The statement has been made that the bill is intended to give the President broad powers in the interest of efficiency, yet it limits those powers in the case of the Department of the Interior. If it is desired to give the President these broad powers, and I am entirely agreeable to the extension of powers to transfer in the interest of efficiency, why not extend to the President, simply and directly, authority to transfer and consolidate bureaus with the consent of Congress without subtle reservation and a change in name, which carries mandatory implication, and without limiting such shifts?

In March 1933 Congress gave the President authority for 2 years to consolidate or shift bureaus, services, offices, commissions, and divisions in the interest of greater administrative efficiency.

Mr. GIFFORD. Was not that permission given before then? Secretary WALLACE. I am not sure. I thought it was March. It might have been earlier.

Mr. GIFFORD. Was it not 1932?

Secretary WALLACE. We will look into that matter further. Possibly that statement is incorrect.

Mr. GIFFORD. Do you remember when President Hoover was authorized to correct the condition and in 1932 recommended to Congress certain changes?

Secretary WALLACE. Yes; I have a remembrance of that general situation.

Mr. GIFFORD. You want an opportunity to look up that point? Secretary WALLACE. I am not sufficiently familiar with the details of that.

Mr. GASQUE. This bill was passed in the Hoover administration and was in effect when the present administration came in.

Mr. GIFFORD. That is what I thought. This is a new bill that has evidently a subtle suggestion.

Mr. GASCUE. The time within which that power was given to the President has expired.

Mr. GIFFORD. Let us look back and see if this does not conform with the power granted at that time.

Secretary WALLACE. It would seem to me that every desirable purpose of H. R. 7712 would be served by simply extending this authority for another 2 years, not coupling with it semimandatory directions to deal only with bureaus and agencies having to do only with conservation and only to move them in one direction.

Would it not be more reasonable to permit the President to exercise some choice in the matter, permitting him to make such transfers, followed by congressional approval, rather than by congressional veto, as administrative efficiency may in his opinion require?

At this point I wish to enlarge upon the conception of conservation, which through study and experience, has been taking on a broader meaning in the Department of Agriculture and has become a theme running through its entire activity.

The Agricultural Adjustment Administration has brought the Department into closer contact with millions of farmers than any time heretofore. The adjustment program has provided an opportunity for bringing to these farmers their problems of conservation. Since transfer of the Soil Conservation Service to the Department there has been under way a development of integrating the work of that Service with the programs of the Adjustment Administration,

as well as the shelter belt project of the Forest Service, in such a way as to definitely advance conservation of soil resources.

Solving the problem of the loss of soil and soil fertility through engineering activities is a very limited approach to the problem. More important is the reorganization of farms and development of farm practices more nearly in harmony with soil conservation. Such a program calls for the services of the farm-management specialist, the agronomist, the land economist, the agricultural economist, the forester, and numerous other specialized agricultural techniques in a new synthesis. Such a synthesis will make dynamic conservation on American farms and public lands but such a synthesis must rest firmly upon:

First, the specialized agricultural techniques; second, close contact and cooperation with the farmer; and third, closely related and harmonious administrative relationship between individuals and agencies responsible for phases of the program. A harmonious administrative relationship, such as this involves, naturally can be achieved best within one department.

The Department of Agriculture has no wish to acquire bureaus or agencies which have nothing to do with the functions of agriculture and the interest of farmers. Many agencies in various Government departments involve conservation directly or indirectly. Those which have to do with agriculture, growing plants, and living animals, can best advance the cause of a sound and dynamic conservation program by being assured of continuing in the Department of Agriculture.

May I say that the Soil Erosion Service is the only agency which has been transferred to the Department of Agriculture either by act of Congress or by presidential order during the present administration. The Subsistence Homesteads Division of the Interior Department, which Secretary Ickes mentioned to this committee as having been given to Agriculture, was terminated and its activities absorbed by the Rural Rehabilitation Division of the Resettlement Administration, which is not part of the Department of Agriculture, but is an independent agency financed through an allotment board of which Secretary Ickes is chairman.

In passing I might add that the Secretary generously credited to the Department of Agriculture almost twice as many employees as it actually has. The correct number is not, as the Secretary stated to this committee 80,000, but is 44,359, while the Department of the Interior has 31,350. These figures include the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and exclude the Public Works Administration.

