Who Runs The Government?

ifs not the people you elect to office but their erstwhile business cronies and political hangers-on who turn the bureaucratic wheels

Americans are taught in their high school civics courses that the people rule this nation through an elective process—every two, four or six years—that sufficiently changes the composition of the Federal Government to guarantee that the will of the people will prevail. As usual, however, high school civics and the conventional wisdom are deficient—not totally, but enough to make anyone who knows how Washington actually functions feel very uneasy, indeed.

For the fact of the matter is that we are ruled only partly by our elected officials. We are more pervasively ruled by what is, for all practical purposes, a hidden Government—hidden in the CIA, the Federal Reserve Board and the lowliest echelons of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and all the other vast agencies —a largely invisible but hugely powerful apparatus composed of men, some former business cronies of politicians, who are appointed to dieir positions (or who win them through competitive Civil Service examinations, thereby ensuring permanent tenure), whose performance is never reviewed by the public at large and whose influence often increases as their careers span different Administrations. These are the members of the permanent bureaucracy—and to many observers they, more than any others, are the real voice and muscle of the Government.

If this sounds alarmist, I would present as evidence a rather cagey politician who does not routinely act on impulse: Richard M. Nixon. Among the more tedious aspects of Mr. Nixon's first four weeks in office, back in 1969, was his systematic effort to win friends and influence people in the sprawling bureaucracies of the capital. His strategy included courtesy calls on each agency and, as White House correspondent for The New York Times, I followed him around. My friends thought I had lost my mind, for the visits were seemingly routine and produced little hard news. After the fourth or fifth such visit, I had begun to share their doubts; then I saw something scrawled on a blackboard in a nondescript room on the fourth floor of die Treasury building, which Nixon was scheduled to visit that afternoon. It read in its poetic entirety:

Roses are red

Violets are blue

The President is coming

To see you.

Quite infantile—and, besides, it didn't scan. But it justified my otherwise barren pilgrimage, because in its simple sarcasm it explained rather well why the President had decided to court the bureaucrats: A lot of them didn't need him, a lot of them didn't like him and he, in turn, was concerned whether, as a minority President propelled into office by the slimmest of margins, he could bend them to his purposes and views.

A few minutes after my discovery, in another room, Mr. Nixon (who did not, as far as I could tell, notice the joyless welcome chalked on the blackboard down the hall) addressed a group of senior civil servants. He commended them for their devotion to nonpartisan duty and pleaded for their continuing loyalty and energy in the years ahead. His ingratiating and at times sanctimonious performance was not without irony. For here was Dick Nixon, a conspicuously loyal member of an earlier Administration that, in 1952, was at best indifferent to and at worst contemptuous of the bureaucrats, especially if they happened to be Democrats. Here, too, was the man who had promised, during the 1968 campaign, to clean house at the State Department. But instead of cleaning house at State or anywhere else, he invited the entrenched army of the Potomac to go right on keeping house.

And all for a very good reason: The bureaucracy is not what it was in 1952. It is larger, and probably more sluggish, and certainly more confident and self-assured. Each agency has built large and loyal constituencies among the public. And each is filled with men who owe their appointments to some earlier President and are protected either by Civil Service regulations or by exemptions written into the law by Eisenhower in 1954 and Johnson in 1966. Like the press—and members of the bureaucracy often regard themselves as a fourth branch of Government—they know that while Presidents and Cabinet members come and go, they remain, guardians of the past and custodians of much of the future.

The presence and the power of the permanent bureaucracy stirs annual debate in die capital and leads to periodic efforts by elected officials, especially the President, to reform the apparatus, to make it a more efficient and responsive instrument of the popular will. It would be a mistake, of course, to think that the continuing struggle between elected officials and the Civil Service involves a perennial fight pitting all elected officials against all appointed officials. The hostility between the two groups is not endemic. An elected official like the President is responsible, after all, for a good many of the most important Federal appointments (although not so many as is commonly supposed, as we shall see) and—especially if he is clever and chooses shrewdly—he can use those appointments to carry out the policies and pledges set forth in his campaign. He can also use his appointees to obstruct or soften or otherwise obfuscate his announced policies; for example, by naming a conservative administrator to implement proposals that appeared liberal during the campaign. Mr. Nixon's appointment of Maurice Stans as Secretary of Commerce is a case in point; under Stans's guidance, Nixon's repeated campaign pledge to give Negroes a "piece of the action" through black capitalism has come to virtually nothing.

