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Continuation of Thomas and Wolman's report, "The Presidency and Policy Formulation: The Johnson Task Forces," 12 pgs. [Report], n.d.
From Haldeman to Harlow, re: Task Force Reports, 2 pgs. [Memo], 12/4/1968
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WHSF: Returned, 32-40
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This file contains:
Continuation of Thomas and Wolman's report, "The Presidency and Policy Formulation: The Johnson Task Forces," 12 pgs. [Report], n.d.
From Haldeman to Harlow, re: Task Force Reports, 2 pgs. [Memo], 12/4/1968
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Richard Nixon Presidential Library
White House Special Files Collection
Folder List
Box Number Folder Number Document Date Document Type
Document Description
32
40
n.d.
Report
Continuation of Thomas and Wolman's
report, "The Presidency and Policy
Formulation: The Johnson Task Forces," 12
pgs.
32
40
12/04/1968
Memo
From Haldeman to Harlow, re: Task Force
Reports, 2 pgs.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Page 1 of 1
-27-
program authorized by Congress in 1965 was the major recommendation
of the 1964 Wood task force; and, the model cities program enacted
in 1966 was the major proposal of the 1965 Wood task force. One
of the major innovative programs authorized in the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act of 1965, Title III, clearly originated
with the 1964 Gardner task force; 18 and, most of the recommenda-
tions of the 1966 Early Childhood task force were adopted, although
at lower funding levels than those the task force recommended.
Not all task force reports, however, automatically became part
of the President's legislative program. For example. only a few
recommendations of the 1967 Friday task force, principally the
Networks for Knowledge and the Partnership for Learning and Earning
proposals, appeared in President Johnson's 1968 education message or
the Administration's 1968 education bills. The muted impact of the
Friday task force report can be explained in part by its focus
on long-range rather than immediate problems and by the con-
straints which the Vietnam war imposed on the political and
budgetary situations. The 1966 Vlvisaker task force also had
little direct impact on policy because its recommendations
were "too rádical" and because its predecessors had been quite
productive in terms of legislative accomplishments. As one
White House staff member remarked:
The Ylvisaker report had little policy impact,
partly because it was the third in a row and the
first two had set policy. Actually It served as a
basis for the Kerner Commission report in that It
changed the framework from urbanism to racism. But,
-28-
I admit, that observation is mostly hindsight. We
didn't see the report as terribly important when it
came in.
Task force reports can also have a major impact through
administrative actions as well as through incorporation in the
President's legislative program. For example. the 1.966 Early
Childhood task force recommended changes in Federal welfare regu-
lations which were subsequently adopted by the agencies involved.
In addition, the possibility of task force recommendations be-
coming Administration policy is enhanced if 2. key task force
participant becomes a member of the Administration.
This, of
course, occured in the cases of John Gardner who became Secre-
tary of HEW and Robert Wood, who served as Undersecretary of HUD.
As one agency official observed:
Because they wrote the reports they are more
likely to take up the cudgels for the task
force proposals than someone else would be.
What they can't get through legislation, they
are likely to push for through administrative
changes.
Appraisal and Prospects
Through the employment of secret White House task forces,
the Johnson Administration developed a substantially altered
pattern of policy formulation and legislative program develop-
ment. The extensive, though selective, use of groups of outside
experts to identify problems and issues and generate new ideas
and approaches coupled with the frequent use of inter-
agency task forces to temper the recommendations of the out
siders with pragmatic considerations were the basic changes. Through
them the Administration sought to expand the process of policy
-29-
formilation boyond traditional reliance on the bureaucracy to
develop most new policy proposals. The changes may constitute
another phase in the institutionalization of the Presidency,
19
but
they were not so highly routinized that they became permanent White
House routines. Given the still highly personalized nature of the
Presidency, it is by no means certain that processes within the
framework of presidential activity that involve policy formula-
tion can be quickly and indelibly institutionalized. Rather,
institutionalization is a continuous and gradual process.
