The Truman Show
1. What are the “laws” of unintended consequences and government expansion?
2. What is often the effect of creating new departments?
3. What did the 1947 National Security Act do?
4. What are the functions of the NSC and CIA?
5. What major problem did the 1947 act not solve?
6. A) What is the difference between a line and staff agency? B) What is the role of the Cabinet? C) What is the overall role of the federal bureaucracy?
7. What was the purpose of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives? What are the potential Constitutional and political problems with this Office?
The Truman Show
Bush's Department of Homeland Security plan is modeled on Truman's 1947 national security reorganization. Here's what Harry got wrong.
By David Greenberg
Posted Thursday, June 13, 2002, at 1:28 PM PT <http://slate.msn.com/?id=2066942
When President Bush unveiled his plan for a Department of Homeland Security last week, he invoked the Democratic president Republicans love to love, Harry Truman. Bush compared his reorganization to Truman's 1947 National Security Act. "Truman recognized that our nation's fragmented defenses had to be reorganized to win the Cold War," Bush said. "He proposed uniting our military forces under a single Department of Defense and creating the National Security Council to bring together defense, intelligence, and diplomacy." Bush added that we now need "similar dramatic reforms to secure our people at home."
The Truman analogy has a political purpose. The Cold War, by spotlighting themes of patriotism and military strength, has always served Republican politicians well, and it's natural that Bush should now try to evoke it. But his Truman-esque plan is nonetheless a bad idea—on conservative grounds. As conservatives often note, the law of unintended consequences holds that the plans of the best and the brightest will inevitably go awry. And as they note even more often, the law of government expansion suggests that federal programs and departments are rarely dismantled, only created. The history of Truman's National Security Act shows that both rules apply particularly in the area of national defense. […]
[Sidebar note: “One reason a new department is a bad idea is that the importance of Cabinet departments has been steadily declining for decades, even as the number of departments has climbed. Since the Nixon administration, if not earlier, Cabinet secretaries—State, Defense, Treasury, and Justice sometimes excepted—have enjoyed far less power than have White House advisers. New departments are often created to address perceived needs of the moment, but they rarely end up exerting significant power. Few would argue that the creation of an Education Department apart from Health and Human Services or the elevation of Veterans Affairs to a full-fledged department have showered presidential attention on the issues of education or veterans' needs. On the contrary, presidents often create departments instead of devoting presidential attention to an issue. Caught up as we are now in the urgency of the war on terrorism, it's easy to forget that the problems that gave rise to the departments of Energy or Housing and Urban Development seemed just as important in their day.”]
Politics aside, parallels to the situation Truman faced are strong. Like the war on terrorism, the Cold War was an ambiguous kind of conflict—less than a literal war but more than a metaphorical one like the fights against poverty or drugs. Since Sept. 11, we've also seen a resurgence of Cold War-style civil-liberties infringements, although to a much smaller extent than in the 1950s. And just as Bush is now reacting to the pre-9/11 intelligence collapse, so Truman believed a lack of coordination between Army and Navy intelligence had left the country vulnerable to the attack on Pearl Harbor and resolved that America wouldn't be caught napping again. Whatever Bush's motives, it makes sense to think about his plan in light of Truman's 1947 act.
On balance, the 1947 law was a success, giving the U.S. government the equipment it needed to fight the Cold War. It unified the Army and Navy and created a new Air Force, then placed them all under a single National Military Establishment (later the Department of Defense) run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It created the National Security Council to coordinate policy-making among the State and Defense departments and other agencies. And it replaced the old Office of Strategic Services with a new Central Intelligence Agency to collect information from abroad about possible threats to the United States.
