Enlightenment

They have done strange and wonderful things in the U.S. Capitol. Baked bread, tended wounded, hawked mousetraps, even passed legislation. One day in 1844 Samuel F.B. Morse, with Dolley Madison and Henry Clay kibitzing, tapped out a message to Baltimore over a wire and the world changed.

It was not precisely the same sort of thing, but in one of the shadowy chambers below the Capitol steps a cluster of young men and women last week were doing their best to nudge society toward a bit more enlightenment.

They hunched over keyboards, scanned television sets, and watched a curved curtain of vivid color on a 4-ft. by 6-ft screen profile of the U.S.--its taxes, income, bank deposits, drugstore sales, crops, ethnic origins, age, employment, education, mobile homes, and infinite combinations of all this and more.

"There is the tax revolt," whispered one congressional aide as the scene before him flickered into bursts of bright color, lightly sprinkled in the Northeast but growing into an explosion of vivid pink over all of California.

Richard Harden, a 6-ft. 4-in. Georgian, coiled himself on one of the hard chairs in the stuffy little room and smiled. Population figures flowed into color patterns and years were compressed into seconds. There was the picture of the great Middle Western population hemorrhage, the flight to the Sunbelt. If only Government planners a few years ago had been able to watch the trend and track it, as Harden was doing right then, federal responses might have been far more on target, less expensive.

Harden worked in state government with Jimmy Carter as commissioner of human resources and became the White House head of Administration and Information Management. He looked out his window one day and correctly figured he now lived in the middle of the single largest repository of information the world has ever known. Harden knew there were mountains of narrative, statistical and graphic facts in the Census Bureau and every major department and agency, up on Capitol Hill, in the Library of Congress. Yet when he tried to meld this information into instant guidance for the White House, it took weeks, not minutes. Harden began to search for some better way to mine this lode. Systems experts like the Senate's John Swearingen, the Library of Congress's Robert Chartrand and officials at the Census Bureau had the same notion. NASA'S Goddard Space Flight Center provided the advanced computer mapping. In two feverish months the data was taped and circuits set up linking Goddard and the Capitol.

An information system plugged into the huge federal apparatus, which has nerve ends in every city and hamlet, could do for political leadership what the jet plane has done for diplomacy or satellites for the spy business.

Crime could quickly be charted and compared with income, housing, weather, ethnic background. Disease could be instantly correlated with age, neighborhood, pollution. Economic models and projections could be formed, expanded, modified as planners sat at the table. Only imagination would limit the computerized probing of U.S. society. Maybe more important than anything, said Harden, would be the ability of the President to see where federal dollars are sent. Then, within weeks, he could sample results of the programs and be able to foresee success or failure in time to correct the Government's course.

People's attitudes and shifting political perceptions, as catalogued in the Gallyp and Harris polls, could even be cranked into a central information system. That of course suggests some Strangelovian scenes such as Hamilton Jordan, Carter's top pol, in a domestic command bunker, farm boots up on the computer console, phone in hand, lights flashing across huge screens: "Get Strauss out to Pittsburgh. The steel areas are angry red ... Tell Califano to shut up on tobacco. North Carolina has dropped off the map ... Can Brown pump some defense contracts into the West Coast? Unemployment is edging up ... For God's sake, is Bergland loose again? Kansas is turning blue ..."

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