Mr. MINOW. Right. I would be perfectly agreeable to that.
Senator PASTORE. Right.

Mr. MINOW. There has been so much confusion about the plan. We could, today, delegate our rulemaking functions to a single Commissioner, or a panel of Commissioners; and in my opinion very often our rulemaking functions are much more important than our adjudicatory functions. We could set up a panel to hold a rulemaking on vital allocations matter. My point is that we have been entrusted with this in the law for years and years and years, and that gives you an indication of how we would operate under the plan. Our future action would be reflected in our past action on delegations, where we have kept critical responsibility within the Commission and not delegate it capriciously to staff people.

Senator PASTORE. Well, now, the next question that I ask is this. I am wondering if we are not talking too quickly here. We do allow one hearing officer to hear an adjudicatory case. "Now, what is wrong with allowing one Commissioner to hear it?

Mr. MINOW. This, at one point, Mr. Chairman, was the practice. Some of my colleagues have sat in that capacity in years past, and they can tell you about their experiences in that. It would seem to me to be unwise to assign individual Commissioners to long protracted cases, because we would then lose the benefit of their participation on important matters where we have to make policy judgments. Senator PASTORE. In other words, your point is that anything that might be considered important enough to assign a Commissioner, it would be important enough to have two?

Mr. MINOW. This would be my view. Take this week, I can give you a practical example of what I mean. We are confronted now with something far transcending, it seems to me, our normal hearing work-namely, this whole problem of space satellite communications. We have to make some judgments and some decisions now on private enterprise participating in this whole field so important to the future. But we sit there, very often immobilized, listening to these arguments which are of no national importance whatever. They are, of course, important to the people involved. My point is they could get just as good justice and informed action by having either panels or employee boards, but we have got to be freed of this redtape we are in now, where we cannot tend to the important business.

Senator PASTORE. It makes a lot of sense to me. I guess that is why we are here.

Now, on this question of breaking for our lunch hour, what is the pleasure of my colleagues? I thought it might be a good point to stop here now and come back at 2 o'clock.

We have been sitting here since 10. We will recess now until 2 o'clock.

Before doing so, I would like at this time to make the following a part of the hearing record:

Letter dated May 18, 1961, to Hon. John L. McClellan from Robert E. Lee, Commissioner, Federal Communications Commission;

Letter dated May 18, 1961, to Hon. Warren G. Magnuson from Louis J. Appell, Jr., president, Susquehanna Broadcasting Co., 53 N. Duke St., York, Pa.;

Letter dated May 18, 1961, to Hon. Warren G. Magnuson from Philip K. Eberly, sales manager, WSBA Radio, P.O. Box 910, York, Pa.;

Letter dated May 17, 1961, to Hon. Warren G. Magnuson from J. S. Sinclair, president, Rhode Island Broadcasters' Association, Providence, R.I.;

Letter dated May 19, 1961, to Hon. John O. Pastore from Luther R. Strittmatter, sales manager, WARM Broadcasting Co., Inc., Bowman Bldg., Scranton, Pa.;

Letter dated May 19, 1961, to Hon. John O. Pastore from Arthur W. Carlson, general manager, radio division, Susquehanna Broadcasting Co., P.O. Box 910, York, Pa.;

Letter dated May 16, 1961, to Hon. John O. Pastore from Tim Elliot, president, Providence Radio, Inc., Crown Hotel, Providence, R.I.;

Letter dated May 17, 1961, to Hon. John O. Pastore from J. S. Sinclair, president, Rhode Island Broadcasters' Association, Providence, R.I.;

Letter dated May 16, 1961, to Hon. Warren G. Magnuson from John S. Booth, president, Chambersburg Broadcasting Co., Chambersburg, Pa.;

Letter dated May 11, 1961, to Hon. John O. Pastore from Henry S. Sahm, president, the Federal Trial Examiners Conference, Washington, D.C.;

Letter dated May 15, 1961, to Hon. Warren G. Magnuson from Nugent S. Sharp, consulting radio engineer, 501 13th Street NW., Washington, D.C.;

An editorial from the Providence Evening Bulletin, dated May 15, 1961;

An editorial from the New York Times dated May 21, 1961; and Two radio editorials from WICE, dated May 16 and May 21, 1961. (The letters and editorials follow:)

Hon. JOHN L. MCCLELLAN,
U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C.

FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION,
Washington, D.C., May 18, 1961.

DEAR SENATOR MCCLELLAN: This will acknowledge the receipt of your letter of May 3, 1961, in which you afforded me the opportunity to submit my views on Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1961.

I am opposed to Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1961. Although I agree with some of the fundamental objectives of the plan, I feel that these objectives can be attained better through amendment of the Communications Act following legislative hearings. In this connection, I have reference to the area that would give the Commission a greater amount of latitude in handling its internal administrative procedures.

