has as its logical objective the proposal now before the Congress. The developments of the war and the reconversion periods make this an appropriate time, I believe, to consider the question afresh.

The Agency's experience-nearly all of it under wartime pressures-has demonstrated the validity of grouping together Government programs for health, education, and security. It has proved, too, the practical need for strengthening their structure through the departmental organization now contemplated. Building on this experience, the proposed Department would provide a firm base for the continuing improvement of these fundamental services:

1. The creation of such a Department would affirm the public interest in health, education, and security as components of the general welfare.

National authority to act in this field has been confirmed by the Supreme Court as resting squarely upon the Constitution. The laws which the new Department would administer were enacted by the Congress for no other purpose than "to promote the general welfare" in its broad constitutional sense. The scope of these measures calls for the establishment of an executive department to carry this responsibility-which cannot be fully met through any less comprehensive

means.

2. The Department would give the public services for health, education, and security a hearing in the Cabinet and place upon the Secretary responsibility for representing the people in their essential character as individuals and families.

Whenever the public interest has required it, Government services have been authorized to meet the multiplying problems of our increasingly complex national life. Thus, the Department of the Treasury deals with the citizen in his capacity as a taxpayer; the Department of Agriculture with that segment of the population engaged in farming; the Department of Commerce with industry and management; the Department of Labor with wage earners. But because such departments serve their designated spheres of interest, no one of them is prepared to serve the citizen in what is, after all, his fundamental capacity as an individual human being. From the earliest days of our history, Government services which look to the preservation of these human values have, to be sure, followed this same evolutionary process. But the pattern is not yet complete. The Government is still without a departmental mandate to promote the welfare of the people simply as people, to help them build a foundation on which each can achieve his own assurances and pursue his own best interests.

3. The new Department would also strengthen and simplify interrelationships between this and other arms of Government-the Congress, the President, Federal agencies, and the States.

Because every individual and every family has a multiple stake in health, education, and security, no needless barriers should stand in the way of joint action that would make services readily accessible in the local communities where the people live. By strengthening the administration of existing programs, such a Department should forestall overemphasis and make for constructive balance among related services, and should enable the people to realize an even larger return on their investment in these services.

4. Finally, the new Department should follow and facilitate the insistence of the professions concerned that in dealing with basic human needs, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This principle is demonstrated by the several sciences to which the new Department must look for professional competence. Medicine, for example, compensates intensive specialization by insistence on viewing man as a whole, as a person rather than a series of unrelated symptoms. So, also, education places its emphasis on the whole child and on teaching as a means of enhancing human values. Again in social security, putting a floor under income is only a partial answer; security remains, in the last analysis, a function of the whole man. This integration is even more apparent in the interrelationships among these fields the doctor is the first to point out that ignorance and poverty are as much foes of health as infection and physical degeneration; the teacher, that education cannot make headway against illness and hunger and fear; the specialist in social welfare, that without health and training the combined efforts of the individual and society can achieve only a meager or precarious security. Whatever the future of services to meet these needs, it should be one in Government administration, as it is in the view of science and in the experience of human living.

These, then, are some of the purposes which the establishment of the proposed Department would further: To provide for health, education, and security a charter commensurate with their status as essentials of the general welfare; to give a voice in the highest councils of the Nation to the people simply as people; to strengthen the administrative structure of the measures they have set up for their own service; and to follow professional guidance in focusing these services on the whole individual.

The heart of the bill is contained in sections 3 and 4, declaring the purposes and defining the functions of the new Department. These sections are written in the broadest terms, and in my judgment this is proper. The present statutory functions of this Agency cannot adequately be stated in a particularistic manner. An agency designed to meet the needs of the people of the Nation in matters pertaining to "individual, family, and community well-being," moreover, should be given sufficient scope to enable it to meet changing requirements and changing conditions from time to time.

The name of the new Department proposed in the bill, I believe, is as descriptive of its functions as any that could be devised. I say this in the conviction that the word "security" would be generally accepted, in this context, as denoting what we have come to describe as social security, and thus as embracing social insurances, public assistance, and social-welfare services.

