it, I believe, Jerry Sayre, from the Chairman's home State, was a member from that area; Eric Caldwell from my State, coming from other areas we had

Mr. WHITTEN. You might supply the list of names for the record. Mr. GODFREY. They were scattered throughout the country. will supply that. I have it right here.

(The list follows:)

MEMBERS OF THE STUDY COMMITTEE

Charles F. Brannan, former Secretary of Agriculture.

Morton Grodzins, professor of political science, University of Chicago.
Charles S. Hyneman, professor of political science, Indiana University.
William D. Knox, editor, "Hoard's Dairyman."

A. Lars Nelson, overseer, the National Grange, and master, Washington State Grange.

Charles R. Sayre, president and general manager, Staple Cotton Cooperative Association.

Douglas R. Stanfield, executive vice president, Ohio Farm Bureau Federation. Claude R. Wickard, former Secretary of Agriculture.

Harry B. Caldwell, ex officio chairman, National Agricultural Advisory Commission.

Chairman, A. Lars Nelson.

Secretary, Grover C. Chappell, Staff Economist, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Staff Director, Joseph Hajda, associate professor of political science, Kansas State University.

Mr. GODFREY. This committee deliberated for quite some time. They made quite a few field visits as individuals or in groups of two. visiting farmers, visiting farm organization leaders, visiting businesses dealing with farmers, and visiting the various agricultural offices in counties and in States.

Mr. WHITTEN. I might say, Mr. Godfrey, that in years past, this subcommittee has from time to time investigated the committee system. Periodically we have found quite a number of shortcomings in some areas of the country. I don't know of any better substitute for farmer-operated committees, but in many instances, it takes a trained county manager in addition to what you have.

For instance, there was a period of time in which one member of the county committee frequently was the county manager. In some instances his background did not fit into this type of work. All of this is a matter of record in hearings of this subcommittee back through the years. We have done that type of thing periodically trying to get a better job done. By and large, we have come up with a feeling that this is probably a better approach than any other single approach. Periodically we have found faults in some areas of the country. The system was changed to where you had a full-time county manager with far more authority than I believe he has under your administration. And we have found places where that system did not work. What I mean is that, whatever you may find generally throughout the country, usually there are some exceptions, according to our own investigations.

Mr. GODFREY. We have followed your investigations very closely down through the years, and they have been very, very helpful to us down through the years. This committee came up with essentially the same conclusion that some of your groups have come up with, and that is that the committee system, by and large, offers a most

effective method for the Secretary to meet his responsibilities to the Congress for the administration of the federally authorized farm programs, and at the same time be responsive to farmer needs.

RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE STUDY COMMITTEE

The committee made several recommendations, pointed up some weakness that existed not only in overall but in some particular areas, but the recommendations boiled down to about four categories.

First, the need to strip away some of the maze of regulatory detail; streamline our procedures so that committeemen could administer the farm programs in the light of local conditions but in the framework of the major objectives. I might add here, parenthetically, that this committee took action themselves a few years back to be sure that this was carried out insofar as the ACP was concerned. I don't recall exactly what year you did this, but I believe it was about 1954. The second recommendation that they made was the need for more qualified personnel both on the elected community committee and on the county committee, and in the county manager positions at the county level, and in the State executive positions at the State office level.

Third, they recommended that there was a need to insure that the Secretary had authority to act where he had the responsibility to act. I think I need to explain a little bit.

By and large, the Congress is holding the Secretary responsible. If you got into a situation where a county committee absolutely refused to carry out the rules and regulations, then the way we were operating, the Secretary could not immediately step in and take over that office. They recommended that some action be taken here in this area.

Fourth, they recommended that we step up our in-service training in order to improve our administrative practices at all levels. I might say that we have adopted practically all of the recommendations made by this committee. We have already initiated action to put the recommendations into effect.

We would need an amendment to be made to the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, section 8(b), in regard to the election of committeemen.

They recommended that county committees be elected on a countywide basis. The Secretary did not accept this recommendation but went part way. At the present time county committees are elected by the chairmen of the locally elected community committee and county convention. The Secretary accepted-made a proposal to Congress, rather, that county committees be elected by all of the elected community committeemen within a county, on what we call a staggered term. This will require legislation.

He also accepted their recommendation that county committees be elected. The first year you elect one for 1 year, one for 2 years and one for 3 years. And on succeeding years you replace only one man. This would give you a background of experience of at least two men continually.

We have had some problems in the past when, due to something that happened in the county, we would get an entirely new county committee who had never had any experience in farm programs,

95910-63-pt. 3-42

elected to the county committee, and it would cause us some problems before they got entirely familiar with the programs that they were supposed to administer.

We have intensified our training program quite a bit. To many of us this is one of the keys to more efficient administration. So we have attached now to our Deputy Administrator for State and County Operations a small staff who will be conducting training courses with State and county committees and with office employees. We have done quite a bit of this already. It has already shown very fruitful results.

We conducted a communications survey during last August to find out just how well we were communicating with our people in the field and whether or not there was a follow through, whether there was clearance and coverage on everything that we wanted, whether there was adequate delegation of authority. This communication survey included both written and verbal communication between Washington and the field offices and between field offices and Washington, because it has got to work both ways if you want to have real efficient administration.