The real issue in Government is not between the elected President and the top men he appoints; Cabinet Secretaries and Undersecretaries can be made to serve his purposes. The real issue is broader: the continuing tension between those who are in some sense vulnerable to the wishes of die electorate (Presidents, Congressmen, even Cabinet members who usually leave office when the President who appointed them is defeated or retires) and those who remain insulated from the electorate through seniority, skill, tenacity, influence or simple anonymity. They make up the permanent bureaucracy. Government cannot work unless the men who carry the popular will to Washington every few years can make an impact on them; and so far, our elected officials haven't been very successful.

This issue—and the tension it produces—is very real and equally frustrates a wide range of men who would not ordinarily be caught in the same room. The late Robert F. Kennedy, for example, was baffled, beaten and ultimately reduced to helpless anger by the refusal of bureaucrats in the Department of Agriculture to cut red tape and deliver free food to the starving children of Mississippi. But it was Senator Strom Thurmond, not widely known for his sensitivity to hungry blacks, who framed the matter most succinctly when he discovered that despite the soothing assurances of a succession of Secretaries of Health, Education and Welfare, the Office of Civil Rights was still sending enforcement agents to South Carolina hell-bent on desegregating Thurmond's school districts. "The trouble around here," he complained, "is that what goes in at die top doesn't come out at the bottom."

That, slightly restated, is the reason Mr. Nixon spent all that time visiting the agencies in the first month of his Presidency. He simply wanted to make certain (or, more precisely, give himself a fighting chance) that the policies he put into the agencies at the top through his appointed Cabinet Secretaries and Undersecretaries would emerge at the bottom, in time, as operational programs. As economist and management expert Peter Drucker has astutely observed, the "strong" President nowadays is not a man of shining vision but one who knows how to make the lions of the bureaucracy do his bidding. Some would argue—as Tom Wicker did in playboy's October 1970 issue—that more is required of a President than administrative skill, especially in these times; but it is equally true that a President who fails to tame the bureaucrats is doomed to an unhappy tenure.

It is to the White House, of course, that die sensible man takes himself when he wants to find governmental frustration of the purest sort. For it is at the White House—even the Nixon White House—that die visions are the largest and the eagerness to influence the rest of the body politic most evident. It is there that the bureaucrat who resists official policy, or fails to understand it, or simply bungles it, causes the most pain. Consider the following example.

Last year, my wife and I invited one of the President's senior domestic advisors and his wife to dinner at the Five Crowns restaurant in California's Newport (continued on page 193) (continued from page 148) Beach, a favorite hangout for key Nixon staffers when their boss is resting at his elegant compound in San Clemen te, some 25 miles down the coast. At one point in the evening, my wife innocently asked our guest how she could effectively join the fight against pollution. The aide first suggested that she join some citizens' campaign to clean up the Potomac. Then he paused, as if dissatisfied with his answer, and, at a decibel level he rarely reaches (judging by the startled expression on his wife's face), he said with passion: "The other thing you can do is go sit on Carl Klein's doorstep, and sit there and sit there, until he gets off his tail and does something!"

Carl Klein was then the Assistant Secretary of Interior for Water Resources, and it was the White House's considered judgment that he had done little or nothing to assist the Administration's efforts to enforce water-pollution standards and chase down errant industrialists and dirty municipalities. As it turned out, my wife was not required to track down Klein at the Department of the Interior, since he was gone a few weeks later. He had been appointed by the President—more precisely, rammed down die President's throat by the late Everett McKinley Dirksen, whose proteges are still scattered all over the Government—and when the time came for his dismissal, he was forced to accept the awful uncertainty that burdens most Presidential appointees. As Wally Hickel discovered, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

But there are not many men like Klein whom the President can easily get at if he decides they aren't measuring up. The reason is that his true powers of appointment are less than they are commonly supposed to be. A study by Congressional Quarterly early in the Administration, for instance, pointed out that the potential political patronage open to the new regime amounted to about 6500 Federal jobs with a total minimum annual salary of SI06,400,000. But this was a misleading figure, because no President can expect to fill all those jobs with new people (there's never enough time); many of the officials he does manage to appoint become captives of the bureaucracies they're supposed to run; and a sizable percentage (nearly one third) of the 6500 posts are already occupied by holdovers with status acquired through good service and seniority, who cannot be removed except for cause—moral or professional turpitude—that is usually impossible to prove.

