Abstract
During the first third of the 20th century, the emergent administrative state overwhelmed the traditional presidency. Between 1900 and 1937, the number of federal civilian employees grew from 230,755 to 895,993 (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975, Sec. Y, 308-317). The same period saw an eightfold increase in federal spending (Sec. Y, 457-465). Yet during that period the presidential office remained essentially unchanged, making uncertain its ability to use the executive power and “see that the laws are faithfully executed.” At the end of his first term, Franklin Roosevelt sought to reverse the imbalance between the presidency and executive branch. Mordecai Lee’s book explores the civil service–related aspect of that effort to build presidential managerial capacity.
In 1936, Roosevelt created the President’s Committee on Administrative Management, assigning its chair, Louis Brownlow, and his two colleagues to recommend for him tools to make the presidency managerial. The committee’s Report was released to Congress and the public in early 1937. In the document’s introduction, the committee announced its guiding principle, “The president needs help.” Its subsequent recommendations aimed to expand the president’s capacities to manage government’s programs, its spending, and its executive branch personnel. There is a large literature on Roosevelt’s management problems, the Brownlow committee, its recommendations, and their fate (e.g., Arnold, 1998; Karl, 1963; Polenberg, 1966). Most of the story is well known to students of public administration. The original bill containing the recommendations sent to Congress by Roosevelt died amid a larger controversy over presidential powers. Finally, in 1939, a few elements of the Report passed in the form of the Reorganization Act of 1939. Through that act Roosevelt gained six new assistants and the initiative over executive reorganization. Using his new reorganization power, Roosevelt established the Executive Office of the President (EOP), moving the budget agency into it from treasury, as the committee had recommended.
What did not survive congressional resistance to the committee’s report was its call for transformation of the civil service system, replacement of the Civil Service Commission with a personnel agency headed by a single administrator and responsible to the president. That recommendation spoke directly to Roosevelt’s hope to strengthen his office’s managerial capacity, but a change of that order could not survive congressional critics already emboldened by the parallel “court packing” fight. That civil service recommendation, interestingly, has received relatively little attention in Brownlow committee scholarship. Perhaps that is because the recommendation was widely disparaged by good government reformers and so quickly fell out of congressional favor. It is that lacuna in the scholarly literature that Mordecai Lee addresses with this relatively small, fine book. And in doing so, he argues convincingly for the importance of the Brownlow committee’s civil service recommendations and its consequences for Roosevelt and the presidency.
Lee’s main interest regarding the Brownlow story is on the aftermath of the civil service recommendation’s rejection: Roosevelt’s creation of his Liaison Office for Personnel Management. The president established that vehicle (in the new EOP), seeking some of the leverage over personnel policy that was to be gained had the Brownlow recommendation passed. Lee’s account highlights Roosevelt’s wily inventiveness in the face of defeat. It was a quality celebrated by the Brownlow committee’s members. In 1939, as Roosevelt consulted them about using his new reorganization powers, Luther Gulick wrote to his fellow committee members asking, “Did you ever see such a matador” (quoted in Arnold, 1998, p. 115)?
Having failed to get what he wanted at first, the president tried again, taking a circuitous path. Lee describes these efforts with a fine-grained process tracing of decisions, interaction, and organization that linked the upper level of the executive branch with leading members of the public administration community. If this were only a case study of Roosevelt’s inventiveness over federal personnel policy, it would be a useful contribution to literatures in public administration, political science, and history. But this book’s aim is to do more, to show that Roosevelt’s quest to control personnel is properly connected with longer-term developments in the presidency and executive branch. FDR’s search contained the seeds of two parallel debates about the federal civil service in the second half of the 20th century. The first of these was the tension between merit system protection from political influence on the one hand and personnel management by politically responsible officials on the other hand. The second, related, debate was over the organizational locus for management of the civil service, the independent civil service commission versus a single-headed agency responsible to the president.
