The Hoover Commissions Revisited by Ronald C. Moe

Author:Ronald C. Moe [Moe, Ronald C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: American Government, Political Science, National
ISBN: 9780865319264
Google: 86-HAAAAMAAJ
Goodreads: 7366520
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 1982-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

115/ First Commission, Federal Business Enterprises, p. 25.

116/ Ibid., p. 40-41.

117/ Ibid., p. 102.

118/ Harold Seidman offers one opinion on the political significance of the Commission's recommendations on the Farmers Home Administration.

Application of 'economy and efficiency' as the criteria for government organization can produce serious distortions, if political and environmental factors are ignored. It led the first Hoover Commission to proceed from the indisputable finding that the Farmers Home Administration's functions duplicated and overlapped those of the Farm Credit Administration and the Agricultural Extension Service to the seemingly logical conclusion that the Administration ought to be liquidated and its functions divided betwen its two competitors. The conclusion was obviously faulty to anyone in the least familiar with the histories of the Farm Credit Administration and the Extension Service as creatures of the American Farm Bureau Federation and the most conservative elements in the agricultural community. The Farm Bureau was proud of its role in scuttling the Rural Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration, the immediate predecessors of the FmHA. If there was ever a case of letting the goat loose in the cabbage patch, this was it."

(Politics, Position, and Power, 3d ed., pp. 16-17).

119/ First Commission, Federal Business Enterprises, p. 43.

120/ Commissioners Aiken, Pollock and Rowe dissented from this transfer proposal in the report on the Treasury Department.

121/ First Commission, Federal Business Enterprises, p. 45.

122/ Ibid., p. 60.

123/ In describing the inability of the Commission to reach decisions or frame recommendations with respect to Federal business enterprises, particularly water resources management, Ferrel Heady observed:

This report evoked no less than six 'separate statements' by individual members or groups of members of the Commission, showing a wide cleavage on many matters. Several of these statements present different points of view concerning electric power and irrigation enterprises, on which the Commission could not muster enough agreement to make any definite recommendations. One attacked the whole organization approach to this report, objecting to treating together numerous agencies which happen to use one or more of the techniques of lending, insuring, or guaranteeing to achieve markedly different public purposes. Task force studies relied upon by the majority are subjected to heavy fire in three of the statements for a lack of objectivity, over-emphasis on accounting standards, and failure to appreciate the objectives of the legislation underlying some of the programs . . . . The total effect is convincing evidence that on this one basic set of issues at least the Commission fell apart at the seams. (Ferrel Heady, "The Reports of the Hoover Commission," Review of Politics 11 (July 1949), p. 373.

124/ U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Government Operations, Senate Action on Hoover Commission Reports, Committee print, 82d Cong., 2d sess., 1952. p. 76.

125/ The task force report on the Post Office was written by Robert Heller and Associates, Management consultants, Cleveland Ohio, and was titled: First Commission, Management Organization and Administration of the Post Office Department [Appendix I].

126/ First Commission, Post Office, p. 3.

127/ Ibid., p. 10.

128/ Ibid., p. 16.

129/ Writing in 1937,

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