It should also be noted that the 6500 posts over which the President theoretically has some influence constitute only a tiny fraction, a mere platoon, of the Federal army, which now numbers some 3,000,000 civilian employees. And these are not all mail carriers. Among them are men with the capacity, judgment and acumen to make or break policy by expediting or obstructing programs at the middle and lower levels.

Finally, there seem to be entire agencies (never mind the individual bureaucrats) that remain impervious to Presidential suggestion, because they have either powerful allies in Congress or influential constituencies among the citizenry. The Soil Conservation Service, the Forestry Service and some of the regulatory agencies—most notably, the Federal Trade Commission—have acquired independent lives of their own, as Ralph Nader never tires of pointing out. Neither John Gardner nor Bob Finch could make a dent in the welfare bureaucracy at HEW; thus, the only hope for a radical change in the welfare system would seem to be an overhaul of the laws governing that agency, as implied in Nixon's proposed Family Assistance Program. The Office of Economic Opportunity was dominated (until Nixon effectively reduced the scope of its power last year) not so much by the Republicans he named to run it as by holdover Democrats wedded to the more aggressive pace of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Public Roads has remained a powerful obstacle to the efforts of successive Secretaries of Transportation to make highways the servant, rather than the master, of constructive land use and population growth. And every time the President or some conservation-minded Congressman sets out to save this or that ecological treasure, he finds that the Army Corps of Engineers has already planned some project in the area and is stubbornly resisting efforts to cancel it.

The outstanding case of bureaucratic isolation from the popular will is, of course, the Federal Reserve Board, whose independence stems from the deep-seated and honestly motivated conviction that politicians should not be allowed to monkey around with the money supply. Johnson ranted and raved at William McChesney Martin when L. B. J. wanted easier credit, but his shouting came to little, because Martin—then nearing the end of the 14-year term of which FRB chairmen are assured—was legally accountable to no one but himself and his system. Mr. Nixon seems to be getting along quite well with Arthur Burns, his choice to succeed Martin, but there are signs of strain below the surface.

The usual Presidential response to the problem of ineffective and sluggish bureaucracies is to strengthen the White House staff, in the apparent belief that enough manpower and expertise concentrated at the top can overcome timidity and/or inertia down below. This phenomenon has been noted by Robert C. Wood, a former political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now president of the University of Massachusetts. Wood served as Undersecretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Johnson Administration, an experience that taught him as much as he had ever imparted to his students about the practical problems of translating the wishes of elected officials into administrative reality. During Wood's tenure, for instance, longtime employees of the Urban Renewal program (which had been a separate entity before the creation of HUD) showed little enthusiasm for— and in one case, to my personal knowledge, lobbied against—the Model Cities program proposed by L. B. J. and authorized by Congress, on grounds that the new program would diminish the funds available for urban renewal. During this same period—just to add to the Undersecretary's frustrations—the Federal Housing Administration (another separate entity in the pre-HUD clays) actively resisted administrative orders and legislative proposals requiring Model Cities to provide insurance for homes built in low-income areas. FHA had always spent most of its mortgage money in the suburbs, where the risks were low, and its officials did not relish the thought of (a) overturning three decades of tradition, a powerful influence in most bureaucracies, and (b) risking their good record with the General Accounting Office by placing the full faith and credit of the Federal Government behind rehabilitated housing in the slums.

However, as Wood has observed, the predictable response to these and similar problems—strengthening the supervisory capability of the President and increasing the size and visibility of the White House staff—has not solved them. On the contrary, the predictable response has produced a predictable result: the creation of even more bureaucracies that, without meaning to, further erode the President's capacity to turn the general guidelines of Government policy into actionable programs that fulfill the promise of that policy. The classic illustration is the old Budget Bureau, which has evolved over the years from a modest accounting organization charged with drawing up the annual budget—a rather generalized form of bureaucratic overview—into an immensely powerful, immensely professional agency that has added to its original functions an enormous degree of operational authority. The average Cabinet member cannot make a move, practically speaking, without getting prior clearance from the Budget Bureau. In Wood's time, for example, the Budget Bureau not only determined how much the housing agency could ask for to finance its Open Space program for the central cities but also—after Congress had appropriated the funds—involved itself intimately in the political and administrative process of allocating the money among competing cities and suburbs.