While manifesting distinctly identifiable patterns, the opera-
tions of the task forces were highly flexible and adaptable to presi-
dential requirements. There are signs, however, that the
flexibility and adaptability of the task forces, at least in
housing and education, had begun to decline as their opera-
tions became increasingly systematized and that they were
tending to become elaborate instruments of incremental adjust-
ment rather than catalytic agents of change. The problem is
that a leadership technique--and that is what the task force
operation is--designed to produce policy innovation worked so
well initially that overuse may have rendered it counterpro-
ductive. After all, the scope for creative policy leadership is
limited by circumstantial factors and even the most effective
techniques can work successfully only part of the time.
It also appears to us that although the task forces were
20
an important procedural innovation, the substantive innovations
in policy for which they- have been responsible are considerably
less than their advocates in the Johnson Administration
have claimed. As a Budget Bureau official acknowledged,
"task forces fail as innovators
All they do is
-30-
pull together existing things instead of coming up with new
ideas. " A staff member of a housing task force agreed: "We
didn't really come up with any innovations, nor were we particu-
larly creative." It does seem that the task forces which had
the greatest immediate impact on legislation recommended programs
appropriately
political rather than
which could more / be characterized as/intellectual breakthroughs.
For example, the rent supplement idea had been circulating for
several years, the HHFA was experimenting with major elements
of the model cities approach before the task force proposed it,
at least
and/three of the five substantive titles of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act, including the all-important Title I
providing for massive aid to disadvantaged children, were pri-
marily the products of other forces in the education policy
system.
Furthermore, to the extent that task forces were made rep-
resentative through their membership. tendencies toward innova-
tion may have been mitigated. This appears likely since con-
sensus was the fundamental decision-making rule and final agree-
ment tended to represent compromise rather than creative thinking.
As one high-ranking official in the Executive Office admitted,
"it is true that with so many interests involved the result is,
in some sense, the lowest common denominator."
However, because task forces may not have been quite as in-
novative (in the sense that no one had thought of their
recommendations before) as their proponents claimed does not
mean that essentially the same courses of action would have
-31-
been followed had they not been used. The ideas which they
promoted may not have been entirely new, but they were not yet
embodied in presidential policies nor, in most cases were they
supported by the bureaucracy. Without outside task forces it
is not likely that the supplementary educational centers and
regional education laboratories or the rent supplements and
model cities programs would have been pushed by the Administra-
tion and authorized by Congress at the time and form that they
were. But more important than the immediate legislative con-
sequences are the long-range effects of the task force process.
They provide a means of maintaining a steady input of ideas
new to the thought processes of high-level policy-makers.
Unfortunately the consequences of this phenomenon cannot be
measured. but its significance is manifest.
On balance, we believe that the task force operation was a
significant contribution to presidential policy leadership. Many
Johnson Administrative officials who served in the Executive Office
of the President view the task force operation as a major in-
stitutional contribution. Whether it will survive is an open
question. Much depends on future Presidents; their personalities,
their attitudes toward the necessity for policy innovation and
the extent to which they employ secrecy and surprise as elements
of their leadership styles. The task force operation was peculiarly
suited to the leadership style of Lyndon B. Johnson. It fitted
-32-
nicely with his often repeated emphasis on the need for a partner-
ship between the public and private sectors, his life-long instinct
for decision-making on the basis of consensus, and his preoccupa-
tion with secrecy. 21 Viewed in another way. 1t was a good example
of what Theodore Lowi has called "interest group liberalism, It a
phenomenon which Lowi feels has come increasingly to characterize
American politics in the 1960's. 22 Interest group liberalism is a
philosophy which specifies that leading societal interests should
all be represented in the interior processes of policy formulation.
Future Presidents are likely to utilize those features of the
task force operation which they find compatible with their own
styles and are appropriate to their policy objectives.
