Who's In Charge Here?: Thoughts on the Diffusion of Power in America
O'Lessker, Karl
The Alternative: An American Spectator • March 1976 • Volume 9, Number 6 Karl O'Lessker Who's In Charge Here? Thoughts on the Diffusion of Power in America • Opinion is like the sea: its...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 7 erally millions of undergraduate students of American government...
...This Congressional drag on executive leadership is understandable to most Americans: the Founding Fathers designed it that way...
...women and impersonal economic forces the second...
...The White House sur*One of my favorite FDR stories appears in Marriner Eccles' memoirs, Beckoning Frontiers...
...There is little enough that one knows about all this from firsthand observation, but if six years as a senior staff member of the U.S...
...Like Congress, he is more successful as, a nay-sayer than as an innovator...
...When the Founding Fathers determined to guard our liberties by separating powers, they succeeded, in their creation of a bicameral legislature, far beyond what their maddest hopes could have led them to expect...
...No power other than that of the electorate can discipline them...
...They have interests of their own to which they are responsive and which are of the greatest significance in determining their length of tenure...
...On the contrary, the largest part of all the actions taken in the name of "Congress" never even come to the attention of, let alone require decision-making by, most members...
...And thatis why even conservatives now are demanding leadership from the President...
...It is enough here to say that the President most certainly cannot now be said to be "in charge" as I have loosely defined the phrase...
...Should the day ever return when we elect a President by a comfortable margin and a Congress both houses of which are controlled by his own party, itis altogether likely that the White House will once again seem the very nerve center of American government, or a castle-dominant sitting high above the sprawling ineffectual chaos of Washington, D.C...
...Second, how accurate isthis revisionist view of the President...
...Opinion seizes .us unbidden, and no slave was ever more loyal to a benevolent master than we to "our" opinion about something or other...
...The other part of the explanation is precisely those great bureaucratic and economic interests I mentioned a moment ago...
...and then that right was limited in a couple of subsequent Supreme Court decisions...
...Even• the fundamental question of whether a President has the right to fire a department head was not resolved until 1926, in the/landmark case Myers v. U.S...
...Let me say that I mean by it nothing more complicated (or sinister) than the ability, more often than not, both to set the principal agenda for government decision-making and to have the final say in cases of interinstitutional conflict...
...No doubt both would have been enacted eventually...
...A President quickly discovers, if he did not already know, that American society is not a tabula rasa upon which a bold leader can write his will in a flowing hand...
...First: Given the rapidly deteriorating condition of our major political parties, it may be a very long time, and only after some sweeping party reconstruction, before a President will again enjoy whatever benefits flow from having "his" own party in a bicameral majority...
...As to the first, one can venture hardly more than a guess...
...Part of the explanation for lack of effective Presidential leadership lies in the fact that only rarely does a new President take office with any very clear policy objectives in-mind...
...And God forbid if any President is defeated after the first term, because then the bureaucracy has another three years to play games with the next President...
...Richard Nixon and John Kennedy are cases in point: each rode into the White House on a wave of rhetoric and consuming personal ambition...
...But their numbers are diminishing as the tide of this latest opinion sweeps over the landscape...
...The fact that the blow struck at the midpoint of Richard Nixon's first term is a matter of coincidence not contrivance...
...Unlike fashion, it is not willed, it does not obey the dictates of prudence...
...Not a trace...
...6 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 rounded" is the phrase one top Nixon aide often used during the first term, no doubt reflecting his chief's sense of enemy forces pressing in from all sides...
...This demonstrable fact might present fewer problems for analysis if anyone coordinated Congressional outputs...
...To renounce one opinion and grasp its opposite is only to remove us from the company of one unseemly group and place us with another...
...The United States government seems to me very like some enormous lumbering beast movingslowly but inexorably over an uncharted terrain, making its own path as it goes, from time to time lurching this way or that in response to some ferocious impingement of the environment upon it—a lightning bolt, say, or an earthquake...
...And on those infrequent occasions when he and the Congress join together in enacting some great new program, the odds are that the implementation of it by the bureaucracy will make it turn out astonishingly different from what he or the Congressional sponsors had envisioned...