A case can be made—and probably ought to be—that the increasing powers of the Budget Bureau are the inevitable result of the failures of the lower bureaucracy, that the vast agencies of Government would never accomplish anything unless the Budget Bureau, acting as the loyal, competent, unbiased servant of the President, constantly prodded those agencies into some form of action. This would be a compelling argument, except for one small but ineluctable fact: This is still a Government in which the Cabinet occupies a large role, however symbolic that role may be. We have not figured out a way to get rid of the Cabinet. Cabinet officers still run the departments, at least in theory. Federal employees still look to their Secretaries and Undersecretaries for leadership and guidance. They regard the Budget Bureau—and this is important—as just another level of the bureaucracy, to be obeyed but not to be inspired by. In their view, the Budget Bureau intimidates and, in the end, emasculates their own bosses, who must grapple with it at budget time, surrender to its business-office mentality and, if so ordered, abandon programs on which those very bureaucrats, not to mention the Secretary himself, may have spent a great deal of time, energy and imagination. Thus, the Budget Bureau historically has tended to dampen agency morale and has inhibited the very efficiency in execution that, through its intervention in operational matters, it is trying to achieve.

Much the same criticism has been aimed at Mr. Nixon's recent reorganization of his own staff, which in itself demonstrates that the impulse to reshuffle at the top in order to achieve results at the bottom remains unabated among those who occupy, with mounting frustration, the theoretical pinnacle of power. In brief, what Mr. Nixon did last year was to name White House staffer John Elniichman chief executive officer of a new Domestic Council to oversee the creation of domestic policy; simultaneously, he named George Shultz —then Secretary of Labor—to head the new Office of Management and Budget, whose mandate includes not only the budget-making functions of the old Budget Bureau but also a vastly expanded management operation. In effect, Shultz is supposed to ride herd on the agencies and thus make sure that Ehrlichman's policies are translated into workable programs.

It sounds beautiful—and may turn out to be, in actual practice—but there are those who wonder whether the old problems (of morale and efficiency) won't soon begin to resurface. Despite the disclaimers of the new scheme's architects—a commission headed by Roy Ash of Litton Industries, who recommended the reorganization to the President—it may be that OMB interposes yet another layer (a supermanagement agency, if you will) between the President and the Cabinet departments, demoting the latter yet another notch. Given the obstructionism of lower-level bureaucrats in the old days, when things were pretty well decentralized, it may be a very good idea, indeed, to concentrate more responsibility in the Executive office of the President. But one wonders how many men of stature and competence will henceforth take on demanding Cabinet and sub-Cabinet jobs when they know they will be dealing not with the President but with a couple of guys named Shultz and Ehrlichman and their successors.

Beyond that: Can any reorganization at the top of the Executive branch solve the problems below? As I have suggested, the problems are formidable and are complicated by tenure, by timidity, by politics, by some inherent malaise that seems to turn bright men into paper-shuffling ciphers. What, for example, can Ehrlichman-Shultz do about Mississippi Congressman Jamie Whitten? Nick Kotz, an enterprising reporter for The Washington Post, once called Jamie Whitten the Permanent Secretary of Agriculture. He is not a bureaucrat but an elected official who knows how to manipulate bureaucrats and exploit their fears. As chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Whitten has used the power of the purse for 20 years to persuade middle-echelon officials in the Department of Agriculture to promote those programs that help the commercial fanner (cotton growers, in particular), while blocking or minimizing the impact of nearly every constructive effort to alleviate hunger among the black poor. During the Johnson Administration, for example, when the White House and the Budget Bureau were chock-full of well-intentioned liberals, Whitten managed to persuade officials in both Agriculture and HEW to drop Mississippi from a list of states targeted for a malnutrition survey. Kotz accurately points out that in the quiet process of hidden power, a bureaucrat in the Agriculture Department reacts more quickly to a raised eyebrow from Jamie Whitten than to a direct order from the Secretary himself.

There is very little that any President can do—especially if he wants Whitten's votes on other issues—to curb this sort of power. He might as well attempt to dislodge the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, for Whitten's constituents seem disposed to grant him permanent tenure—and, besides that, there are probably any number of officials in the Department of Agriculture who would suffer some kind of professional collapse if Whitten were suddenly no longer around to give them guidance.

The long and short of it is that any President—confronted with a bureaucracy that succumbs to the Whittens of this world—has very little leeway. After Eisenhower was elected in 1952, Harry Truman was overheard to remark: "He'll sit right here and he'll say, 'Do this, do that,' and nothing will happen. Poor Ike! It won't be a bit like the Army. He'll find it very frustrating." Or, as McGeorge Bundy, who tussled with the problems of national security in the Kennedy Administration, has observed, "The ablest of Presidents, with the most brilliant and dedicated of Executive office staffs, simply cannot do it alone."

