tariat, a Presidential staff secretary, or a central secretariat for Cabinet committees. All of these proposals have apparently so far come to nothing in part because of a widespread antipathy in Executive Office circles to the formalization of Cabinet work or even to any lesser approximation of British cabinet practice.

A proposal for consolidating the principal existing interdepartmental committee secretariats in a central secretariat in the Executive Office would be somewhat different from prior proposals and might be thought to have certain merits of its own. The argument for such a proposal would begin with advantages of the kind found to exist for the existing central secretariat in the Department of State. It would emphasize the advantages of bringing together the secretariat arrangements for all major committees in one place, so that it would be possible to include committees that are concerned mainly with domestic matters, as well as those concerned mainly with foreign affairs. Presumably this would facilitate the coordination of the foreign and domestic aspects of national policy as a whole, and would be a major reason for locating central secretariat arrangements in the Executive Office rather than in the Department of State, which limits its activities almost entirely to the foreign affairs committees.

It can be argued further that any question of sufficient interdepartmental importance to warrant consideration as to policy by an interdepartmental committee is by virtue of that fact automatically of interest to the Executive Office. The establishment of a central secretariat in the Executive Office would facilitate the exchange of information needed for other phases of Executive Office work. Conversely, the other facilities of the Executive Office could be used to strengthen the quality of the secretariat work and to improve the functioning of the committees. Appropriate staff agencies in the Executive Office would be fully informed in case of deadlock in a committee. Interdepartmental problems would not go unresolved for long periods of time merely because no agency directly concerned was prepared to take the responsibility of bringing it to the President for settlement. It may also be argued on behalf of this alternative that it would avoid the tendency that is said to exist in the case of committees that have their own secretariats to develop a sense of corporate identity in their own right. Such committees may attain almost the status of small independent executive agencies, and add accordingly to the supervisory burdens of the President. A central secretariat in the Executive Office, with responsibility to serve several important committees, would not need to develop an institutional loyalty to any one of them.

Against such a proposal, it could be argued that the creation of an adequate central secretariat in the Executive Office would be a difficult task. The qualifications of skill and prestige for the chief of such a

secretariat would be substantial. In addition, it would be difficult to recruit and organize the necessary staff if substantive qualifications were expected for the existing wide variety of committee work. Expert personnel in the substantive agencies would probably be reluctant to transfer for service in a purely secretariat capacity, while existing staffs of Executive Office agencies would be severely pressed if expected to supply qualified expert personnel for a constant stream of temporary and ad hoc assignments in connection with such a secretariat.

More importantly, it might be argued that the establishment of a central secretariat is merely a first step in the direction of a Cabinet secretariat and that the step should not be taken unless it is desired, as it evidently is not, to go the full way. Against this point, it could be argued that the existing interdepartmental committees do exist, that they are growing in numbers, and that action otherwise appropriate should not be prejudiced by arguing about the Cabinet, which is actually a different kind of a problem.

FURTHER ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSIONS

The strengths and weaknesses of the committee system, by and large, are those of any system that seeks to secure cooperation and compliance by voluntary means. Its strength is that officials, departments, and agencies are most likely to cooperate fully in carrying out decisions that they have participated in making. The weakness is that the process is likely to require full and free debate that is timeconsuming and, within a system of executive control, to some extent irrelevant.

Nevertheless, teamwork in foreign affairs is necessary as it has never been before. The use of interdepartmental committees within limits, in some form and for some purposes, therefore appears to be both necessary and desirable. Moreover, the use of staff aids to higher authority to obtain systematically coordinated action as an alternative to committee action can also have only a limited application. Presidential staffs work primarily on matters of Presidential concern, and neither the President nor his staff has the time to be concerned with all matters of interdepartmental relations. Even if there were enough staff assistants in the Executive Office to keep track of all questions of concern to more than one department at the seat of government, it is not at all certain that this process would be more efficient in its total effect, or any less expensive of time and talent, than the committee process.

General considerations affecting committee usefulness

The committee device is most workable when the committee can be made advisory to one agency, which other members of a committee

accept as having the primary action responsibility for matters coming within the committee's purview. This arrangement, when it is possible to recognize a clear leadership responsibility in one agency, tends to minimize the unanimity principle and to allow work to proceed more rapidly.

The reason why committees advisory to an agency of primary interest work best in the American system is that committees of this type do least violence to the line of command and executive responsibility. Jurisdictional issues under these circumstances are not likely to plague the work of a committee, and it remains the responsibility of the agency most involved to accept or reject the advice given. Experience seems to indicate that in the great majority of cases, the agency with primary responsibility has been willing to accept and utilize such advice.