There are several provisions of the bill to which I wish to call more particular attention:

1. The bill (section 2 (a)) would provide for three Under Secretaries, one a doctor of medicine to supervise health activities in the Department, one an educator to supervise educational activities, and one experienced in social security and welfare to supervise activities in that field. It would provide for no over-all deputy, no under secretary in the sense in which that term is most commonly used.

These provisions, I believe, would unduly emphasize the professional work of the new Department at the expense of its broadly public services, would impede selection by the President of the best qualified administrators, and would make distinctly more difficult the processes of coordination among the different but related functions of the Department. The provisions would constitute a departure from the uniform practice by which the heads of executive departments and their immediate assistants are selected without the imposition of any statutory qualifications whatsoever; the only exceptions being that the Solicitor General and the Assistant Attorneys General, presumably in deference to the courts before which they must practice, must be learned in the law; and that the Under Secretary of War, the Under Secretary of the Navy, and an Assistant Secretary of the Navy are affirmatively required to be selected from civil life.

There are already in the. Federal Security Agency professional persons in immediate charge of most of its principal units, such as the Public Health Service, the Office of Education, and the Social Security Administration. No strength would be added to the present administrative structure by superimposing another physician to oversee the Surgeon General, another educator to supervise the Commissioner of Education, or another social-security expert to review the operations of the Commissioner for Social Security.

Officials appointed to represent their respective professions are not likely to be the most helpful to the Secretary in the all-important task of giving a common direction to the several professional groups and professional points of view within the new department. The reasons for creating one department instead of three rest largely in the fact that we are concerned with the health and the education and the security of the same men and women, and that the needs of these people do not always divide themselves neatly among the professions. S. 140 in its present form seems to impose on the Secretary, without much aid from his statutory assistants, the vital task of directing the several professional services toward a more rounded whole. This, I believe, is too large a task for one man to perform.

2. The bill (section 5 (a)) would create three divisions within the Department, which "shall have charge," respectively, of its health functions and activities, its educational functions and activities, and its social security and welware functions and activities.

These provisions are apparently modified by specfic assignment (section 6 (b)) of certain named agencies and their functions to stated divisions. Thus, the assignment of the Children's Bureau and its functions to the Division of

Security would seem to override the general distribution of functions, and to place in that division both the health and the educational as well as the welfare activities of the Children's Bureau. Possibly, however, the bill is intended to require splitting up among the three divisions those functions of the Children's Bureau for which, by Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1946, statutory responsibility was vested directly in the Federal Security Administrator. If so, the question remains what disposition is intended in the case of the crippled children's program which, under a single statutory authorization, assists the State to finance services that fall partly in the fiold of health, partly in the field of education, and partly in the field of security and welfare.

The vocational rehabilitation program is not specifically assigned by the bill to any of the three named divisions, and the location intended for it is left in doubt. Here again, a single grant-in-aid program deals at one and the same. time with matters of health, matters of education, and matters of security and welfare. This program well illustrates the necessity of cutting across professional lines when the needs of the persons to be served are as varied as they are in the case of the disabled.

The Food and Drug Administration, which would be assigned by the bill to the Division of Health, is engaged in protecting people's pocketbooks as well as their health. It is largely a law enforcement agency. Its activities are of direct concern not only to the public, but also to the manufacturers and distributors of foods, drugs, and cosmetics-to those manufacturers and distributors who seek protection against their competitors' illegal practices, as well as to those who violate the law. Such regulatory and enforcement activities are for the most part quite unlike the activities of the Public Health Service. Whether or not the Food and Drug Administration should be placed in a division of health--and there are arguments on both sides of the question-I believe that this ought not to be done by statute. Particularly if a health division were required to be headed by a doctor of medicine, such rigid requirements could easily lead, under some circumstances, to an overemphasis on the health aspects in the regulation of the food and drug industries, and to a failure to take adequate account of the many other factors which enter into so complex an administrative task.

The Bureau of Employees' Compensation and the Employees' Compensation Appeals Board are not specifically assigned by S. 140 to any of the three divisions, and it is difficult to know what assignment is intended. In administering workmen's compensation for Federal employees they deal with matters both of security and of health, while the functions of the Bureau under the Longshoremen and Harbor Workers Act consist principally in the adjudication of claims against private insurance carriers.