I am afraid that section 1 of the plan now before you would leave us in a never-never land insofar as our hearing procedures are concerned. This is not to say that I am unwilling to delegate functions because I have acquiesced in such delegations in the past and I am willing to delegate more functions in the future. I am uncertain, however, just what effect section 1 of the plan will have on the existing provisions of section 409 of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, and section 7(a) of the Administrative Procedure Act.

My primary concern arises out of section 2 of the reorganization plan. This, it seems to me, strikes at the basic philosophy underlying the structure of the Communications Act. As you know, this section withdraws from the Commission the function of assigning personnel and makes an absolute grant of this function to the Chairman. There are no exceptions to this grant of authority. The Chairman's word would be absolute to the point that he would have au

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thority to assign all Commission personnel, including Commissioners and the personal staff of the several Commissioners.

In my study of the proposal before you, I reviewed the hearings on Reorganization Plan No. 11 of 1950. The latter plan bears some similarity to the Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1961, although it did not seem to go as far as the current reorganization plan appears to do.

In reviewing the 1950 hearing record, I was particularly impressed with the testimony of former Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado in opposition to the plan. His testimony is set forth in the transcript of "Hearings before the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Department, U.S. Senate, 81st Congress, 2d session, on Senate Resolusions 253, 254, 255, and 256," which were held on April, 25, and 26, 1950. I feel that the following quotation from his testimony (transcript p. 16) is apropos :

"It is the long-established congressional policy that regulatory agencies must be independent and directly responsible to Congress.

"The necessity of maintaining the independency of regulatory bodies was discussed during the Senate debate in 1938 on the Government departments reorganization bill, a legislative culmination of a professional study of Government and how to reorganize it. In that debate former Senator Champ Clark, of Missouri, one of the Senate's greatest students of parliamentary history, now one of our really great judges on the Federal bench, pointed out that the 'principal functions of such commissions as the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Communications Commission are as agencies of the legislative branch of the Government and as extensions of the legislative power' and that 'the important function which has been conferred on such commissions is the ascertainment of particular facts in order to carry out a policy of Congress enunciated in a statute' and 'they are legislative rather than executive or administrative in character.'

"Many of these statements are direct quotes of Mr. Clark.

"Senator Barkley, the then majority leader and now our distinguished Vice President, stated during the debate that he 'would not approve any measure which provided for a one-man Interstate Commerce Commission, or a one-man Communications Commission, or a one-man Federal Trade Commission, or a oneman Power Commission, because those commissions are agencies set up by Congress in the performance of the duty of Congress to regulate commerce among the States.'

"Senator Barkley, now our Vice President, said:

"They are quasi-judical and quasi-legislative. They are quite different from a commission which is created merely to aid the President in determining how he shall perform his executive duty of appointing people to office, in the way of testing their qualifications (for instance, the Civil Service Commission). One is an executive function, the others are legislative and judicial, and the only reason why the Interstate Commerce Commission was set up, and why the Federal Trade Commission, and the Power Commission, and the Communications Commission, were set up under the authority to regulate commerce among the States and with foreign governments, was the knowledge that Congress itself could not do that.

"But plan No. 7 does just exactly what Vice President Barkley said he would never approve. It makes the ICC a one-man agency, just as plans Nos. 8, 9 and 11 make one-man agencies of the Trade, Power, and Communications Commissions."

I am certain that Senator Johnson would view the reorganization plan before you as being equally repugnant.

At this point I would like to digress for a moment to make it abundantly clear that I have no concern that the current Chairman would in any way abuse any delegated power, whether that power was delegated to him by the Commission or by the law. On the contrary, the Chairman has indicated a very understanding desire to work as a team with the full Commission. Laws, however, are not made for men but for the public interest and, in my opinion, the approval of section 2 of Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1961 would open this door to wide abuse on the part of an ambitious or an unscrupulous Chairman. A concrete example or two will demonstrate my concern.

The Chairman could assign me to duties away from the Commission's offices for an extended period and thereby affect the result of a decision on an important policy question.

He could assign members of my personal staff to duties which would deprive me of their services during periods when they would be required to assist me in analyzing highly technical engineering and legal matters.

He could assign me to a special project, such as for example the subscription television case, that would take all of my time to the detriment of my other work.

Through the assignment of staff personnel to special projects, he could achieve a predetermined result insofar as a staff recommendation is concerned. In this connection, the psychological effect on the staff of making one Commissioner so much more powerful than the others cannot be ignored. The staff will be quick to recognize who is supreme and will react accordingly. They would be less than human if they did not.

These are the practical difficulties I have with Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1961.

As indicated, the Commission has delegated certain of its functions in the past and it is in the process of delegating other functions.