...Indeed, even President Franklin Roosevelt at the height of his popularity and influence was forced to accept stunning defeats in Congress and avoided others only by raw coercion in time of war...
...And if those views don't happen to comport with the President's, well, let him re-read his Constitution with eyes filled with tears of frustration...
...Can anyone suppose, for example, that President Johnson intended his War on Poverty to be a series of programs, in Daniel Moynihan's phrase, "of which the first effect would be to improve the condition of middle-class professionals and the second effect might or might not be that of improving the condition of the poor" ? Who then really is in charge of the United States government...
...But the bureaucracy...
...Ask any six citizens chosen at random in a coffee shop or tavern and ask them what they think the government ought to do about the energy crisis...
...The Supreme Court and black people themselves took the lead in the first...
...8 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976...
...What fundamental, or even significant, changes in national policy can we attribute to Presidential leadership during the past twenty-five years...
...But so multitudinous, so diverse, so obscure are these stimuli that no one can ever hope to identify them all, let alone array them in a causally explanatory way...
...I decline to answer on the prudent grounds that that really is the subject for another, even longer essay...
...Isn't it part of the executive branch...
...The budgetfor fiscal year 1973 projected outlays of $1.2 billion for this program...
...Indeed one can only feel apprehensive about one's own sharing of this view in the presence of such assertions as Paul Weaver's: "Congress itself has been growing steadily more powerful vis-a-vis the Presidency over the last two decades and more...
...Poor Finch, hospitalized for "nervous exhaustion," resigned soon thereafter...
...Now, however, tick off the other momentous changes since 1950: civil rights, women's equality, Medicare...
...No, Mr...
...The models, in democratic regimes, would be the British cabinet or the presidency of the Fifth Republic—or, more to the point of this essay, the American Presidency as it appeared to the rapt vision of a generation of publicists and political scientists, who succeeded in transmitting that vision to litCongress clutches [the President's] wrist with something like a death grip...
...In other instances the two chairmen and the two ranking minority members of their respective committees reach agreements among themselves, agreements which may or may not have to await the pro forma ratification of the entire Congress...
...Granted, the Presidency of Gerald R. Ford-does nothing to make one cling to the earlier view of President- as -colossus -bestriding - this - narrow - globe...
...Ford does not now have it, that is a peculiarity of his situation and abilities rather than a token of any major systemic change...
...But the President is one man, an identifiable entity of flesh and blood whose actions, no matter whence the idea for them came, are directly assignable to himself...
...Adroitly misinterpreting Congressional intent on the question of social services to welfare recipients, HEW program officials presided over an expansion of spending for such services that, by the early 1970s, reached budget-breaking proportions...
...In one, the unhappy Robert Finch, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, is the principal victim...
...His large policy objectives are held hostage by Congress, his modest policy objectives by the bureaucracy...
...it is instead a question of policy views and commitments—and large segments of the federal bureaucracy held views and commitments opposed to those of the President...
...And the federal • bureaucracy hangs upon his arm like a grossly overweight, desperately jealous mistress...
...And then, if we are at all reflective, we are perplexed and embarrassed—but what are we to do...
...No doubt, as many readers will already have remarked, the terms of the definition are too rigorous, too confining to have ever had much application to the American experience...
...Even so powerful and self-confident a President as Franklin Roosevelt had to concede his inability to control the bureaucracy,* and all his successors have sounded the same note of angry frustration...
...At the very least he would have to be able to exercise a degree of control over key members of Congress that no President has ever been able to exercise...
...One great reason is that no one is in charge...
...One doesn't have to have studied at Wittgenstein's feet to recognize that the question is unanswerable until the phrase "in charge" is defined...
...More striking yet is the fact that until 1921 agencies negotiated directly with Congress for their appropriations...
...Eccles reports Roosevelt saying: ....When I woke up this morning, the first thing I saw was a headline in the New York Times to the effect that our Navy was going to spend two billion dollars on a shipbuilding program...
...Policies do get made and some may appear to warrant considerable faith in the likelihood of beneficent effects...
...The second illustration had even larger policy consequences...
...Nor, given the fundamental nature of the American electoral system, can he ever hope to exercise such power...