Ironically, however, there is one area of public policy in which the President has great leverage to work his will: foreign affairs. While the Whittens and the obstructionists at HUD cannot easily be removed, the strangle hold that various bureaucrats and appointed dignitaries have had on the conduct of foreign policy for 20 years can easily be broken simply by not appointing them again. It is worth mentioning the existence of an entrenched foreign-policy bureaucracy, if only because when people start complaining of inertia in Government, they tend to think exclusively of the domestic agencies. But the international arena also abounds with people who are similarly immune from public review. One need only peruse the columns written by James Reston of The New York Times to discover who some of them are: the Achesons. Lovetts, McCloys, Nitzes, Har-rimans, Cliffords, Gilpatrics and Mc-Namaras. Many arose in the Truman years and went to ground in the Eisenhower era, but the first thing John Kennedy did after pledging to get the country moving again was to reach back and resurrect them. Richard Nixon has his own equivalents, all cut to the same establishmentarian, Cold Warrior pattern. He kept Henry Cabot Lodge at the Paris peace talks (David Bruce, another old hand, replaced him) and he has stuck with Ellsworth Bunker as ambassador in Saigon. And there has been no real house cleaning at State.

To the anti-Cold Warrior who resents the refusal of Presidents to infuse the foreign-policy process with new blood and who regards the foreign-policy establishment as so many interchangeable parts, the solution is instantly clear: Fire or sensibly retire the architects of the old order or elect a President with a new foreign policy. In short, find a new boy. someone who has not so fully absorbed the diplomacy of the Cold War that he feels compelled, quadrennially, to seek counsel from those who have provided the rhetoric and the policies that sustain the Cold War. But this simple remedy, unfortunately, is not applicable to the domestic agencies, to the middle-level officials in HEW nor HUD nor the Bureau of Roads nor the Corps of Engineers nor the OMB nor the Agency for International Development nor the Departments of Interior and Agriculture and Justice. Canonized by some earlier ruler, their positions secured by acceptable performance and consolidated lay tenure, they remain fugitives from the men who are supposed to exercise some authority over them—but easy prey for the Jamie Whittens. Is it therefore true that nothing can be done to give elected officials greater control over the bureaucracy they inherit? No. The prospects for reform are not hopeless. One partial remedy would be to strengthen the roles of individual Cabinet members. The people on die Ash Commission who devised the reorganization plan under which Ehrlichman became head of the Domestic Council and Sluiltz boss of the OMB genuinely hoped that the scheme would strengthen the ties between the President and his principal appointive officers instead of inserting another layer between them. To his credit, Ehrlichman has attempted, through a complex system of ad hoc subcommittees that meet regularly at the White House, to bring Cabinet members into an intimate, day-to-day relationship with himself and other key members of Nixon's palace guard. If successful, this system ought to give members of the Cabinet a larger stake in policy making and, in time, infuse the vast structures around them with a greater sense of purpose.

Moreover, once it's clearly established that policy is to be made at the top. the men in the middle and at the bottom may acquire a sharper definition of their own roles, which are (or ought to be) essentially operational, nonpolitical and professional. Robert Wood recalls that when he was Undersecretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, both Congress and the White House tried hard to arrange for greater coordination between ordinary citizens and local governments in the administration of antipoverty programs. Federal administrators at the local level, however, he complains, "never changed the signals." The will of the President and Congress was thus thwarted, and Wood suggests that new disciplinary measures be devised by the bureaucracy itself to ensure that people on the operational level behave like trained professionals rather than amateurs "intoxicated by visions" of making policy on their own.

When Wood complains about operational types in the permanent bureaucracy who imagine themselves to be policy makers, he and others who share his objections are expressing (sometimes tacitly, often openly) the wistful hope that someday the American Civil Service might be refashioned to resemble more nearly its British counterpart. It is generally conceded that the British version works infinitely better and the reasons are not hard to find. One—as Wood has already suggested in his plea for more professionalism in American Government—is that to be a public servant in Britain is to occupy a post of considerable public prestige. The British civil service is free from patronage and its members are not routinely regarded as drudges or even, for that matter, as bureaucrats, which in America is not a kind word. Henry Kissinger, for instance, is constantly referring to men in the State Department as bureaucrats and the contempt in his voice is not calculated to elevate morale in Foggy Bottom. More important, perhaps, is the fact that a clear distinction is and always has been made in Britain between the (concluded on page 200) (continued from page 191)

functions of elected officials and those of the civil service. In Britain, the Prime Minister and his Cabinet (whose officers must all be elected members of Parliament) are solely responsible for policy in the broadest sense. The civil service is responsible for the operation of that policy. There is none of the confusion of roles that so bedeviled a man like Wood, who found his underlings continuously meddling with what he thought was his and the President's policy.

