Federal Executive Reorganization: Thirty Years of Experience

Abstract

since President Franklin D. Roosevelt made reorganization in the Executive Branch a major item on the agenda of his second term of office, by sending to the Congress in January 1937 the Report 1 of his Committee on Administrative Management. This was not the first official attempt to deal with the subject comprehensively. But it was the first such effort to have direct and important practical consequences, the first to present a coherent program in brief compass, the first to view reorganization as a problem for the President and of the presidency, the first to stir an academic (as distinguished from a technical or homiletic) literature. During the intervening years since the Congress initially rejected the reorganization bill in 1938 by a close vote in the House at the climax of an emotional campaign,2 a few of the Committee's recommendations have been adopted, others have been realized in effect by different means, and still others have been abandoned as impractical or mistaken. Scholarly studies of organization and management, including both case studies and conscious efforts to formulate and test hypotheses, have contributed to a more realistic understanding, greater precision of statement, and