4. Program staffing is a necessary and desirable concept in foreign affairs personnel administration. It should not be adopted to the exclusion of the career staffing concept, but should be recognized as legitimate and essential in a balanced approach to the expanding responsibilities of foreign affairs staffs. The new foreign affairs personnel system should give full recognition to the concept of program staffing.

5. The successful establishment of a new foreign affairs personnel system depends upon a clear and unequivocal fixing of responsibility for administrative leadership during the initial period. We therefore favor the designation or appointment, within the Executive Office of the President, of an administrative assistant to the President who would devote himself intensively to the problems of foreign affiairs personnel administration for a period of 1 to 3 years, with the assistance of a small high-quality supporting staff. It would be the initial assignment of this unit to develop the necessary legislative proposals in consultation with interested agencies and to be of assistance during the period of their congressional consideration. Upon the enactment of basic legislation, the unit would concern itself with the preparation of such Executive orders and foreign affairs personnel regulations as would then be needed. Thereafter the future of the unit would be subject to reconsideration, taking into account such progress as may have occurred in the general development of the central personnel institutions of the Government.

Coordination through interdepartmental committees

1. Executive Office staff work and interdepartmental committee work are to some extent alternatives to each other, but neither can be a completely effective substitute for the other. Interdepartmental committees can be useful provided there is general understanding of their limitations and there are also safeguards against abuses.

2. In securing successful interdepartmental committee work, there is no substitute for a competent presiding officer who believes in the purpose for which the committee was established. In those cases where it is essential that the chairmanship be held by a particular agency, failure to provide an effective chairman is a significant failure upon the part of the agency.

3. Jurisdictional issues should not be debated in interdepartmental committees. Problems of work assignment among agencies should not be handled in interdepartmental committees unless the respective agency jurisdictions are reasonably clear and well-understood. Jurisdictional issues that arise in the course of committee work should be promptly taken elsewhere for decision.

4. The terms of reference for a permanent interdepartmental committee should usually set forth specifically the channel by which any

unresolved issue is to be appealed to higher authority, and the deciding authority should be designated.

5. As a general rule, interdepartmental committees should not be established at the Cabinet level unless they are specifically advisory to the President. The assistant secretary or bureau chief level appears most appropriate for committees in which the agency members are expected to commit themselves to an agreed decision as the end product of the committee process.

6. Cabinet-level committees should be established only with specific Presidential approval, although such action may appropriately be informal in the case of ad hoc committees. Other permanent interdepartmental committees should be established only by Executive order, in order that appropriate procedural safeguards may be maintained. Ad hoc committees below the Cabinet level need not receive Presidential approval and may appropriately be formed by interagency agreement.

7. The supervision of permanent interdepartmental committees is essentially an Executive Office function and one for which definite responsibility should be fixed. The lack of any central secretariat in the Executive Office of the President for the more important standing interdepartmental committees appears to be a gap in the governmental machinery of the United States. The system of interdepartmental committees is unlikely to serve the public interest as well as it should until means can be found by which this gap may appropriately be filled.

8. The uncertainties as to the proper organization and use of Cabinet committees have been a major factor standing in the way of Executive Office action to deal with the general problem of interdepartmental committes. Cabinet committees are being utilized increasingly on an ad hoc basis. The National Security Council is a permanent body for the conduct of deliberative activities at the Cabinet level.

9. The National Security Council has become more than a Cabinet committee, inasmuch as the President himself has begun to preside regularly. There is a question as to whether the present values of the council for central coordination could be preserved while securing the advantages to the President that might be inherent in the appointment of a full-time vice chairman of the council. The existing limitations on the scope of the National Security Council appear to have been somewhat responsible for the establishment of the Office of the Special Assistant to the President (Mr. Harriman) and the International Security Affairs Committee. The relationships between the three units may appropriately be subject to a further evolution.

CHAPTER I

FACTORS BASIC TO THE CONDUCT OF FOREIGN RELATIONS IN THE WORLD TODAY

The problems confronting the United States in the administration of foreign affairs are problems of extreme difficulty. It is probably fair to say that the administrative problems of the United States in foreign affairs bulk larger and more difficult than those of the entire Federal Government as recently as the mid-1930's, when emergency domestic programs were being undertaken that seemed immense at the time but which are dwarfed by the foreign programs of the last several years.

Under the circumstances it is not surprising that there have been repeated efforts to improve organization and performance in the administration of foreign affairs. Since the end of the Second World War several surveys have been made of the organizational problems of the Department of State, and a major reorganization, which grew out of the Hoover Commission survey, was commenced in 1949 and is still incomplete.

The Hoover Commission's report went beyond the internal organization of the Department of State and reviewed the entire governmental framework for the conduct of foreign affairs. Indeed, one of its greatest contributions was its emphasis on the fact that the United States has a radically new role to play in world affairs, and on the related fact that the task of foreign affairs administration has become a responsibility of the Government as a whole and not merely that of the Department of State.

The Hoover Commission pointed out that at least 45 executive agencies in addition to the Department of State were involved in the administration of foreign affairs, that the budget estimates for international affairs and finance had reached a level of 7 billion dollars annually, of which at that time only about 5 percent was expended through the Department of State, and that the total number of civilian employees of the Government abroad in 1948 was approximately 128,500, of whom only 11 percent were attached to the Department of State and the Foreign Service. The Hoover Commission also commented on the extent to which the staffs in the Executive Office of the President are involved in matters of foreign affairs, on the extent and variety of the special arrangements for interdepartmental coordina

tion, and on the growing significance of the legislative and appropriations activities of the Congress in relation to foreign affairs.

The situation in 1948, when the Hoover Commission was at work, appeared to have its transitory aspects, and there was hope in some quarters for a return to a condition of world affairs that would be simpler and less burdensome to the United States. Obviously realization of that hope has been postponed for the present.

Nevertheless the persistent and difficult problems of administration of foreign affairs and overseas operations that have been so troublesome in recent years have not been solely or even primarily the product of passing events. Fundamentally, they have arisen from the new position of the United States in the world, from the objectives it has formulated as it has come to understand its new position in the world, and from the factors that condition the achievement of those objectives. The purpose of the present chapter is to examine these matters and to point out some of their implications for the problems of this report.

THE NEW POSITION OF THE UNITED STATES

It was said of the United States after the First World War that it retained a debtor mentality although it had attained a creditor position. In the years since the Second World War, the United States has been in some danger of retaining a peripheral mentality although it has attained a central position.

A central position is not exactly the same as a position of leadership, although the two are closely related. At the end of the First World War, the United States was unquestionably in a central position for many purposes, but within a few years it rejected the responsibilities of world leadership. Some elements of its central position then disappeared in the course of time, although others remained during the period between the wars.

At present there appears to be considerable acceptance in the United States of the view that it has a measure of responsibility for world leadership, but the position which it occupies in the world and which provides the basis for that leadership is not well understood.

Economic superiority

The present central position of the United States is essentially the result of its great economic strength in relation to that of other countries. It is not easy to realize the proportions of that strength. All of the statistical measures that might be applied are somewhat unsatisfactory, but it may be helpful to look at a number of brief statistical indications of the relative economic strength of the larger countries. The 12 countries that rank largest in population are shown in the table on page 3, together with estimates of their population for a recent