...No doubt this image will strike many readers as unduly, not to say disgracefully, fatalistic...
...There is nothing new under the sun and no opinion is unique to any man...
...For again I must point out that this characteristic of the system is a consequence of its deepest structure—the way we elect our political leaders...
...HEW Secretary Richardson and OMB officials found to their despair that unstructured and unmonitored spending for social services was closing out virtually all their opportunities for new initiatives in the social-program area...
...President is only slightly more capable than Congress of altering the direction of American national policy...
...But no one, no thing, does...
...the civil service and the unions do...
...According to Nathan: "Over the five-years 1968 'to 1973, HEW officials projected that social-services spending would grow 20-fold, with the plateau to come at approximately $18 billion if at all...
...Indeed it seems to me that Congress as a corporate actor hardly even exists, let alone wields significantly expanded power vis-a-vis the executive...
...Moreover, on most great issues the inability of the federal government to get, its act together is a true reflection of the state of opinion among us...
...Yes, but...
...It is not only in the banner-headline cases like the Watergate tapes or school desegregation that the courts have forced Presidents to do what they didn't want to do or prevented them from doing what they most earnestly wished to do, nor does the Supreme Court get in a President's way only when there is a sharp ideological division between the two...
...I am altogether persuaded that we are overgoverned these days and I am prepared to hail nearly every instance of one branch of government's checking and balancing some other branch...
...And if Mr...
...When the Founding Fathers determined to guard our liberties by separating powers, they succeeded, in their creation of a bicameral legislature, far beyond their maddest hopes...
...No indeed...
...In order for a President to gain real control of the bureaucracy he must somehow make it less responsive to interests other than his own...
...rather, it is the power to say, "Thou shalt not govern...
...And what of Herbert Hoover and Woodrow Wilson during the last biennia of their tenures...
...But it is only when we look around, surprised, and find that a great many others—not all of whom, by any means, people we respect—happen to share that opinion, do we become aware of the tidal nature of opinion in general...
...In domestic affairs, however, our chief executive looks surprisingly like that Nixonian nightmare-figure, the pitiful helpless giant...
...Thoughts on the Diffusion of Power in America • Opinion is like the sea: its movements are tidal...
...So it can hardly be the ineptness of Ford that first opened eyes to the absence of garments on the imperial person...
...Leave to one side as deceptively atypical such Presidential extravaganzas as the opening to Peking...
...each had at best (or worst) some vague notions about "getting the country moving again" or "reversing the drifr of power to Washington...
...there is no driver to whom we the sovereign passengers can shout directions, but only a crowd of fettered men struggling fitfully for a temporary feel of the reins...
...It took him three years to find out what was going on in the bureaucracy...
...Congress the third...
...This means that, for any given agency, he must be able to force the agency to place White House policy preferences ahead of those of the Congressional subcommittees which control its flow of legal authority and appropriations and of the great economic interests which in a sense are its very reason for being...
...As my col-league Roderick A. Bell has so well put it in a recent book, "Congress itself is a kind of optical illusion...
...Characteristically, Finch at first agreed to do so, then at the last minute pleaded illness and canceled the meeting...
...Congressional "obstructionism" is neither new nor an indication of growing power vis-l-vis the executive...
...In this connection, too, one ought not overlook the federal judiciary as a limit-setter on Presidential power...
...Not so "Congress," which is a label we haphazardly slap on a vast complex of actions only a few of which involve the conscious decisions of anything like a majority of the elected members of the institution...
...The story of his efforts to prevent that from happening by taking direct control of the government's administrative machinery is the subject of Nathan's fascinating, if uneven and badly edited, short book, The Plot That Failed...
...But this is a very long way from clear policy objectives...
...The question is not so much whether the bureaucracy regarded Nixon as an enemy and determined to do him in (though no doubt Nixon himself felt they did...
...How in fact could a President do that...
...There are riders on its back but none controls it...
...Do you know what I said to that...
...President...
...And so the great beast lumbers on, dragging us with it over its littered way...
...It is the overall direction of American government that seems to me utterly inscrutable...
...That is the second and far more important question...
...But what sort of consensus does one see among the American people on energy policy...