Lee’s account begins with ideas about civil service and management in the early 20th-century emergence of public administration as a field of study. He briefly touches on how those issues are evident in executive branch management during the period 1910 to the 1930s. All this is by way of preparation for understanding the swirl of issues and ideas attendant to the New Deal’s administrative chaos and the Brownlow committee’s plan for calming that chaos.
Lee examines the creation and then the debate over the Brownlow committee’s centralizing plan for federal personnel, following both congressional reaction and reactions within the public administration and government reform communities. Briefly there was support for the reform among Roosevelt’s congressional allies and among management-oriented public administration scholars. However, as Lee writes, “the terms of the debate changed” (p. 44) when the Brookings Institution released its report, “Personnel Administration in the Federal Government,” written by Lewis Merriam. The Brookings report “was a fierce attack on [the Brownlow] proposals for reorganizing personnel management and the underlying rationales for these recommended changes” (p. 47). Thus, the Brookings report armed FDR’s congressional opponents with the arguments they needed to reject Brownlow recommendation and maintain the Civil Service Commission’s independence. Notice that the Brookings Institution also successfully attacked the Brownlow recommendations for shifting government’s auditing functions from the General Accounting Office under Congress to presidential supervision within the Executive Branch.
Roosevelt’s alternative to the failed civil service reform was to improvise a new management effort through the new staff assistants created by the 1939 Reorganization Act. He designated that one of the six new presidential assistants would be a presidential liaison to the Civil Service Commission. Lee writes, “liaison was a classic FDR term for his approach to public administration. It could mean anything.” At the same time, “it did not sound like a delegation of power [line function].” It was merely another staff position (p. 62). William H. McReynolds, an experienced, senior federal civil servant at the treasury department, became FDR’s assistant for personnel liaison. McReynolds would also head the Liaison Office for Personnel Management, newly created in the executive office by executive order.
With a tiny staff, McReynolds managed to dominate the Civil Service Commission. In mid-1939, FDR had an opening to fill on the commission and sought an appointee who would be amenable to White House influence. To that end, he appointed Arthur Flemming who then served as Roosevelt and McReynolds’s main contact on the commission. By the end of 1939, President Roosevelt had used his malleable understanding of “liaison” to construct a working replacement for the Brownlow committee’s management centralization scheme. It was jerry-rigged, but, as Leonard White said about McReynolds’s liaison role, the results were “a neat tactical move [which] gained some of the advantages of a single [personnel] administrator” (p. 77).
The president’s focus necessarily shifted in 1940 as war expanded, turning his attention to military preparedness and diplomacy. During wartime, McReynolds continued his personnel work, largely operating autonomously from the now distracted president. Lee stresses that Roosevelt’s improvised system of executive control over personnel through the Liaison Office for Personnel Management was sufficiently robust to continue through the war. He observes, “During the war LOPM was a de facto presidential personnel management agency (p. 121). It was sufficiently established to perform its function absent presidential attention.
FDR’s personnel system changed abruptly under the President Truman, who unceremoniously dismissed McReynolds. It was, Lee notes, a lamentable end for a great public servant’s career. In a brief overview of the state of play of executive personnel management after the war, Lee describes the balance shifting from merit protection to presidential management, in part, through ideas from reform planning efforts in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Indeed, the balance shifted further toward presidential management during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Then, in 1978 and 1979 President Carter effected dramatic changes that gave full legal and organizational life to a presidential-centric civil service, abolishing the Civil Service Commission and creating the Office of Personnel Management. Forty years after the fact, the Brownlow recommendation had come to life.
A Presidential Civil Service fulfills everything its author promises. It explicates core ideas in American public administration and relates them to an evolving managerial orientation. It provides a close examination of organizational struggles around personnel control in the federal government between the 1930s and the 1950s. And it briefly traces organizational changes and debates in the federal personnel system into the Carter administration. As an added virtue, Lee provides well-drawn profiles of the main characters in the struggles during the Roosevelt era. Deserving praise especially is his appreciation of the contributions of William McReynolds. Lee’s book is deeply researched and gracefully written. It is a first-rate addition to the literatures on presidential management and executive reorganization. I commend it to scholars and students of American public administration and political institutions.