206 Politics and the administration
line of command from the top to the bottom, and a return line of respon-
sibility and accountability from the bottom to the top.This concern for stronger, more effective presidential direction of the admin-
istration has been a recurrent theme of official studies. In 1937 the Com-
mittee on Administrative Management (the Brownlow Committee) recom-
mended that the administrative and legislative functions of the independent
regulatory commissions should be transferred to the executive departments,
leaving the commissions only the judicial part of their duties. However, when
Congress passed the Reorganization Act of l939, implementing some of the
Committee’s proposals and giving to the president the power to formulate
reorganisation plans for submission to Congress, it withheld from the presi-
dent the power to reorganise the independent commissions. In 1949 the
Hoover Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch, after an
exhaustive survey of the machinery of government, laid great stress on the
need for greater coordination and control in the administrative structure,
and in the same year a new Reorganization Act gave new power to the presi-
dent to propose reforms in the administration. This time the independent
regulatory commissions were not excluded by the Act. Successive presidents
submitted a large number of reorganisation plans to Congress, perhaps the
most important being the one creating the Department of Health, Education
and Welfare in 1953.
In 1955 the Second Hoover Commission went further than its predeces-
sors and recommended that the problem of the regulatory functions of the
commissions should be dealt with by the creation of an Administrative Court
to take over their judicial role. Before taking office in 1960, President-elect
John F. Kennedy asked James M. Landis to report on the problem of control-
ling the independent agencies. He submitted a report that proposed that
the Executive Office of the President should have a coordinating authority
over the commissions, with three offices responsible for transport, commu-
nications and energy policy. In addition, an Office of Oversight over all the
regulatory agencies would be created in the Executive Office, the authority
of the chairmen of the commissions would be strengthened, and they would
be more directly responsible to the president. After taking office, President
Kennedy included some of these recommendations in a series of Reorganiza-
tion Plans that he submitted to Congress. There was a powerful reaction in
Congress against the strengthening of presidential power over the commis-
sions, and the President failed to get his proposals for three of the commis-
sions accepted. The ideas that Landis put forward for making the Executive
Office into a general supervisor of the commissions were dropped.
Thus, although there has been a good deal of reform, and much concern
for the greater integration of the administrative machine, the fundamental
problems remain. Indeed, the changes that have been made have not kept
pace with the problem. Every new burst of government activity sees the pro-
liferation of new agencies, and the problem of the presidency becomes more
and more formidable.