Plan No. 1

Last week Franklin Roosevelt, as empowered last month by act of Congress, started in a small way to reorganize the U. S. Government.

During the Presidency of Herbert Hoover, the able engineer and organizer under whose secretaryship the Department of Commerce grew from small acorn to many-branched oak, an element of U. S. Government unknown to the Founding Fathers really got going: government-by-agency. Reconstruction Finance Corp. was the Hoover era's modest prototype for what, after 1933, became known as Franklin Roosevelt's billionaire "alphabet soup."

Without calling for any new Departments, the President last week proposed bringing together out of the New Deal's limbo and out of old administrative nooks & crannies, 21 various Government units devoted mainly to Security, Lending and Works, and grouping them into three Agencies with a $12,000 Administrator at the head of each.

A Security Agency would take in the now independent Social Security Board, National Youth Administration (now part of WPA), Civilian Conservation Corps (independent), also the old U. S. Employment Service and Office of Education (now in the Departments of Labor and Interior, respectively) and the Public Health Service (from the Treasury).

A Lending Agency would consolidate ten independents: RFC, Disaster Loan Corp, RFC Mortgage Co., Federal National Mortgage Association, Electric Home & Farm Authority, Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Home Owners' Loan Corp., Federal Savings & Loan Insurance Corp., Federal Housing Administration, Export-Import Bank of Washington.

A Works Agency would merge Works Progress Administration and Public Works Administration (both independent), the Agriculture Department's Bureau of Public Roads, the public buildings branches of the Treasury's Procurement Division and of the National Park Service (now Interior) ; also the U. S. Housing Authority (Interior).

The President also proposed merging eight other units under two old executive headings.

To the Department of Agriculture would go the Farm Credit Administration, Federal Farm Mortgage Corp. and Commodity Credit Corp. (all now independent).

To the Chief Executive, as parts of the President's immediate executive setup, would go the Budget Bureau (now in the Treasury Department), the Central Statistical Committee and Board (independent), National Resources Committee (independent) and Federal Employment Stabilization Office (since 1935 a name only in Commerce).

One of the President's six new assistants authorized by the Reorganization Act would be assigned to personnel work throughout the Administration.

Ideally the President's plan would shuffle his agencies physically as well as functionally into streamlined new quarters, not only in Washington but out through the land where their scattered regional offices now cost citizens dear in time to find them, deal separately with them. Affected by the altered grouping will be 90,400 Federal employes in all, only 24,982 of them in Washington. The President in this plan did not dwell on the unpopular subject of how many of these jobs would be telescoped.

Objections to Reorganization Plan No. I were notably few last week. One of the most serious was removed when a report was proved false that RFC and other lending spigots would be hooked up to the Department of Commerce. Jesse Jones as a, subordinate of Harry Hopkins was such a bad dream that, when it passed away, no one worried further about who would become chief Federal loan officer: probably he would still be that big Texan, Jesse Jones.

The Public Health Service disliked being lumped into Security, but its protest got nowhere. A plan to consolidate the police units of the Treasury (Secret Service, Revenue, Narcotics, Customs, Alcohol) was vetoed by the President and Secretary Morgenthau as looking too much like the start of an Ogpu or Gestapo.

In Congress, the Reorganization Act's best friends, Representative Lindsay Warren of North Carolina and Senator Jimmy Byrnes of South Carolina (TIME, April 3), had support well lined up. But their sponsorship of reorganization did not necessarily mean that they wanted all the agencies continued forever. Take WPA, for example. Jimmy Byrnes has ideas about that. Last week he politely shelved his bill to put WPA into a Department of Public Works (TIME, Jan. 23) but he did not shelve his idea, in which many another friend of Economy concurs, of making the States & cities share the cost of Relief, and cutting down on white-collar projects.

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