Even in the case of the Public Health Service, the Office of Education, and the Social Security Administration, many problems, such as medical education, school health services, and aid to the blind, tend to blur the dividing lines between the professions.

I have cited the difficulty of arriving at a wholly satisfactory grouping of units within the new department, not so much because I think some other grouping preferable to that proposed in S. 140 (through literal compliance with section 5 (a) would be impracticable), as because I believe that any rigid statutory grouping would make seriously more difficult the efficient administration of the department. The programs with which it will be concerned have in large part either originated or been greatly expanded within the last generation, and if one is to judge by bills introduced in the Congress and committee hearings held, they are by no means static as yet. The adoption of a disability insurance program, to give a single illustration, would demand a wholly new set of relationships between the security and health functions of the Department. Even without new legislation, changing needs or demands of the people, or indeed the mere accumulation of experience, may dictate a change of alinement.

I would therefore urge that the Secretary have the discretion exercised by agency heads generally, to arrange and rearrange the assignments and responsibilities of his immediate assistants.

3. In one related respect it seems to me that S. 140 goes too far in the opposite direction, and gives the Secretary too much authority. I refer to the concluding clause of section 6 (a), authorizing the Secretary to abolish constituent units of the Department, and presumably to transfer their statutory functions to himself.

When the Congress has created an administrative entity such as the Public Health Service or the Office of Education, headed by a Presidential appointee vested with statutory authority, I think it inappropriate that the Secretary alone be empowered to abolish the entity and take to himself the statutory authority of its chief officer. There should be no question of the Secretary's authority to supervise and direct his subordinates, but such drastic action as would be permitted by S. 140 is not necessary to this end.

4. The statement of the functions of the new Department, in sections 3 and 4 of S. 140, while otherwise admirable, contains in my judgment one serious flaw. It would require the Department to "aid, stimulate, and encourage" the development of voluntary, that is, private, activity in the fields of its concern,` to "promote, foster, and encourage" such voluntary activity, and to "advise and cooperate with" voluntary agencies functioning in those fields.

A Department of Health, Education, and Security will inevitably maintain close contact with private organizations concerned with these subjects, and its activities will inevitably stimulate and encourage the efforts of such organizations to further the common objectives. A legislative mandate merely to do these things would be no more than a mandate to good administration. But I believe that such provisions as are contained in S. 140 would be bound to have collateral and probably unintended effects, and that it would be wiser to omit them from the bill.

Enactment of these provisions would seem to commit the Congress as well as the Department to a policy of lending governmental support to private organizations in the whole range of activities dealt with in this legislation. It may be questioned whether the creation of an executive department is an appropriate occasion for the adoption of so far-reaching a national policy, or one which, at least in the case of Federal aid to education, is so controversial. I suggest that this issue can better be dealth with in connection with each substantive program, as was done last year in the Hospital Survey and Construction Act, when the pros and the cons applicable to the particular program can more readily be appraised. It is by no means axiomatic that the same conclusion should be reached in every case.

A legislative mandate to aid and cooperate with private organizations, moreover, is necessarily indiscriminate in its operation. Whatever measures are commanded with respect to those private agencies of which we all approve are also commanded with respect to less meritorious organizations. An organization which by the terms of its charter and by its actual performance may lay claim to be functioning in the field of health, education, or security may also be engaged in conduct which we should hardly wish to abet-in subversive activity, in fostering intolerance, in the promotion of dishonest or criminal "remedies" for the ills of the human body. Even if we might disregard such extreme examples, it would be quite impossible for the secretary to determine the bona fides of all the myriad organizations functioning or claiming to function in the fields of health, education, and security.

I suggest, therefore, that cooperation with private agencies should not be dictated by statute, but should be left for effectuation in accordance with sound administrative judgment.

5. A related question is raised by the provision of section 5 (b) requiring advisory committees to contain representatives of private organizations. While I am a strong advocate, as I believe the record of the Federal Security Agency will show, of the use of advisory committees composed of nongovernmental persons, and while such committees will ordinarily contain members who are prominent in the work of leading private organizations, I think it a mistake to require their appointment in the capacity of representatives of those organizations. Persons so appointed are likely to be bound by the stated views of the organizations for which they speak, and thus to be unable to participate fully in the free give and take of ideas which is necessary to fruitful committee discussion and to the reconciliation of conflicting views.

