“Anybody we like is efficient. Anybody we do not like is a bureaucrat.” This good-natured comment on legislative attitudes toward the executive branch was made recently in Congress by an experienced lawmaker, speaking as chairman of a subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations. The epigram may be relished for its knowing humor, but its greater significance lies in the light it sheds on one of the most important problems of modern government—the problem of insuring responsible administration in the framework of democratic society.

For, of course, one way of getting nowhere in attempting a solution of this problem is to reduce it to a matter of personal preference. In the broader context, it is plainly irrelevant whether or not “we,” as citizens or as lawmakers, happen to “like” the individual administrative official we confront, or the particular public agency, or the functions that have to be performed under the laws, or the general direction in which things are moving in response to the policies of those elected to exercise political control. Nor do our likes and dislikes furnish a trustworthy criterion to mark the border line between “efficient” public service and “bureaucracy.”

And yet, for the administrative official it is a familiar experience to encounter sharp animosity on the part of some legislators, as well as some elements of the public, precisely for doing his statutory duty. In a party system like ours, which puts only a small premium on political solidarity, the frequency of such experience is increased because lawmakers exercise great freedom of dissent from legislative measures passed with the support of their own party.

How to bring managerial independence and public accountability into a working accord, so that neither efficiency nor necessary controls will be neglected, is the fundamental problem arising out of the operation of government corporations. Having dealt with managerial independence in the first instalment of this article, we now are faced with the problem of explaining how such independence can be reconciled with the controls necessary to assure public accountability. Experience everywhere has shown that governments can carry on a business enterprise efficiently only, when it possesses sufficient autonomy and flexibility to call forth managerial skills that are self-reliant and inventive as well as prudent. It has been argued that the corporate device, when faithfully followed, is superior to departmentalism in at least three major respects: it is potentially less subject to injurious political considerations; it is more autonomous in organization and capable of a greater degree of unity in its management, both of which are essential to efficient operation; and it has more flexibility with regard to its financial operations and is designed to stand on its own financial feet, as a business-operated enterprise should. The competent manager of a government corporation must be free within his own sphere, but he must also be externally accountable in important respects as regards both policy and administration, and to both Congress and the President. To effect such an equilibrium is difficult, at best, but it is particularly difficult and uncertain when the political climate is hostile toward the social purposes for which government corporations are created.

In 1934, Harold J. Laski wrote of Charles A. Beard: “It is true that he has formulated no consistent or systematic philosophy of politics; none has been formulated in the America of our time. But it is clear that the day for such a formulation is rapidly approaching. When it comes, I believe it will be found that no one has made a more solid contribution than Charles Beard to the elements from which it will have to be fashioned.”

It is likely that most Americans of academic bent, whether they have actually read the book or not, are aware of the stir once created by An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Certainly they could hardly have avoided some part of that flood of articles, books, and reviews which for decades has poured from the pen of Beard. Whether or not his writings have contributed to the building of an American “philosophy of politics,” it seems obvious that college youth in unknown number, scholars, and Americans in many walks of life must in some degree have been influenced by Beard in various subtle or indirect ways. The very bulk and range of his writings make it highly probable. For a check of the card catalog in a large university library, plus an examination of the Library of Congress bibliography and a few other sources, yields a total of about sixty first-edition volumes with Beard's name attached as author, co-author, or editor.

There is no subject on which all human beings agree; but in the political field in the United States an almost universal tendency exists to blame Congress for everything undesirable in the life of the nation. That is not so about the President; for always there is a large group who think of the current President as “that man” and another to whom he is a hero. As for the Supreme Court, whether it be made up of the “Nine Old Men” or the “Nine Young Men,” a certain veneration is attached to its activities which makes all-inclusive attack seem a little sacrilegious.

When Congress is discussed, party affiliations and liberal or conservative views are surmounted in the general condemnation. Oddly enough, this national whipping-boy happens to be the nearest thing to the voice of the American people in our country. Under the Constitution and by the almost untrammeled votes of our citizens, the men and women who sit under the dome of the Capitol have been assigned the function of interpreting the desires of those citizens and of making the policies which supposedly carry them to fruition.

My words must not be taken to indicate disagreement with or resentment of the popular attitude toward Congress. First, any Congress that fails to carry out the desires of the American people deserves all of the criticism it may receive.

