0.3 Knowledge for governance: social science perspectives on science  (Page 10/10)

The report went on to recommend consolidating various existing bureaus within cabinet departments, reorganizing the federal government’s fiscal and accounting system, and appointing a six-person White House staff to serve as liaison to cabinet departments.

The centerpiece of the report was its recommendation of a new Executive Office of the President (EoP) that would put budgeting, planning and personnel management—which committee members regarded as the essential tools of public administration—under direct control of the president. These would be administered on behalf of the president by the National Resources Planning Board; an office to supercede the quasi-independent Civil Service Commission; and the Bureau of the Budget, which had been housed in the Treasury Department since the bureau’s creation in 1921.

Congressional reaction

Roosevelt transmitted the report to Congress on January 12, 1937, a few days before his second inaugural. But coming hard on the heels of his controversial court-packing proposal, the bill that would have implemented the recommendations was rejected by the Senate, which regarded it as a “dictator” bill that intruded on congressional prerogatives. Despite this defeat, many of the Brownlow committee’s recommendations were quietly put into effect through piecemeal actions over the next two years. The EoP was established temporarily in 1939, extended with the War Powers Act of 1941, and given permanent status with the Reorganization Act of 1945. Although Congress continued to deny Roosevelt the authority to reorganize the quasi-independent Civil Service Commission (now the Office of Personnel Management) as an executive office, it approved the plan to reorganize the National Resources Committee and elevate its status to that of the National Resources Planning Board within the Executive Office of the President; and to transfer the Bureau of the Budget to the EoP from the Treasury Department. At this point, Merriam finally assumed a position within the federal government as vice-chair of the three-member National Resources Planning Board, serving under the chairman Frederic Delano.

This was to prove a short-lived triumph. Under siege by congressional critics who still regarded central planning with suspicion, and with the president’s attention absorbed by the looming war, the National Resources Planning Board was abolished in 1941, and the postwar period saw the ascendance of natural scientists. Not until the late 1960s would social sciences again be recognized as worthy of federal support.

Aftermath

Still, the idea that social-science-informed planning was essential to effective management of the executive branch survived. The executive office structure turned out to be well suited to the temporary emergency agencies created during World War II. In 1946, the EoP became home of the new Council of Economic Advisers, a body established with the expectation that sound data and expert knowledge, coupled with access to the president, would advance domestic prosperity. A year later, the National Security Council became an additional arm of the EoP with the expectation that it would serve an analogous function for the president's management of expanding international responsibilities. And the concept of rational planning based on expert knowledge as essential to the modern presidency obviously survives in the form of our presidential science advisory system, as does the EoP as its organizational home.

Acceptance by government of the proposition that expert knowledge is essential to effective governance also attracted to Washington many energetic and talented young men who had been exposed to the ideas of Merriam and Brownlow and who were convinced that government service during the New Deal provided an opportunity to make a difference. Prominent among these were Elmer Staats, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1939 after a year-long fellowship at the Brookings Institute, then joined the BoB, becoming its assistant director in 1947, and going on to serve as Comptroller General from 1961 to 1988. Brownlow’s protégé Don K. Price joined the BoB in 1943, audited the super-secret facility at Los Alamos, helped organize a new relationship between science and government, and later became Dean of the Littauer (now the Kennedy) School of Government at Harvard University. William D. Carey came to Washington in 1942 and served as principal federal negotiator between the Congress and the scientific community from 1946 to 1950, helping forge the bill creating the National Science Foundation.

With the refusal of the Congress to transfer the personnel management functions of the Civil Service Commission to the EoP and the demise of the National Resources Planning Board in 1941, the BoB became, by default, the primary embodiment of the idea within the federal government that knowledge and governance ought to be closely coupled. Thus the BoB became the home of energetic young men who were convinced that they could make a difference by means of careers in government. These young men, inspired by the ideas of Merriam, Brownlow, and others, were instrumental in establishing the structure of post-war science policy in the United States.