...Here I am, the Commander in Chief of the Navy having to read about that for the first time in the press...
...The reasons for my skepticism go to the heart of the argument of this essay: not only is no one in charge of the federal government, no one can be...
...I conclude with an image...
...Senate entitle the present observer to a judgment, I should have to say that Weaver's pronouncement is greatly mistaken...
...but neither attitude had much of an effect on the outcomes...
...I said: 'Jesus Chr-rist...
...For the...
...And_ Nathan goes on to quote another White House aide, Michael Balzano, who by the middle of 1972 told the Wall Street Journal: "President Nixon doesn't run the bureaucracy...
...Suppose then we loosen it a bit, no longer requiring that "in charge" entail agenda-setting and the power of the final say...
...I am inclined to doubt that it ever could have succeeded...
...But the damage had been done: Nixon recognized, first, that Finch simply wasn't strong enough to master that most intractable of all departments, and second, that the HEW bureaucrats at least were not even going to make a pretense of accepting leadership from the White House...
...Was it ever an accurate vision...
...Two illustrations from Nixon's first term demonstrate this policy divergence and its consequences...
...The fact that a tide of "informed opinion" now holds the Presidency to be an institution of tightly limited power does not necessarily make it so...
...And the result is, each new President soon finds himself the captive of events—imperiously summoning reactions from him—and of the great bureaucratic andeconomic interests that preceded him to Washington and that will still be there long after he has left...
...One would not do great violence to the evidence, I think, to claim that, throughout much of this century, Presidents have had that degree at least of primacy...
...For members of Congress—especially those who have acquired enough seniority to gain committee chairmanships—owe nothingto any President for their reelections...
...More important, it is not the kind of power that governs a nation...
...He entered office with a solid conservative distrust of bureaucrats heightened by his own especially virulent form of the politician's dissease, paranoia...
...One great Presidential initiative in domestic affairs —Nixon's Family Assistance Plan—after being passed by the House of Representatives was humiliatingly defeated in the Senate: it was not even permitted to come to a vote...
...The best guess seems to be that a few very astute observers (myself not among them) saw the reality behind the fog of textbook and journalistic exaltation of Presidential power, and only now, with a real bumbler in the White House, do the rest of us begin to share that perception...
...most of their efforts go to keep from being thrown off and crushed...
...For the most part, despite what one has read in the feverish accounts of the Washington press corps, Presidents have confined their activities either to cheering or to looking sullen...
...But two related caveats are in order...
...Suspecting the White House of insufficient enthusiasm for pushing ahead with school desegregation in the South and believing that the Secretary should represent their views in policy discussions in the Cabinet Room, two thousand HEW employees signed a petition to Finch demanding that he meet with them and hear their views...
...This is the view that the President of the United States is not the puissant creature we had all imagined him to be but rather, as one writershas put it, he' is at best "a strategically situated and important participant among vast numbers of policy entrepreneurs and policy-bearing bureaucrats...
...It is literally not under intelligent control...
...Outside the international field, precious few...
...prior to passage of the Budget and Accounting Act of that year, Presidents had nothing more helpful to offer to federal budget-making than moral suasion...
...What stirs these discomforting ruminations is the discovery that a particular political view I have lately come to, all (I thought) on my own, just happens now to be shared by every pundit and political analyst rushing into print with "his" discovery...
...To summarize the argument thus far: Presidents continue to have considerable latitude in foreign affairs (though I should be very much surprised if any President reaches again the autocratic heights of Nixon's Cambodian and Chinese ventures...
...And electorates are notoriously unwilling to take a President's word on purging an incumbent...
...What alternative is there...
...But the inconvenient fact is that people who depend for 'a living on votes are reluctant to lead voters toward bitterly disapproved-of goals...
...And, indeed, as party becomes less and less important as a voting cue to most of us, this sort of political entropy can only increase, making the prospect of centralized leadership more and more remote, if not chimerical...
...Congress clutches his wrist with something like a death grip...
...For present purposes it is enough to say that the outcome of Nixon's third and most strenuous effort was still in doubt when Watergate destroyed his Presidency...
...What makes it particularly relevant to the present discussion is that, according to another Nixon aide, Richard P. Nathan, it referred specifically to the bureaucracy, not to the news media or the Democratic Congress...