For all the advantages of the new arrangements, the law also produced some unfortunate, even catastrophic outcomes. Critics of the plan—mostly on the political right—warned that it would create a "garrison state" in which individual rights and liberties were sacrificed to a militaristic ethos. Some evoked the specter of the Gestapo secret police of Nazi Germany. In A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State , historian Michael Hogan has noted that while the darkest fears of Truman's critics were never realized, the military-intelligence apparatus did become the biggest and fastest-growing piece of the government. Foreign-policy decisions, increasingly made by these new agencies, receded from public view. Adventurism abroad [the willingness to use military and covert operations] became more sweeping and less democratically accountable [think Cambodia, Chile, Iran-Contra, et. al.].
One reason the NSC and CIA grew unexpectedly powerful was that in sculpting the legislation, Congress focused on the merger of the armed forces more than on the new agencies. The NSC's creation occasioned almost no discussion. The debate about the CIA centered on whether it would fall under civilian or military control. The possibility that the agency might develop its own operational capacities wasn't even considered. The bill's final language, while bowing to garrison-state Cassandras in requiring that the agency "shall have no police, subpoena, law enforcement powers or internal security functions," also contained an open-ended clause permitting it to perform unspecified "other functions" relating to national security. Similarly vague wording allowed the NSC to metastasize [grow and spread like cancer].
The CIA's evolution was most dramatic. Under Eisenhower, the agency changed from an intelligence-gathering outfit into a tool of intervention. It developed a secret, high-level paramilitary shop that plotted coups and assassinations of foreign leaders without public, congressional, or sometimes even White House knowledge. The NSC, too, was transformed. It was conceived as a small, neutral coordinating body to be dominated by the secretary of state and other Cabinet members, with a tiny staff of administrators. But Truman and Eisenhower used executive orders to place the council within the Executive Office of the President (in 1949) and to create a new position of national security adviser (in 1953). By Kennedy's presidency, the NSC was an independent policy-planning institution that competed with the State Department.
The rise of these agencies wasted resources by duplicating work. More disturbingly, it diminished Congress' role in foreign-policy-making. The resulting system—secretive and often reckless—produced the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, and the Iran-Contra scandal, to name just the highlights. All these debacles were the work, to some extent, of a national security apparatus without sufficient democratic checks.
Most unconscionable of all was the CIA's spying on American civilians, in explicit violation of its charter. Under Operation Chaos, which began in 1967 and was exposed in 1974, the CIA spied on thousands of anti-war activists and Democrats, including Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The CIA also opened citizens' mail and experimented with drugs on unwitting subjects. Under Henry Kissinger, the NSC slid into similar lawlessness with the secret wiretaps that were the first of the Nixon administration's Watergate crimes. The 1947 National Security Act did not cause these abuses, of course, but it fostered the conditions under which they occurred.
At the same time, the 1947 law didn't solve one of the main problems it was supposed to, that of interservice rivalry. As early as World War I, the liabilities of having separate War and Navy departments had become obvious—they fought over issues from budgets to military strategy—but it took World War II to provide the impetus to combine them. But when Truman proposed a merger, the Navy feared it would lose its autonomy and resisted the president's plan. Legislators also worried about a single centralized military. A compromise was thus struck that preserved the Navy as a free-standing department within the newly unified armed forces. Yet in allowing the Navy to retain some independence, the compromise undermined the plan's main purpose, as infighting continued.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff also turned out to be a poor vehicle for coordinating military operations—"barely adequate," as its onetime chairman, Colin Powell, has said. In Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC , political scientist Amy Zegart cites the failed 1980 effort to rescue the American hostages in Iran as one example: Because of the military's organizational structure, no single officer was responsible for planning and coordinating the effort—a systemic flaw that contributed to the disaster. Only with the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which gave the JCS chairman direct control over the Joint Chiefs, was the situation remedied. And where the JCS was hard to reform, the CIA and NSC have been impossible. Since the Soviet Union's demise, sporadic cries to abolish one or the other of these two institutions have fallen on deaf ears.