Lying behind the interest of the Department of the Interior in this bill is the hope that the Bureau of the Biological Survey, the Soil Conservation Service, and the Forest Service may be transferred to that Department. This effort to obtain possession of the Forest Service is a historical one, notwithstanding the fact that the forests were transferred from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture partly as the result of recommendations made in 1901 and 1903 by Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Secretary of the Interior. At the time of the transfer it was pointed out that the Department of Agriculture already had three scientific bureaus directly engaged in forest problems the Bureau of Chemistry, engaged in dendrochemical operations; the Bureau of Entomology, studying forest insects; and the Bureau of Plant Industry, studying timber diseases.

The transfer from Interior to Agriculture was made in 1905 by act of Congress, and Gifford Pinchot became Chief Forester.

Late in 1909, under Richard A. Ballinger, then Secretary of the Interior, plans were made for the disposal of vast coal fields in Alaska. These plans were exposed by the Forest Service and these coal fields remain today as part of our natural resources under public ownership. The Interior Department then moved to bring the national forests under its control once more. This was in 1911, only 6 years after Congress had transferred them to the Department of Agriculture.

And so for 24 years the Department of the Interior has been engaged in this effort. Many of the same people who were in the Interior Department in the days of the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy are still there. They have not forgotten nor ceased their steady pressure to control the forests.

One of the most determined of these efforts was made when my father was Secretary of Agriculture.

Nor is the idea of a separate Department of Conservation a new It was proposed in the Garrett bill in 1927.

one.

In 1928 this same committee of the House of Representatives considered a bill to create a Department of Conservation on which Secretary of Agriculture Jardine reported unfavorably.

The last attempt to set up a Department of Conservation occurred in February 1933. In commenting upon the proposal, Secretary Hyde said, only 15 days before the present administration took office:

No facts known to this Department would warrant the belief that the bill S. 5538, if enacted into law, would result in greater benefits to agriculture, greater efficiency, or greater economy of Federal expenditures; consequently I recommend against the enactment of the bill.

The last attempt to transfer the Forest Service to the Department of the Interior occurred in the same session of Congress, and on January 31, 1933, in reporting unfavorably upon it, Secretary Hyde said:

The proposed transfer would have a number of adverse consequences; few, if any, beneficial ones. The intimate relationship between forestry and agriculture, between the Forest Service and the other bureaus of this Department which conduct related technical activities, would be weakened by the substitution of cumbersome interdepartmental action for the informal and expeditious intradepartmental procedure which now prevails. In such circumstances a tendency to develop new technical staffs, duplicating those now existing in the Department of Agriculture, would be expected. Larger, rather than lower costs of administration, would seem to be the inevitable result of the transfer.

By far the greater part of the activities related to forestry deal fundamentally with the use of the soil and must rest upon the sciences which have to do with the soil. This is the domain of the Department of Agriculture. No workable line can be drawn between the part of these activities which have to do primarily with the public lands and the other greater part which relates to land practices and progressive agriculture in the United States generally.

As now constituted, it is the Department of Agriculture which contains the Bureau of Chemistry and Soils, the Bureau of Plant Industry, the Bureau of Animal Industry, the Biological Survey, the Bureau of Entomology, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, and the Weather Bureau; the governmental agencies charged by law with the wide range of fundamental activities which relate directly and vitally to forestry. As a part of the Department of Agriculture, the Forest Service has freely available to it, and freely employs, the services of all these other related agencies. In another department it would be dependent upon less effectively coordinated interdepartmental cooperation, or would be compelled to duplicate certain functions and services. Certainly no other department of the Government is so well organized and equipped as this Department to furnish the wide array of technical services essential to the adequate practice of forestry.

Those arguments I believe still hold, and I may say that exactly this sort of duplication occurred when the Soil Erosion Service was in the Department of the Interior. Congress ended that tangle only this year when it transferred Erosion Control to the Department of Agriculture.

No Government department has had or should have a monopoly on conservation. Certainly the historical conservation record of the Department of the Interior has not been an enviable one. Created in the beginning primarily to dispose of the public domain by passing it into private ownership, its record is one of dispersal rather than of conservation. It has been marked in the past by numerous episodes of which those involving Secretary Ballinger and Secretary Fall were merely the ones which attracted the most public attention. I am sure Secretary Ickes is as much interested as anyone in revising the earlier record of his Department, but this term of office is not per

manent.

