The task of transforming central economic organs and especially ministries into headquarters of scientific-technological progress, i. e., into bodies that would define the strategic directions of scientific-technological progress in branches of the economy, was posed at the Twenty-seventh Congress of the CPSU. It is specifically on the basis of attainments in science and technology that branch ministries are called upon to carry out the economic reform and to strive to raise our nation's economy to a qualitatively new level. However, the press is filled with abundant evidence that the economic reform is bogging down primarily because the apparatus of ministries and other central bodies is still functioning in a command-administrative regime. They have been quite sharply criticized by people's deputies at the congress and at a session of the USSR Supreme Soviet noting that the law on the state enterprise does not agree with the existing forms and methods of branch management of the economy.