But unless we can transform our own Civil Service overnight (and I seriously doubt that we can), my feeling is that Government will not work until Congress makes it work. The President and his principal officers in Government can do very little to master the agencies as long as the bureaucrats can play Congress off against the Executive—as long as they can run to Congressman Whit-ten or to somebody like him whenever they get into trouble or whenever they disagree with orders passed down by their superiors. The public may want a national malnutrition survey; the President may want it; the Cabinet and sub-Cabinet officers (appointed by the President and, therefore, responsive to him) may want it. But the middle-echelon shuffler, responsive to Whitten. may not want it, and if he can get enough like-minded people together, he can either dissuade his boss from undertaking the project or simply sabotage it. But the Whitten example is an extreme one. The fundamental problem goes beyond the Whittens to embrace not only those isolated Congressmen who, hand in glove with their bureaucratic allies, work actively to sabotage policy but also all those in Congress who, because of apathy or overwork, just don't care what happens to their programs after the legislative process has ended and the bureaucracy has taken control. What we're talking about, in short, is Congressional accountability for the performance of the Executive branch.

Astoundingly enough, given the amount of energy expended by Congress to invent programs, not to mention the enormous sums authorized for them, the men on the Hill make very little effort to monitor the subsequent performance of their own creations. Bad programs— flawed at conception—not only survive but flourish. Good programs are allowed to founder. Programs with a terminal date of, say, five years are often renewed with little opposition. By then, they have acquired momentum and allies—a bureaucracy in Washington to manage them and a constituency in the country to keep them alive. Ask a typical Congressman how he keeps track of the bureaucracy and lie will reply, "Through the GAO"—the General Accounting Office, an extension of Congress that not only publishes the least-read reports in Washington but concerns itself almost exclusively with accounting procedures. The GAO is interested mainly in discovering waste in Government programs and establishing efficiency; but the GAO never really asks the relevant questions, namely: Is the program doing the job expected of it by Congress and are the men in charge of it any good?

Some brand-new medianism will have to be devised to make crucial value judgments like these. There has never been any shortage of suggestions. I recall with nostalgia Daniel Patrick Moyni-han's appearance five years ago before the subcommittee on government reorganization chaired by Senator Abraham Ribicoff. The hearings still stand as the largest compendium anywhere of good (and unused) suggestions on how the Government might better organize itself to attack die problems of the cities. Among the simplest and best of die ideas was Moynihan's proposal for a permanent, well-staffed office to monitor the effectiveness of Government programs. The office would be directly responsible not to the bureaucracy but to Congress and would make stiff recommendations for improving flawed programs or for canceling them altogether, along with the various bureaucratic appendages that have lost their usefulness. On a more modest level, Charles L. Schultze, L. B.J.'s Budget Director, has suggested that Congress can do as much if not more than the Executive branch to control the dollar-happy bureaucrats in the Pentagon; he suggests, for this purpose, that Congress set up a joint committee on the military budget to help establish priorities in the national-security area. Both committees would be staffed with skilled professionals capable of making tough judgments and remaining immune from bureaucratic or political pressures.

It may be argued that, by superimposing Congressional review on the workings of the bureaucracy, we might risk years of patient effort to protect die administrative structure from the political process. This, of course, is a basic rationale for having a Civil Service in the first place. However, as Drucker has noted, the safeguards we have devised to protect the existing machinery from the distortions and pressures of politics "also protect the incumbents in the agencies from the demands of performance." And the monitoring functions that Moynihan and Schultze suggested would not require intense surveillance and day-to-day snooping. They would simply produce well-researched judgments as to whether agency A or bureau B or program C was effectively producing the results originally intended. The committees would then recommend revision or automatic abandonment or at least extensive public hearings to put (he agency or die program back on course. Given this prospect, even the most deeply entrenched official would soon become more responsive—to his superiors, to the President and (through them) to the public, which nowadays has little notion of what the bureaucrat is up 10 and an even slimmer chance of finding out.