Whatever the nature of the bill that Congress ends up passing, it should include—as did the U.S.A. Patriot Act passed last fall—sunset provisions to disband or renew the new agency in several years once the terrorism threat has subsided. Otherwise we may end up a half-century from now with another hulking bureaucracy as efficient and beloved as today's CIA and NSC.
[Notes from Chapter 15:
Types of agencies: Staff: serve a support capacity (advice, paperwork); Line: perform tasks (enforcement, on the front line). Often overlap w/in same agency: CIA both advises Pres. and carries out tasks
Chief components of the federal administration (the government’s many administrators and agencies):
1. Executive Office of the President (EOP)
An umbrella agency, created in 1939 to help FDR deal with the paperwork of the New Deal, it contains: a) the White House Office (think “West Wing”; the nerve center of the Presidency, the most influential part of the EOP), b) the NSC, c) the Office of Homeland Security (headed by the director of the Department of Homeland Security (Tom Ridge)), d) the Office of Management and Budget (largest and second most influential: prepares the federal budget every year, oversees expenditures, and does odd-jobs), e) Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (created by GW in 2001: encourages and expands the activities of church and church-related groups that deal with social problems, from drugs to homelessness), f) Office of National Drug Control Policy (created 1989, headed by a Drug “Czar”), g) Council of Economic Advisers (3 of nation’s leading economists who help the Pres. with his annual Economic Report)
2. The 15 Cabinet Departments (see list on p. 426-7): “The Cabinet is an informal advisory body [normally made up of the heads of the [15] departments, the Vice President, the President’s chief domestic advisor (Karl Rove), and the President’s chief of staff (Andrew Card)] brought together by the President to serve his needs.” (no mention in Const., created through custom and usage).
3. Independent Agencies: agencies of the government that fall outside the departments: 1) Executive (v. similar to departments in structure just not that high up), 2) Regulatory (largely beyond reach of presidential direction and control—police the economy (SEC, FCC, FERC, etc.)), 3) Gov. Corporations (created by Congress to carry-out business like activities: e.g. Postal Service, FDIC, Amtrak, TVA)
Changes in the Bureaucracy: Pendleton Act: Civil Service Act of 1883: makes merit basis for hiring, promotion, etc. in federal b’y (Civil Service Exam)à created to deal with problem of spoils system (appointment based on political loyalty)
Hatch Act 1939 (Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities) and Federal Employees Political Activities Act 1993 (new Hatch Act): limits political activities to voting, helping to register voters, contributing money, participating in campaigns, and holding office in political party; may not run in partisan elections, engage in party work on gov’t property or while on job, collect contributions from subordinates or general public, or use gov’t position to influence an election
Marble-cake Federalism: ever since the New Deal the Federal government has involved itself more and more in local affairs
Transcript Excerpt of Frontline’s “The Jesus Factor”
NARRATOR: As he took office, Bush put his campaign promise of compassionate conservatism immediately to work. In his first executive order, he established the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives inside the White House.
Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH: When we see social needs in America, my administration will look first to faith-based programs and community groups.
NARRATOR: In the early days of his presidency, Bush's faith-based initiative was called his signature program. Bush asked Congress to expand on something called "charitable choice," a provision that had been passed as part of the 1996 Welfare reform bill. Championed by then senator John Ashcroft, a Pentecostal Christian and a member of the conservative Assemblies of God church, charitable choice had opened the door to allow smaller and more overtly religious groups to receive government money for providing social services. Now Bush wanted the principles from Ashcroft's provision to be applied to most of his government agencies.
RICHARD CIZIK, Natl Association of Evangelicals: We believe there has to be equality of treatment towards religious social service providers so that they're treated the same as secular service providers, equal competitors for federal dollars to be able to dispense services.
E.J. DIONNE, Jr., Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution: I had an argument about this with a conservative evangelical friend, who said, "Look, their method is Freud, our method is Jesus. Why should Freud get the money and Jesus not get the money?" And I thought that was an interesting argument. But we still do have the 1st Amendment, and it raises a real question.