An innova
tion-minded President would find secret outside task forces to be
most useful for purposes of broad policy planning. In this con-
text, he could employ them to identify problems. pinpoint issues
and suggest alternative solutions to them. It is likely that these
task forces would develop some new ideas independently, but more
importantly they would function to collate and bring to the atten-
tion of the President and other top policy-makers innovative and
creative thinking done elsewhere. on the other hand, such a Presi-
dent could not expect them regularly to develop the specifics of
proposed legislation. He could more appropriately assign that
function to interagency task forces working in conjunction with
policy planners in the departments and agencies. The President
would also find that outside task forces are more suitable than
-33-
public commissions for reaching out and acquiring fresh ideas
and appreaches. They do not tend to be as concerned with the
balancing of societal interests as. commissions, by their very
nature, must be. Correspondingly, however, commissions are more
appropriate for developing a consensus behind a set of policy
recommendations.
In determining whether to employ outside task forces in the
processes of policy formulation, the President who is intent on
innovation must asses the costs and gains associated with their
use. In addition to being a most promising means of generating
new ideas, outside task forces will afford him a maximum range of
options which can be kept open over a long period of time with a
minimum of energy required to defend his choices. The principal
costs are the resentments which the task forces engender in the
bureaucracy and among powerful clientele groups. These costs can
be reduced somewhat by balancing interests in selecting task forces
members, thus rendering them somewhat more like public commissions,
and by reliance on interagency task forces to review outside task
force recommendations and to take the lead in developing specific
legislative proposals. To the extent that the President takes
these counter-measures, however, he risks losing some of the por
tential gains to be derived from the use of outside task forces.
Unfortunately, our information is not sufficient and measuring
instruments lack the precision to permit a more definitive assess-
ment of such costs and gains. Whatever the goals of future Presi-
dents, it is certainly expected that they will examine carefully
-34-
the uses 02" presidential bask forces during the Johnson Presidency
and that some elements of the task force operation will become
permanently institutionalized.
* * *
Footnotes
Iwe obtained our data in the course of conducting more compre-
hensive studies of the Federal policy-making processes in the areas
of housing and education. We selected those areas because, as major
sectors of President's Johnson's Great Society, substantial redis-
tributive policies have been enacted within them since 1965. (The
distinction between regulatory, distributive and redistributive
policies is Theodore J. Lowi's. See "American Business, Public
Policy. Case-Studies and Political Theory, World Politics, 16
(1964). Redistributive policies have broad impact, produce con-
siderable conflict and tension and can result in altered relation-
ships between the Presidency, the bureaucracy and clientele groups.
A comparison of our initial findings suggested further exam-
ination of the process of formulating the President's legislative
program and of President Johnson's use of task forces.
our respondents, for this phase of the study, included five
members of the White House staff, seven Bureau of the Budget of-
ficials, and 32 department and agency officials and task force
participants.
2 The best description of this process and its development to
the point of almost total dependence on agency submission of proposals
by the early years of the Eisenhower Administration is Richard E.
Neustadt, "The Presidency and Legislation: Planning the President's
Program, American Political Science Review, 49 (1955) pp. 980-1018.
See also Neustadt's "The Presidency and Legislation: The Growth of
Central Clearance," Ibid., 48 (1954) PP. 641-670.
The classic studies of the Presidency have not examined in any
detail the process of presidential policy formulation. See, for
example, Edward S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers, 4th
ed., (New York: New York University Press, 1957) Chapter VII;
and, E. Pendelton Herring, Presidential Leadership (New York:
Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1940). However, more recent institu-
tional analyses have begun to do so. See Joseph E. Kallenbach,
The American Chief Executive (Now York: Harper and Row, 1966)
pp. 341-344; and, Louis W. Koenig, The Chief Executive (New York;
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964) PP. 166-183.
3see J. Lipeer Leeper Freeman, "The Bureaucracy in Pressure Politics,"
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,
Vol. 319 (1958) pp. 11-19.