In recent years, party theorists have been much concerned over the validity of the sectional interpretation of American politics. One contention is that sectionalism, if still valid, is being modified, or supplemented, by an urbanrural party alignment which bodes major change for the future. This intuition is of comparatively recent vintage, certainly not a product of the study of political trends before the New Deal, although one writer has attempted to construe a specific earlier election in terms of the tension between urban and rural areas. In the 1920's, however, most analysts decried the urban-rural thesis. Professor Holcombe, writing in 1924, asserted that “whatever may be the cause of the existing partisan alignment in national politics, it is not primarily a conflict between rural and urban interests.” And Stuart Rice concluded in 1928, after specialized studies of voting trends, that “antithetical” facts belie any interpretation of urban-rural election divisions which suggested a clearly defined cleavage.

The literature on this subject which has appeared since 1932, however, has persistently suggested a new urban-rural modification of the pattern of presidential politics. In 1933, Professor Holcombe commented on the “radically different … urban politics of the future.”

The Executive Office of the President of the United States was established in the summer of 1939 through the associated, if not wholly harmonious, endeavors of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Seventy-sixth Congress. The Reorganization Act of April 3, Reorganization Plans No. 1 of April 25 and No. 2 of May 9, and the Joint Resolution of June 7, were the principal stages in a labyrinthine course of policy-formulation that culminated September 8, 1939, in the issuance of the celebrated Executive Order 8248. Today, ten years later, it is virtually impossible to conceive of the Presidency without the Executive Office, so essential has this nexus of administrative machinery become to its proper functioning. The end of a decade of unparalleled presidential activity would seem a proper season to take stock of the Executive Office of the President: to recall the reasons for its creation, total up the many additions and subtractions that have followed in bewildering and not always purposeful profusion, sketch its present composition, and, most important, call attention to its waxing significance as a key institution in the American system of government.

A criticism of the procedure which results in appropriations acts must proceed from some premises regarding the function of Congress and the nature and use of the budget process. This criticism is based on the assumption that it is not the function of Congress to govern, but instead: (1) to indicate wants, (2) to institutionalize the giving or withholding of consent, (3) to bring political conflicts toward resolution, (4) to provide a forum for the formation and expression of public opinion, and (5) to act as a court of final review in which the actions of the government may be scrutinized, controlled, and checked. All of these functions are thought of as being performed in the broadest policy sphere, the application of policy to particular matters being left to the executive branch. The whole function of Congress, so conceived, is to make value judgments in matters of widest concern.

Budgeting is commonly regarded as a method of setting down, item by item, the estimated component costs of an undertaking in order to arrive at an estimated total cost. At the same time, budgeting is also used as a technique for securing managerial control over expenditures; by requiring that funds be spent according to a budget, it is possible, if the budget is sufficiently itemized, to control the spender in minutest detail. While these uses of budgetary procedure are by no means excluded, it is the premise of this paper that the primary purpose of budgeting ought to be to achieve the most desirable allocation of funds among alternative uses, and over time.

An erroneous impression appears to exist among certain people in the United States that if a person is convicted of a crime by a court of competent jurisdiction, he immediately and automatically loses his citizenship. It is apparently believed that when a citizen is convicted of a felony or a crime involving moral turpitude in either a state or national court, the person is no longer a citizen, and can never enjoy any of the rights or privileges of American citizenship for the rest of his natural life. A search of standard textbooks on American government will disclose that if the matter of the loss of citizenship or of civil rights for the conviction of crime is discussed at all, the author or authors will dismiss the topic by making the statement that citizens of the United States do not lose their citizenship for the conviction of crime; and the authors usually add that this fact is contrary to popular impression.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution defines citizenship by stating that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside. The procedure required for a person to become a citizen by naturalization is one for Congress to determine by law, and Congress has passed legislation governing it. On the other hand, the Constitution does not contain a statement providing for the loss of citizenship or expatriation in any form, whether by voluntary or involuntary act on the part of the citizen.

“So you want to be a politician,” my friend said, with a slight lift to the eyebrows. Others wanted to know what the goal was. Running for alderman in ward politics and a partisan campaign must be a training ground for some coveted objective in the state legislature or Congress. You don't just want to be an alderman, some queried. “Starting pretty low down,” was another leading remark. All these and many more comments intrigued me, for they spelled out something or other about the prestige of local government in a day of Big Government at the federal level, or any level other than a municipality of 40,000 population. My answer to all this was that, after twenty years of residence in one community, a professor of municipal government could hardly avoid grubbing around in politics at the level of local self-government. I hoped to become an alderman—period.

I soon learned to parry the pleasant “hazing” remarks made to all prospective ward “politicians.” “Kissed any babies today, Alderman?” “Where are the cigars?” “How's ward-heeling today?” “I'll vote for you, if—.” “How is door-bell ringing?” Most of these remarks prompted the unspoken remark: “When you say those words, sir, smile.” You will notice that I said unspoken.