Stretching the Limbs

When a Man has Married a Wife, he finds out whether

Her knees & elbows are only glewed together.

--William Blake

The states and cities, indissolubly wedded to the Great Society, have discovered to their chagrin that most of its distributive mechanisms--its knees and elbows--are glued together by a welter of rigid and overlapping legislation.

Never has federal money been more available to communities--and seldom has the source been harder to crack. Five separate agencies subsidize sewage treatment, three programs cater to the needs of deaf children, 30 aid training for teachers. Confusion about where to get what has brought forth so many catalogues that the Administration is preparing a Catalogue of Catalogues.

Of the nearly $15 billion spent annually in 400 federal domestic programs, 70% is handled by state and local governments. To lubricate the process, Lyndon Johnson decided to form and send throughout the U.S. a task force of high federal officials directly involved in making his programs work.

Ridiculous Details. The team is led by a former Governor of Florida, genial Farris Bryant, 52, who is the director of the Office of Emergency Planning but serves also as Johnson's chief engineer and evangelist of creative federalism. Last week federal men boarded one of the President's Boeing 707 jetliners, touched down in Washington State and Alaska to meet firsthand with their state counterparts. So far, the task force of better than a score of federal officials has visited 19 states. The problems they have encountered have been as diverse as America itself.

In Alaska, the federal men were barraged with complaints about restrictions hampering sea imports to the state. In Washington State, officials heatedly complained to the visitors that announcement of a new federal power plant for Grand Coulee Dam caught the state by surprise--and wholly unprepared to provide the needed roadways.

Still in the 1800s. At earlier meetings, Johnson's flying squad heard Maryland officials complain about book-thick federal regulations, going into such "ridiculous" detail as one by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare demanding that nursing homes have doors exactly 4 ft. 2 in. wide. In Kansas, Superintendent of Motor Vehicles L. A. Billings railed against a flood of complicated directives on highway safety: "We have your 13 directives--any one of which would take five years to implement. And you want us to tell you how we'll meet them in one month."

Bryant and his team kept their cool. "Well," one of them admitted, "there is a lack of coordination and coherence in Washington. This is why we're here, isn't it?"

The problems, it turned out, are not all Washington's fault. The federal mission discovered how little control most Governors have over their legislatures, cabinets or budgets. Only a handful of states have changed their bookkeeping systems since the 19th century. Thirty of the states have legislatures that meet only every other year, thus often miss out on federal funds and new programs. Even worse, state officials tend to concentrate exclusively on their own bureaucratic fiefdoms. "We even had the pleasure of introducing one state official to another," marveled HEW's Deputy Under Secretary Dean Coston. "These two guys had never met."

4-C Program. During hearings last week before the Senate Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations, it was all too evident that the same lack of coordination that exists between the federal and state governments also plagues relations between the states and local governments. In New York State alone, Senator Robert Kennedy pointed out, "there are 4,500 independent governmental units."

While the thrust of the previous Congress was the passage of Great Society legislation, the main task of the 90th Congress clearly is one of digestion and direction. Already the Administration has taken a seven-league step with the creation of a review board by which Governors and mayors can scrutinize federal programs and suggest how, and how much, Washington can aid their implementation. And Lyndon Johnson has called for a limb-stretching exercise that might be called the 4-C program: communication, consideration, consistency and coordination. In a rare mood of modesty, the President declared: "What remains for us now is to improve the quality of Government itself."

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