4
Arthur W. Maas, "In Accord with the Program of the President,'
in Carl J. Friedrich, ed., Public Policy, Vol. 4 (1953) pp. 79-
93. Maas stated that the President needed staff in addition to
the Bureau of the Budget "to meet the 'need for positive origina-
tion at the center of broad objectives' and policies so
that adequate 'leadership and direction' are given to the develop-
ment of /his/ program."
5 Quoted in William E. Leuchtenberg. "The Genesis of the Great
Society, " The Reporter, April 21, 1966, pp. 36-39.
-36-
6 See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F.
Kennedy in the White House (New York: Fawcett World Library,
1967) pp. 148-154. Texts of the reports appear in New
Frontiers of the Kennedy Administration (Washington: Public
Affairs Press, 1961).
7 For an account of the establishment of the task forces 1n
1964 and their role in developing the legislative program of the
Great Society, see W. E. Leuchtenberg. op. cit.
8 A sharp differentiation of the functions of policy-planning
and legislative liaison has occured on the White House staff
with the policy-planners enjoying greater influence and status.
See Thomas E. Cronin, "The Presidency and Education,' Phi Delta
Kappan, February, 1968, pp. 295-299.
9 Louis Koenig's prediction, made in 1964 at the outset of the
Johnson Presidency. that the White House staff would play a re-
duced and the old-line departments a greater role in policy-
formulation has not proved correct. The reverse has occured.
OD. cit., pp. 182-183.
10 This description is based on our interviews. See also the
description of the preparation of the 1968 State of the Union
message in "Formulating Presidential Program is Long Process,"
Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, January 26, 1968,
pp. 111-114.
11 See Elizabeth Brenner Drew, "On Giving Onseself a Hotfoot:
Government by Commission," Atlantic, Vol. 221, May, 1968, pp. 45-
49. In her barbed though highly perceptive article, she lists
several uses of public commissions including: to postpone action
yet be justified in insisting that you are at work on the problem;
to act as a lightning rod, drawing political heat away from the
White House: and to investigate, lay to rest, rumors and convince
the public of the validity of a particular set of facts.
A highly placed official on the White House staff commented
that "there's a hell of a lot of truth to some of the things in
Drew's article. However, in some cases we do expect new and
important things to come out of public commissions."
-37-
12
Cf. Deniel Sell, "Goverment by Conmission," The Public
Interest,
No. 3 (1966) pp. 3-9.
13 2017 usually because the entire process of policy formula-
then is flexible and somewhat unstructured. What happens in any
given case may be and often is dependent on ideosyncratic personal
and situational variables. There is a great temptation for the
political analyst to impose El. more rational order on the patterns
of the governmental process than may be empirically justified.
See James M. Burns, Presidential Government (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1966) P. 143. Burns cites the highly relevant com-
ments of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., based on his experiences in
the White House during the Kennedy Administration: "Nothing in
my recent experience has been more chastening than the attempt to
penetrate into the process of decision. I shudder a little when
I think how confidently I have analyzed decisions in the ages of
Jackson and Roosevelt. traced influences, assigned motives, evaluated
roles, allocated responsibilities and, in short, transormed a ais-
dishevelled and murky evolution into a tidy and ordered trans-
action. The sad fact is that, in many cases, the basic evidence
for the historian's reconstruction of the really hard cases does
not exist--and the evidence that it does is often incomplete,
misleading cr erroncous." From "The Historian and History,"
Foreign Affairs. Vol. 41 (April, 1963) pp. 491-497.
14 R. E. Neustadt, Presidential Power (New York: John Wiley &
Sons, 1960. passim.
15
Drew criticizes the balancing of interests on public com-
missions on the ground that it tends to immobilize them. Op. cit.,
P. 47. Bell is more sympathetic toward the representational
aspects of commissions, op. cit.. P. 7.
16
These meetings, which usually lasted for one or two days,
were held on a monthly or bimonthly basis.