Such a provision is quite unnecessary for the purpose of assuring to the private organizations an opportunity to present their views to the Department. Other channels for that purpose will always be open, and are assured (if assurance is necessary) by the Administrative Procedure Act.

98634-47-pt. 1-3

6. If, as I hope, the references to voluntary agencies should be eliminated from the bill there would remain in section 3 a direction that the Department, in operating through State and local agencies, seek to preserve and protect the independence and autonomy" of those agencies. Insofar as the operations of the Federal Security Agency have had any bearing upon the matter it has been our consistent policy to preserve and protect such "independence and autonomy."

This Agency administers a number of programs of grants to the States, in most of which the Congress has laid down more or less extensive conditions which a State must meet in order to obtain Federal funds, and has charged the Agency with the duty of seeing that the conditions are observed. On the whole, I think it fair to say, our relations with the State and local agencies have been harmonious. From time to time, however, differences of opinion have arisen, and in a few instances they have led to charges of improper interference by this Agency or one of its units. Sometimes these difficulties have arisen because we have been unable to satisfy both parties to a dispute between a State and its local-subdivisions.

Section 3 of S. 140 would not amend any of the grant-in-aid statutes or any of the conditions contained in them. The Department would still be obligated to enforce these conditions. I do not believe that future relationships would be improved by the general directive contained in section 3.

7. A difficult technical problem is raised in section 1 (b) of the bill making title IV of the Revised Statutes applicable to the new department.

Most modern statutes applicable generally to the executive branch of the Government are couched in terms which include both departments and independent establishments, and these, I feel sure, are uniformly construed as applying to a newly created agency. There are still on the books, however, a number of statutes which speak only of departments. In the case of title IV of the Revised Statutes, many of the provisions of which are so limited, the term "department" is defined (R. S. 158, 159, 5 U. S. C. 1, 2) by listing the executive departments, and this definition has been amended in the past when a new executive department has been created. The codifiers of the United States Code have (5 U. S. C. 2) construed this definition as applicable to all of the statutes assembled in chapters 1 to 11 of title 5 of the Code, including many sections which are not drawn from the Revised Statutes and to which the definition is not in terms applicable. Perhaps it is reasonable to assume that whenever the Congress has used the word "department" alone it has intended to refer to existing of future executive departments and to no other agencies.

(See,

Some of the provisions in title IV of the Revised Statutes appear to be archaic, and their application to the new Department to serve no useful purpose. for example, R. S. 173-175, 5 U. S. C. 23-25, relating to the duties of the chief clerk, and R. S. 166, 5 U. S. C. 38, relating to details of personnel.) In other cases it would be difficult to know which provisions would be inapplicable because "inconsistent with" S. 140. (See R. S. 177-182, 5 U. S. C. 4-9, relating to the temporary filling of certain posts by the President.) Again, there are provisions which, while not in conflict with S. 140, are apparently inconsistent with the Social Security Act (see R. S. 184, 187, 5 U. S. C. 48, 94, relating to examination of witnesses), or with the Public Health Service Act (see R. S. 178, 5 U. S. C. 5, relating to vacancies in certain offices). There are relatively few provisions which seem to be of any present value.

Omission of section 1 (b) would not wholly solve the problem, since the question would remain whether some provisions of law which use the word "department," but to which the definition in the Revised Statutes is not in terms applicable, might be construed to apply to the newly created Department. But this course would at least avoid the danger that the incorporation of title IV of the Revised Statutes would constitute a reenactment of provisions which might modify later legislation.

On the whole, I am inclined to recommend the elimination of section 1 (b), and the substitution of language specifically incorporating these provisions of law which would serve a useful purpose. These should include R. S. 161 (5 U. S. C. 22), authorizing regulations for the internal management of the executive departments, and R. S. 190 (5 U. S. C. 99), forbidding ex-employees for 2 years from handling certain claims against the Government. Although it is quite unnecessary at the present time, there could be no objection to the inclusion of R. S. 165 (5 U. S. C. 33), authorizing the employment of women clerks in the ex