Knowledge Is Power

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency/Hugh Sidey

Not in a long while has so much knowledge led to so much power as it has with David Stockman, head of the Office of Management and Budget. The man with the mod-cut mop of hair, engaging smile and soft voice may be the greatest human repository of information on the U.S. Government now in Washington.

Stockman was lucky: he was in the right place and in the right party at the right time. But he had no special friendships or political connections to vault him to his prominence. He simply knew more than anyone else about how to go about dismantling the federal monster. He calls this resource "My knowledge base," and it comes from a decade of awesome study and work. Stockman, using his experience at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government as a gauge, believes that he has accumulated the equivalent of four or five Ph.D.s. Others would judge the figure higher.

Stockman went to Washington in 1970 as an aide to John Anderson, then MIMS an Illinois Congressman. He later became director of the Republican Conference in the House, and in 1976 he was himself elected to Congress from Michigan. Over ten years, with the help of a handful of aides, he analyzed every significant governmental issue. The Stockman summaries became a crucial part of G.O.P. strategy. Each committee report--some running to hundreds of pages --was read and boiled down to a few sheets. "We worked a lot of nights into the wee hours," says Stockman with a wan smile. Nor was that flood of hundreds of congressional initiatives his only fare. When Nixon proposed chopping 112 federal programs in 1973, Stockman and his loyal band delved into each one.

Strange things showed up. Subcommittees dominated by special interests issued lopsided reports that hid their prejudices behind clouds of turgid prose. They were, concluded Stockman, designed to discourage understanding. The cargo preference bill report in 1974 was a panegyric to the glories of forcing more oil imports into American ships. The inflationary impact from the higher rates was largely an untold story. Stockman unraveled it and alerted the Republicans. Though the bill passed, President Ford killed it with a pocket veto.

Sometimes even Stockman could not get through the fog. He grappled one night until 4 a.m. with a bill affecting the federal employee retirement system and gave up. He could not understand it, and he doubts that the people who prepared it could either. It is Stockman's view that the Social Security program is now technically so dense that no one in the Government comprehends it totally. The information crisis is most acute on the Hill, where, in Stockman's view, "there is not much reward for accumulating knowledge." The more pressing concern is political survival. Also, the turnover in Congressmen and their staff experts makes it difficult for the House to sustain an institutional understanding of programs that go through generations and keep enlarging each year. "The big Government problem is the information overload at the center," says Stockman. There is just too much for most members of Congress to absorb in too short a time.

Stockman says that he does not possess a photographic memory, but when he was named Director of OMB, he read the entire 613-page federal budget line by line and table by table. A picture of related programs, money and goals formed in his mind. And from that guide came the proposed budget cuts that stunned Washington. He is a home-trained speed reader and may get up to 1,000 words a minute, but part of the swiftness comes from his mind's having traveled there before.

Stockman was fascinated with the intellectual challenge of understanding the anatomy of the Government. Unmarried (as he still is), he could expend the prodigious time and energy that this advanced education required. The reward for the President, and perhaps the worry for the nation, is that Stockman truly may be the only person with such an arsenal of knowledge.

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