Much of the difficulty that has been experienced with committees has developed in cases where primary responsibility does not reside clearly in any single agency, where the terms of reference of the committee are not clearly defined, or where some members of a committee are attempting to use it to enlarge their own sphere of responsibility. In such cases, issues will inevitably arise that involve appeal to higher authority in case of disagreement. Some experience has developed in the combining of staff and committee work that may be useful in handling such problems; namely, in the designation of a member of a Presidential staff agency to sit either as a representative or as an observer on a committee. A representative of the Harriman office sits on the International Security Affairs Committee, and staff members of the Bureau of the Budget sit as observers on several of the more important interdepartmental committees.

These representatives sit as observers because of the belief that it would be unwise to commit the Executive Office agencies on questions at the departmental level that might later arise for settlement in the Excutive Office. This is undoubtedly correct, but an opportunity exists to develop the role of the observer more actively without violating the principle. We believe this to be particularly so in cases where a committee is necessary but where it is not possible to make a clear assignment of primary responsibility. We believe that staff members of the Executive Office should always be assigned to such committees, and can be of special usefulness in seeing that stalemates are not allowed to remain unresolved, but are instead referred to higher authority. In this situation, a combination of committee work and of staff work outside the committee would seem to be of great practical utility.

Even within these terms, the interdepartmental committee should not be considered a panacea for interagency ills. In many cases, informal liaison will be a more effective and less costly way of fixing

policy or administering or reviewing programs. In other cases, the remedy for diffusion of authority may lie in the concentration of authority in a single agency, rather than in institutionalizing relations between agencies of divided authority by establishment of a committee. Similarly, the committee device should not be used as a means of formalizing and fixing a relatively slight agency interest in a problem or area of work in which the interests and responsibilities of another agency are paramount. When there exists relatively slight interests of other agencies, they may be satisfied more appropriately by arrangements for exchange of information, informal liaison, maintenance of formal liaison relationships, or the like. In such cases the establishment of a permanent committee, or the inclusion of members whose interests are partial or tangential, may serve to stultify the effective development and execution of governmental policy. A primary requisite of government is action; if action is frustrated by an overburdensome requirement of committee clearance, the results can be quite as serious as if no coordination is attempted in areas where it is in fact needed.

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. This can hardly be over-emphasized. Many chairmanships tend to be settled on the basis of ex officio criteria without regard to experience and skill, notwithstanding the fact that otherwise capable executives are sometimes inadequate as committee chairmen. In such cases the committee's failure is often in fact the failure of the chairman. Moreover, 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 on the part of the agency.

An effective committee must rest on a firm basis of ability of its members to present a coordinated agency position. If coordination within agencies has not been achieved, the meetings of an interdepartmental committee are likely to be time-consuming and fruitless.

Issues in committee administration

Functions of a committee.-With these general considerations in mind, it is possible to consider the more specific issues that were raised and discussed earlier in the chapter. In connection with the issue as to the functions that can be performed by committees, the evidence is somewhat contradictory.

The fact is that each of the types of activity indicated by one of the five alternatives under this issue has at times been carried on successfully and at other times unsuccessfully in an interdepartmental committee. Possibly the general view that committees should concentrate on matters of policy and program formulation and avoid

administration is a quantitative reflection of the experience, but this cannot be the subject of any complete determination in the present state of the evidence.

The difficulty probably results from the fact that several other variables are also at work and affect the degree to which an interdepartmental committee can successfully attack any one of the tasks described. Aside from the obvious factors of personality with respect to chairman, members, and secretary, the extent to which the jurisdictional interests of the various members are clear and certain may be one major point. Another, possibly of general importance, is the extent to which jurisdiction is more or less evenly dispersed among agencies represented on the committee as contrasted with the situation in which jurisdiction is mainly in a single agency, leaving the other agencies on the committee in an essentially advisory and cooperating relationship. There may be a correlation between the jurisdictional pattern and the type of activity that can be carried on effectively: for example, it might be suggested tentatively that committees should consider only policy and program issues in situations in which authority and responsibility are more or less evenly distributed in the committee, while detailed administrative work may be possible and desirable in situations in which authority tends to be concentrated in the agency of the chairman, while other members have an essentially cooperative role on behalf of their respective agencies.

Experience indicates that jurisdictional issues should not be debated in interdepartmental committees. There may be exceptions to this rule, as, for example, the obvious one of an interdepartmental committee set up for the specific purpose of considering a jurisdictional issue. But the more usual situation is the one in which the issue is not clearly stated, and in which the several members of the committee assume primary jurisdiction over a particular area with which the committee is attempting to deal. In such cases, the more or less submerged conflict, if it continues, can lead to no outcome other than a steady deterioration in the work of the committee. As a rule, jurisdictional questions should be settled as fully as possible before an interdepartmental committee is established. In any case, a specific jurisdictional dispute should not be "resolved" by the easy but dangerous method of establishment of a committee with an ill-defined character of responsibilities and on which the disputing agencies are all represented.

At the present time the most that can be said as to functions apparently is that committees have seemed to work best when involved in work of a broad rather than a narrow character. This is a relative matter, and it is related to the experience of the government with the particular field being considered.