Traditional thinking within any department carries over from one administration to another and the traditional thinking of the Interior Department is not conservational thinking.

Mr. RICH. In the second section of this bill, Secretary Wallace, you claim that if this bill is put into effect, instead of showing a greater amount of confidence in the President to segregate various departments, it will tend to decrease his power rather than to increase it? Secretary WALLACE. I suggest a method of placing greater confidence in the President rather than limiting that confidence.

Mr. RICH. In reference to the Forest Service which is now in the Department of Agriculture, about a year ago when we passed the Grazing Act, at that time it was your opinion and the opinion of Secretary Ickes that the grazing of this country should be placed under one department.

Secretary WALLACE. Yes; I think we still have that belief, both of us. Mr. RICH. We passed the bill authorizing the set-up in the Department of the Interior for handling the grazing on the public lands that were taken over under the Taylor Act, and we have a set-up in the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture which is, you may say, just the beginning of the handling of grazing on those public lands. In the Department of Agriculture under the Forest Service you handle the grazing under your Department during the summertime and in the wintertime on the public lands if grazing is conducted it goes to the Department of the Interior. year ago you made the statement that it ought to be handled by one department and Secretary Ickes made the same statement, yet we have summer grazing in one department and winter grazing in another department. Why did you not get together and put this grazing all in one department as you and Secretary Ickes promised that you would do?

A

Secretary WALLACE. I do not think we promised that we would do it. Let me say in a matter of that sort, I feel ordinarily that the interests of harmony are sometimes a little more to be preferred than pursuing logic to its ultimate.

Mr. CRAVENS. I will ask Mr. Rich a question. Do you mean to say the Department of Agriculture has charge of the grazing in the forest reserves part of the year and the Interior Department part of the year?

Mr. RICH. Yes. It is set up. We passed the law here.
Mr. CRAVENS. That did not affect the forest reserves.

Secretary WALLACE. If I might intervene I think you have misunderstood his statement. The summer grazing is in the forests. In the winter grazing is on the public lands is his point.

Mr. CRAVENS. Do you not control winter grazing on the forest reserve lands?

Secretary WALLACE. There is not so much winter grazing on the forest reserves.

Mr. CRAVENS. In some parts of the country there is considerable. Secretary WALLACE. That is true. We can control all there is.

Mr. RICH. I am not here trying to criticize these Departments, but we had that up a year ago, and from the standpoint of economy so far as the Government is concerned, I was led to believe by both Secretaries that the President would issue an Executive order transferring to either one Department on the other-and that is no concern of mine-this activity whereby this grazing would be handled without dual control, and I was in hopes that the Secretaries would get together and the President would make this Executive order placing this grazing under one head, but instead of that we have set up two Departments. Now, what effect will this bill have in trying to get this Department segregated or any other Department where there is dual control of anything that might be in your Department or might be in the Department of the Interior? Would it accomplish anything?

Secretary WALLACE. May I make an observation at this point? At the time I appeared before the Public Lands Committee, I think it was in April or May a year ago, we were firmly convinced, those of us in the Department of Agriculture, that the all important thing was to stop overgrazing and put control of that for a time, the minutiae of it, in one place. That was the view definitely, that the important thing was to stop the overgrazing which had been going on in the public domain. That is the all important thing. Shortly after that I went on a trip to the West, to the Southwest, and made numerous inquiries into the question relating to this proposal which had been made that grazing whether on the public lands or in the forests should be in the Department of Agriculture and the forests should be in the Department of the Interior-I made numerous inquiries about that and discovered that the logic which was in many people's minds at the time of these hearings a little over a year ago was superficial logic to some extent because, if grazing were placed completely in Agriculture and the forest were placed in Interior, the result would be that you would have men of one department dealing with the trees in the forest reservations and men of another department dealing with grazing in the forests reservations, a procedure which I became convinced on inquiry was wasteful, but to people in Washington not acquainted with the facts that procedure might seem logical. Mr. RICH. If it was necessary then for handling the trees and handling the grazing to be under the same department, which would be under the Department of Agriculture, then should not we have had the new set-up with grazing on the public domain under the Taylor Act, and should not that be put under your Department also?

Secretary WALLACE. I have never wanted to take the aggressive in matters of that sort.