expire with the end of this Congress. For all practical purposes it has already expired because of the 60-day waiting period for reorganization plans.

The President elect will have 2 months to prepare his program before taking office. It is true that he will have many things to do, but one of the most important will be to prepare the organization of the executive branch which he must administer.

If the Reorganization Act is extended, this will allow the President-elect to prepare his reorganization plans and to submit them to the Congress as soon as he takes office. If, however, he must wait until the Congress gives him the reorganization authority many months of valuable time may be wasted and it is not at all impossible that reorganization will be lost in the shuffle of more pressing events.

By now reorganization procedure-after 13 years of trial and error-appears to be sufficiently acceptable so as to be nonpartisan. The power should be given to any President, whatever political party label he wears.

In January 1949 the Hoover Commission recommended to the Congress that the power to submit reorganization plans should be a permanent power of the Presidency. It recommended also that the reorganization plan would be approved unless disapproved by both Houses by concurrent resolution. It recommended further that no exemptions of any agencies be made. Congress accepted the third recommendation and allowed no exemptions. It did not accept the other two, but limited the life of the reorganization statute and allowed a reorganization plan to be disapproved by a constitutional majority of one House.

In my opinion the January 1949 recommendations were correct and I would, therefore, suggest the Reorganization Act be extended permanently and that a reorganization plan be regarded as approved unless disapproved by simple majorities of both Houses.

The CHAIRMAN. Our next witness will be Mr. George Watkins, who is the chairman of the Bipartisan Cook County, Ill., Citizens Committee for the Hoover Report. We are very glad to have you here. STATEMENT OF GEORGE WATKINS, CHAIRMAN, BIPARTISAN COOK COUNTY, ILL., CITIZENS COMMITTEE FOR THE HOOVER REPORT

Mr. WATKINS. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I appreciate the opportunity of appearing here today.

My name is George Watkins. I am chairman of the Bipartisan Cook County, Ill., Citizens Committee for the Hoover Report. At the request of Mr. John Stuart, our chairman in the State of Illinois,

I am representing today the entire Illinois citizens group which favors enactment of the recommendations of the Hoover Commission. I am also secretary of the University of Chicago. Both as an officer and a civilian, I participated in the management and personnel programs of the Department of the Army during and after the war.

Your committee ought to be highly commended for its action in holding these marathon hearings on the nine remaining reports of the Hoover Commission with which you are concerned. Regardless of the action which occurs on any specific bill, we are delighted to see how energetically your committee is moving in on these matters. We believe that your committee, in clearing its calendar of all this legislation before it, is setting an important precedent. We hope that other committees of Congress will follow this example over future years and decades to come.

Those of us from Chicago note that this unique step is taken by a committee which includes three members from the Chicago area including the chairman, Representative William L. Dawson; and we take pride in the splendid record which your committee has established.

The 27 reorganization plans which have gone into effect are one notable accomplishment of your committee.

The Federal Property and Administrative Services Act setting up the General Services Administration is the most all-embracing procurement and supply bill in our history; and former President Hoover has characterized the Budgeting and Accounting Procedures Act as "one of the two most important fiscal measures in our Nation's history." These two and other significant measures were prepared right here in your committee. We, therefore, wish to extend our thanks to each of you.

Of the measures here under consideration, we feel that the most important one is the extension of the Reorganization Act of 1949. Our next President, whoever he may be, should be afforded the authority in the present Reorganization Act so that he can organize the executive branch in accordance with what he considers to be the most efficient methods. It would be no less than tragic in our opinion were this authority to expire, a few short months after our next President takes office. Should this happen, it might be many months before the reorganization powers of the President would be again set forth by statute. In the meantime, his hands would be virtually tied. The loss might well prove to be an irretrievable one.

The 1949 act has proven to be extremely successful. Under it, more reorganization has occurred than in any comparable period in our history. Twenty-seven reorganization plans have been put on the books. We hope that this number will have been increased by four more before the Eighty-second Congress adjourns in early July. We, therefore, suggest that your committee extend this act indefinitely, so that every new President will have this power as one of his regular working tools. Both former President Hoover and President Truman have strongly supported the need for such a reorganization power. Since it has proven successful in practice, we feel that it should be continued indefinitely.

Of course, your committee will be beset with predictions of dire consequences should this occur. In the case of almost every reorganization plan, as we understand it, opposing groups have appeared