In the safety and special radio services filed the Commission processes thousands of applications annually. Authority to grant these applications is delegated (pursuant to section 5(d) (i) of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, 47 U.S.C. § 155 (d) (i)) to the chief of the safety and special radio bureau. We have made similar delegations to the bureau chief in the common carrier field. We have also delegated certain functions in the telephone and telegraph field to a committee of Commissioners.

Recently, we delegated certain authority to the chief hearing examiner to enlarge the issues in hearing cases. This official also possesses other delegations

of authority over adjudicatory matters.

We recently instructed the staff to prepare a document for publication in the Federal Register concerning a delegation of authority to the Chief of the Broadcast Bureau. When adopted, this delegation will authorize the Chief of this Bureau to grant uncontested applications for AM, FM, and TV stations that meet certain criteria. I cite these examples solely to indicate that we are attempting, within the framework of the present act, to free ourselves from time-consuming duties so that we can devote more time to matters of broad communications policy.

Through these delegations and others that we can make and with a greater degree of latitude that could be achieved through minor modifications of the present act, I am certain that we can achieve the basic objective of Reorganization Plan No. 2 without destroying the bipartisan independent nature of the Commission-without making it a one-man agency subservient to the Executive. Should you require anything further I would be most happy to oblige. I am taking the liberty of providing Senator Pastore of the Senate Commerce Committee with a copy of this letter.

Sincerely,

ROBERT E. LEE, Commissioner.

SUSQUEHANNA BROADCASTING CO.,
York, Pa., May 18, 1961.

Hon. WARREN MAGNUSON,
Senate Office Building,
Washington, D.C.

DEAR SENATOR MAGNUSON: I am writing you with regard to agency Reorganization Plan No. 2, as it applies to the Federal Communications Commission. It is my feeling that the functions and responsibility of this agency are too broad and complex to allow for one-man rule. More particularly, it appears that the impetuosity and inexperience Commissioner Minow has exhibited to date bode ill for an arrangement such as proposed by this plan.

Therefore, I urge that you vote to veto this proposal. I also think that your active opposition to this measure would benefit the entire broadcasting industry. Sincerely,

LOUIS J. APPELL, Jr., President.

RADIO WSBA, York, Pa., May 18, 2961.

Hon. WARREN MAGNUSON,
Senate Office Building,
Washington, D.C.

MY DEAR SENATOR: We strongly urge that you vote to veto Reorganization Plan No. 2, covering the FCC. In our opinion, it would not be good for the country to give the FCC Chairman absolute control over the seven-man FCC. We think that when you search your mind and heart on this matter, you will agree with us and vote to veto the Reorganization Plan No. 2. Thank you for your considerate attention in this matter.

Sincerely,

PHILIP K. EBERLY, Sales Manager.

SCRANTON, PA., May 19, 1961.

Hon. SENATOR PASTORE,

U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C.

DEAR MR. PASTORE: I feel that the matter of Reorganization Plan No. 2, which will come before the Senate soon, is of such great importance to the broadcasting industry that it requires your thorough consideration.

We in the broadcasting industry are convinced that this plan, giving the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission almost dictatorial power over the Commission, cannot possibly be of any benefit. We, therefore, ask your help in defeating this bill. Yours very truly,

WARM BROADCASTING CO., INC.,

LUTHER R. STRITTMATTER, Sales Manager.

RADIO WSBA, York, Pa., May 19, 1961.

Hon. JOHN PASTORE,

Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C.

DEAR SENATOR PASTORE: With the great and continuing growth of the broadcast industry, it is reasonable that the agency regulating the industry, the Federal Communications Commission, may be the subject of organizational refinements. The Reorganization Plan No. 2, now before Congress, is obviously an attempt to improve the organization of the FCC.

The adoption of this plan, however well-intended it may be, could only result in the concentration of extreme power in the hands of one man, the Chairman of the FCC. Under this plan the chairman would, in effect, be a one-man Conmission. Such a concentration of power is inherently far more dangerous than any problems created by the current system of organization.

I am sure that I echo the sentiments of a majority of broadcasters when I suggest that you, and the other members of Congress, thoroughly examine Reorganization Plan No. 2. After a thorough examination, I am sure you will agree that a congressional veto is necessary to avoid placing a complete control of the Federal Communications Commission in the hands of one man.

Respectfully,

Hon. JOHN O. PASTORE,

U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C.

ARTHUR W. CARLSON,
General Manager-Radio Division,
Susquehanna Broadcasting Co.
PROVIDENCE RADIO INC.,
Providence, R.I., May 16, 1961.

DEAR JOHN: You have asked the Rhode Island Broadcasters individually to express their opinion of the administration's Reorganization Plan No. 2 as it would affect the FCC.

Separately, you have reecived a statement of opposition to the plan from the Rhode Island Broadcasters Association. WICE Radio, and the undersigned personally, endorse the association's opposition to this plan.

Certainly at a time when broadcasting is threatened with large-scale Government interference with the freedoms it has traditionally enjoyed, the intro