Washington-U.S.A.:

...But the Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, headed by Representative Oren L. Harris (D-Ark...

...As prominent and respected a political scientist as Peter H. Odegard of the University of California endorsed the Hector proposal in a recent article in the Washington Post...

...The idea of the agencies was almost deceptively simple...

...Whether the Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight has looked into the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Power Commission, the view has frequently been startling, often breathtaking, but never reassuring...

...There are many in Washington who believe the regulatory agencies have deteriorated so badly that there is virtually no hope of once again pointing them down the idealistic road toward control of industry in the public interest, Last September Louis Hector resigned as a member of the CAB and in a letter to President Eisenhower suggested that that regulatory agency be abolished...

...What has gone wrong with the regulatory concept which was championed by such persons as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Robert F. La Follette...

...One obvious fault with the regulatory agencies is that they have seldom attracted the high-caliber men necessary to judge fairly the great issues of commerce which come before the commissions...

...As the voluble "Tommy the Cork" noted in his commanding performance before the Harris Subcommittee, most if not all of the shortcomings of the regulatory agencies are a result of the failure of Congress over the years to decide what it really expects from the commissions...

...The commissioners and the staffs of the agencies quickly identify themselves with the interests of the industries they are supposed to regulate or police in the public interest...

...For one thing, it would take years to clear the dockets of the existing agencies...

...For commission staff members one sure road to riches is via the sale of experience gained to a company that deals with the agency day after day and therefore finds it valuable to hire men who know their way around the commission's building as well as through its labyrinthine procedures...

...The Subcommittee has pointed with great alarm to situations which a complacent Administration has indulgently tolerated...

...The Subcommittee has not only put on a good show, boasting such star attractions as Sherman Adams, Charles Van Doren, Dick Clark and most recently Thomas G. ("Tommy the Cork") Corcoran, but the members and staff of the Subcommittee have also raised and spotlighted startling questions about the operations of the supposedly independent agencies...

...The procedures governing representations before the agencies need to be tightened up, too...

...The case of Leland Olds is a conspicuous example...

...The commissions offer some degree of prominence and respectability, and frequently not too much work, for an old party wheelhorse who has labored arduously but seldom with any spectacular results in highly partisan politics...

...But drastic administrative surgery of this sort is highly unlikely, even in a new Administration riding into office on the crest of a decisive popular vote...

...The best approach would seem to be through appointment of outstanding men to the commissions and appropriation of sufficient funds so that the agencies can do more than carry out a token enforcement...

...The regulatory agencies have also become a dumping ground for political hacks and for defeated Senators and Representatives who don't want to go back to Pocatello...

...The shortcomings of the regulatory agencies have been obvious for a good many years...

...Indeed, many members of these presumably independent agencies move from jobs in the regulated industries to positions on the boards or commissions...

...But primarily the commissions require a transfusion of confidence through appointment of qualified members and beefing up of staffs that already include many dedicated but frequently frustrated public servants...

...Perhaps an even more serious fault has been the failure of the advocates of the regulatory bodies to realize that billions of dollars would soon be riding on the decisions of a handful of commissioners or board members...

...Sometimes a President does not even go beyond the cronies or aides of the politicians to find nominees for the agencies...

...As a result of this sort of political subterfuge, the agencies seldom actually reflect a spectrum of political views, as was envisioned by the idealists who more than 50 years ago looked upon the quasi-judicial regulatory agency plan as an excellent way of keeping politics out of Government and of maintaining competition and other presumably desirable business practices at optimum levels...

...has succeeded in calling more attention to the problem than has any other investigating committee of recent years...

...The trade press—from a pro-industry and anti-regulation standpoint—assiduously and competently covers the agency or agencies in which its readers are interested...

...And because the regulatory agencies are so much more than judicial bodies the restraints which apply to cases before courts never seemed to have been applied to them...

...When President Truman renominated Olds to the FPC in 1949, the oil and gas industry succeeded in preventing confirmation of the nomination by the Senate...

...But representatives of the industry that must deal with a particular agency know its operations the way a veteran member of Congress knows his constituency...

...It is unquestionably unrealistic to expect a company to refrain from doing all it can to influence the agency to render a favorable decision...

...Commissioners are also supposed to be bi-partisan, indeed removed from politics...

...These agencies have been largely ignored by the press, the general public, the President and members of Congress, except of course when an affluent constitutent has a particularly important case before one of them...

...As usual, the industry and not the consumer was well organized, And it is difficult to think of anyone since Olds who truly served with distinction on a Federal regulatory commission...

...But the Eisenhower Administration, like all of its Republican predecessors, tries to seek out Democrats who are in fact crypto-Republicans when vacancies occur which under law are required to be filled by someone at least nominally a Democrat...

...Nor does the situation appear to be different in the three other major regulatory bodies—the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Civil Aeronautics Board...

...Unfortunately, however, the Subcommittee has failed to suggest any significant solutions to the many problems that all too obviously cry out for attention...

...Among all of the other problems confronting a new President in 1961, the reorganization of the regulatory agencies will surely be one of the most important domestic reforms and it ought to be undertaken as carefully, but just as expeditiously, as possible...

...The industry objected to Olds because he was a consumer man rather than an industry man...

...Not since the internal revenue scandals of the latter and worst days of the Truman Administration have so many questionable governmental practices been so mercilessly exposed by Congressional investigators...

...The agencies should be divorced from both legislative and executive branches of the Government and become almost a fourth branch of Government, fiercely independent, scrupulously fair and almost like a court in the tone and atmosphere of their deliberations...

...And even the Harris Subcommittee has had to be prodded from time to time by its staff, the press or some of its members to carry out its all-important public service...

...Hector believes that the board's administrative duties should be transferred to the Commerce Department, that the Justice Department should undertake its investigative functions and that its judicial duties should be exercised by a truly administrative court...

...So accustomed has Congress become to naming one of its own or a nonentity to a regulatory agency that usually the only time a nominee runs into trouble on Capitol Hill is on the rare occasion when a champion of the consumer in some mysterious way finds himself appointed to a commission...

...The revelations of the Harris Subcommittee have surely shown the way for the next Administration to right the shocking wrongs in the regulatory agencies...

...For another, so many interests have become vested in the existing order—or is it disorder?—that reform is obviously going to have to be gradual if it is to come at all...

...By Julius Duscha Politics and the Regulatory Agencies FOR MORE THAN two years the amorphous independent agencies of the Federal Government have been under the intermittent scrutiny of that wonderfully named House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight...

...The new Administration will be as derelict in its duty as the Eisenhower Administration has been if it does not act quickly and decisively to get the regulatory agencies to regulate and to realize that public interest supersedes any private or industrial representations, no matter how skillfully and persuasively put forward...

...Democratic Administrations have, of course, played the same game with Republican appointees...