...but Presidents pushed hard for them and brought them into being when they did...
...What Senator Warren G. Magnuson does to the Departments of Labor and HEW in his capacity as chairman of the subcommittee on Labor-HEW appropriations may not even be known to Senator Harrison A. Williams in his capacity as chairman of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare (the authorizing committee for most legislation affecting the two departments...
...Suppose instead we mean only that to be in charge is to be the principal lead-giver in the system, the institutional actor whose policy recommendations will, more often than not, and in the absence of compelling reasons not to do so, be acceded to by others...
...But of course it served to confirm and harden Nixon's conviction that the bureaucracy would stop at nothing to sabotage his Administration...
...Six different answers—some of which will deny there even is an energy crisis...
...Can the President and Congress not agree on an energy policy...
...But is it correct...
...For whereas Whiggish types like myself are only too happy not to have anyone do much in the way of leading, conservatives like liberals are dissatisfied and/or apprehensive with things as they are and want to change them...
...The central point here is that a bureaucratic act of will—refusing to set any standards or apply any controls—transformed a modest humanitarian gesture on the part of Congress into a sledgehammer blow at the federal budget...
...This brings us a bit closer to home...
...Even if it compels a sort of uneasy shock of recognition, it should deter no one from acting as if he believed in the efficacy of political action...
...And isn't the President our chief executive...
...It is no vote of confidence in the present to say that this is a vain aspiration...
...And what do these agreements have to do with the policy views of, say, Senator Quentin Burdick or Senator Paul Fannin—to say nothing of any memThe Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 5 ber of the House of Representatives...
...Even paranoids, the saying goes, have real enemies...
...By September of 1972 revised estimates placed the figure at nearly $5 billion...
...Two other large programs of permanent consequence can rightly be attributed to strong Presidential leadership: Johnson's federal aid to elementary and secondary education and Nixon's revenue sharing...
...The upshot is that while Congress has a certain facility for devising and enacting large as well as small policies that no one much disapproves of, the institution becomes virtually paralytic in the face of deep-rooted public controversy...
...And the federal bureaucracy hangs upon his arm like a grossly overweight, desperately jealous mistress...
...First, what set the tide in motion...
...I do not want to be understood as deploring this kind of negativism...
...To be sure, Congress as an institution retains the power to say no to a President, and in our own day of a nonelected, not very competent or respected chief executive, Congress has been doing so with some notable frequency...
...Yes, yes, I know: government is supposed to lead, not follow, public opinion...
...No one tried harder to exercise control than Richard Nixon...
...Like Congressmen-and bureaucrats, Court members make decisions on the basis of their own individual views of correct, or at least expedient, policy...
...It crashes about as it does in response to stimuli that are, in principle at least, explicable...
...Second: Unless there evolves a degree of internal party discipline we have not seen in this system since the first decade of the century, Congressional potentates in alliance with interest-group leaders and bureaucratic chieftains will continue to wield effective policy-making power over the broad range of federal governmental activities that most, intimately affect most Americans...
...For one thing, the executive branch was never understood or intended to be a unified entity under the control of the President...
...From another perspective, I should be inclined to call it a verbal trick we play on ourselves: we say, "the Congress" just as we say, "the President...
...There are still, I think, a great many political scientists and an even larger number of high school social studies teachers who would be astonished at that judgment...
...Yet it is true that the starkly revisionist comment I quoted above was written by Professor Thomas Cronin in 1970, at a time when President Nixon was behaving all too imperially...
...The opportunity for careful policy planning has passed him by: the time and energy for it were consumed in years of campaigning...
...As late as the 1840s, for example, Presidents themselves cautioned in gravest tones against Presidential control of the Treasury Department...
...But I need hardly point out that there have been other times in our national history when executive and legislature were scarcely on speaking terms...
...So it is not surprising that federal administrators early developed, and resolutely cling to, a tradition of independence vis-a-vis their nominal leader...
...Two separate and intriguing questions here...
...And if Congress seems more surly and ungovernable today than ever before, well, try convincing Harry Truman's ghost that it really is...
Vol. 9 • March 1976 • No. 6