17
Sce Drew. op. cit.
18
There was a considerable difference of opinion among our
respondents regarding the impact of the Gardner task force on
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Those individuals
who commented from the perspective of the bureaucracy--USOE-HEW-
asserted that aside from Title III, the task force functioned
only to crystalize ideas that had been circulating for some time
and to legitimize policy planning done elsewhere in the educa-
tional policy-making system. On the other hand, observers in
the Executive Office of the President claimed that Title IV, and
to a considerable extent Title I, owed their existence to the
task force. While it is-not possible to measure the amount of
variance in policy for which the task force accounted, it seems
clear that it was a variable of considerable significance. See
Stephen K. Bailey and Edith K. Mosher, ESEA: The Office of Educa-
tion Administers a Law (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1968)
pp. 39-42.
On the difficulty of tracing the origins of new policies, see
Adam Marmolinsky, "Ideas into Programs,' The Public Interest No. 2
(1966) pp. 70-77.
-38-
19
Cf. Lester G. Seligman, "Presidential Leadership: The
Inner Circle and Institutionalization," Journal of Politics,
Vol. 18 (1956). pp. 410-426.
20 The problem of defining innovation is a familiar one which
does not lend itself to any easy solution. A8 we view it, policy
innovation includes the conception: of ideas as well as giving sub-
stance and form to them. Cf. Victor A. Thompson, "Bureaucracy
and Innovation, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 10,
(June, 1965) pp. 1-20. Thompson defines innovation as "the gen-
eration, acceptance, and implementation of new ideas, products or
services."
21
See Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson:
The Exercise of Power (New York: New American Library, 1966).
22ᵣ. J. Lowi, "The Public Philosophy: Interest-Group
Liberalism, American Political Science Review, Vol. 61
(1967) pp. 5-24.
MEMORANDUM
December 4, 1968
TO:
BRYCE HARLOW
FROM:
BOB HALDEMAN
RE:
TASK FORCE REPORTS
Based on the general discussion at this morning's meeting, I
would strongly suggest that we go ahead with plans for each task
force, or group of task forces, to be prepared to have its progress
report meeting here at the Pierre Hotel. We should start with
the first one as soon as possible after December 10th.
In each individual case I would suggest that the task force submit
its report in writing to your review committee, or to the President,
via your review committee, and that the entire group plan to meet
here at the Pierre approximately four days after the written report
is in hand. The first part of the meeting would be with the full
review committee and concerned cabinet officers as well as concerned
members of Congress. This would be a private, closed meeting, but
the fact that it was being held would be announced. The chairman of
the task force would then come upstairs, meet briefly with the Presi-
dent, and then escort the President down to the group meeting where
he, RN, would have an opportunity briefly to thank the members of
the group for their fine work and possibly to discuss a particular point
or two of the report with them.
The press would be permitted to come in at this time, for pictures only.
Following this session, the chairman of the task force should be made
available to the press to answer questions regarding the general content
of the report.
It would be understood, of course, that the task force continue with its
work, perhaps with some modification of membership, and that it would
be used as Dr. Burns suggested, to review questions as they arise in the
particular field.
Hopefully, these sessions would be scheduled at fedrly frequent intervals,
even two or three a day, from December 10th through December 20th.
It would be helpful if as many of the reports as possible would be in
prior to Christmas. With regard to RN's schedule, it should be noted
that from the 21st on, he will be involved in the wedding and Christmas
vacation.
Bryce Harlow
-2-
Then, shortly after the first of the year, the balance of the reports
could be handled in the same fashion. Perhaps around January 10th,
with the hope that all the work would be in by that time, the dinner
for all task forces and the cabinet officers could be held at the Plaza
as was suggested.
It is going to be difficult to get this process in motion and keep it going
unless we get started quickly, and I think that if the plan outlined above
is not one you want to follow, we should get an alternative plan developed
right away, and get something started.