We sent out more than 3,000 questionnaires which were returned unsigned. More than 2,800 of them were returned, which we thought was excellent. It gave us some good information which we could work on to improve our communications setup.

One other thing that we did during the latter part of this past year was to conduct in every county office in the United States what we called a self-appraisal so that every county committee and every county manager could sit down together and decide how well they were administering farm programs, how effective their farm programs were, and what needed to be done in that county to improve the administration of farm programs and their service to farmers. This is in the process of being completed. You might think that a selfappraisal like this would not carry much weight, but from the reports we have had, it has been received in the counties very well and has had a tremendous effect already on their work.

Next I would like to mention the simplification of bookkeeping and allocation procedures. Last year, if you recall, we got a consolidated administrative expense appropriation, and as a result of that, the recording and reporting of county office expenditures for salaries, travel, and other expenses have been greatly simplified. At the same time, this system of allocation of funds for such expenses has also been simplified. To illustrate this, before July 1, last year, allocations for county expenses were made to ASCS State offices by programs. The State offices then reallocated the funds in a similar manner. In many instances, the State allocation would consist of from 10 to 18 items. It now consists of from 3 to 4 only. Each county allocation consisted of a similar number of items and in a State with 100 county offices, as we had in my home State, we would have some normally 1,000 to 1,800 items involved. Now this has been reduced to less than 300, which simplifies bookkeeping and accounting considerably.

Before July 1, the work sheet for tabulating county expenses could include this is before July 1 of last year-800 items for a county with 4 employees. Now this work sheet requires only about 65 items to get an accounting of all the funds on a workload basis.

You are familiar, of course, with the fact that since 1950 we have had a workload system in operation in ASCS county offices in which we measure the workload in each county office. We have that perfected to the extent that we are using this workload system for the purpose of establishing personnel ceilings in county offices and for the purpose of budgeting funds in county offices. This is a considerable improvement, and we are still working on the workload formula in an effort to improve it as much as we can, because we have to weigh this job against each other job and in one county you have to weigh the measure of tobacco acreage against the measure of cotton acreage for example, and there is a lot of difference within the same county in determining the relative weights to be assigned to the workload items.

NUMBER AND SALARIES OF STATE EMPLOYEES

Mr. WHITTEN. I have followed this work of the staff through the years fairly closely, and have always felt that fewer employees who are efficient and good are more economical and satisfactory than a lot of employees not quite so good. I have gone along and helped where I could to get the workers in this field treated as Federal employees for purposes of retirement, insurance, and the rest, on the basis that they were full-time Federal employees, whether so identified or not. Some several years ago this committee recommended and Congress approved, I believe, about $3 million to help improve salaries in many areas. I personally-and I think the subcommittee agreed with me was very much disturbed about the way this was handled. At that time those States which had rates which kept their salaries fairly comparative with other employees within the Department of Agriculture, and kept the number at a minimum, were penalized. Those States that had a tremendous number of employees, which pulled the total average salary down, got the big part of the increase so as to pull up a large number of employees to the level with the State with a few employees, even though the State with few employees had a less costly administrative overhead than the other States.

I realize this is a rather tough one to handle. But I know that my State was penalized along with two or three others, where the administrative costs were much less than in other States. With the approval of the members here, they received this better treatment.

Do you still give the local State committee and others the right to try to keep the numbers down as long as they can keep the administrative costs down as against having some semicivil service approach where the more employees you have the better job you have as manager. The Civil Service says this is not true, but anybody who studies. it comes out believing it is true.

Mr. GODFREY. The workload formulas that we are now using will do exactly what you asked to be done a couple of years ago. It will permit the States to have an efficient operation holding down their number of employees, and by so doing they could have a better degree of uniformity in establishing salaries for similar work. At the same time, it reduces the amount of funds available to the other State. They must either reduce salaries or improve their productivity. This is working.

REORGANIZATION OF ASCS

I would like to talk now about a reorganization that we went through last year.

Mr. WHITTEN. On that I think you might touch on the high spots and then enlarge on it in the record. The chart speaks for itself.

Mr. GODFREY. I want to get the key features and objectives. We reorganized to where we are operating on a functional concept. We hope to improve our communication, reporting and efficiency. We have now abolished the commodity divisions as such and have established a small policy staff. Actually the policy staff for each commodity consists of two people, two for tobacco, two for cotton and so forth. They look ahead, they look at what we are currently doing, look behind at what we have been doing, and advise on policy. The internal auditing and investigations functions were combined at this time. It has since been transferred to the supervision of the Inspector General.

Instead of having five deputy administrators as we had under the previous organization, we now have only three. The Farmers Programs Division was created to centralize the writing of procedures and instructions that are used in the field. Previously the writing of program procedures and instructions had all been done in separate divisions. Now we are trying to centralize it into one division and trying to get some similarity between the instructions for one program as compared to another program. We established the Conservation and Land Use Division to handle the conservation reserve, the pilot land use programs and ACP. We established our commodity operations setup: two divisions, one for procurement and sales, one for inventory management.

And we established our management services office for the field, and also the data processing center at Kansas City. We set up the Disaster and Defense Staff which we referred to a while ago, a very small staff, which works under the Deputy Administrator, State and County Operations.

Then marketing agreements and orders have been transferred back to AMS where they were formerly.

This is the organizational chart. (The chart follows:)