Rage to Reorganize

"Organization is policy," says Roy Ash, former president of Litton Industries and new director of the Office of Management and Budget. Apparently Richard Nixon agrees. He has taken the advice of Ash and a council he headed that the Government should be reorganized to make it more responsive to presidential command. Though Congress failed to act on Nixon's larger plans--to merge six Cabinet departments into four--the President has gone right ahead and created a super-Cabinet by Executive order. The effort is receiving mixed reviews--as a laudable effort to streamline Government, or as a worrisome presidential grab for ever-stronger authority.

Most Presidents have complained about their Cabinets, but Nixon is the first to alter the structure significantly. He has promoted three Cabinet members to the rank of Presidential Counsellor, with broadened responsibility for handling interdepartmental programs. Health, Education and Welfare Secretary-designate Caspar Weinberger will become Counsellor for Human Resources, Housing and Urban Development Secretary-designate James Lynn will be Counsellor for Community Development, and Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz will oversee Natural Resources. Each will confront related problems that overlap various departments. The shift is sensible, but it has been accomplished at the expense of the other Cabinet officers, who have clearly suffered a demotion. From now on, for example, if Interior Secretary Rogers Morton wants to get a decision on the use of park land, he will have to go, hat in hand, to Earl Butz, whereas formerly he could go directly to the White House. In turn, Butz will pass along his decision to John Ehrlichman, Domestic Affairs chief in the White House. "I will be considerably less involved in the actual policy promulgation," Ehrlichman explains, "and my role will be increasingly ministerial, as literally a conduit for passing along messages and documents and things of that kind."

The point of the change is to bridge the gap between the White House and the bureaucracy. The Counsellors will have a foot in each establishment --doubtless a stretching experience. Supposedly, the new setup will permit the President to cut back his Executive Office staff from 4,216 to a little over 2,000--the number that existed when he took office. He will then have to deal with fewer people, as he prefers. When he gives an order, it will glide more swiftly down the chain of command.

The task of making the reorganization work falls, appropriately, on Roy Ash, who will manage not only the federal budget but the entire Executive Branch. In this post, he ranks with the other big four of the super-Cabinet: H.R. Haldeman, White House chief of staff; Ehrlichman; Henry Kissinger; and George Shultz, Adviser for Economic Affairs. Whether Ash is the man to fill this awesome job has become a matter of debate. At issue in the first place is his management of Litton, whose profits fell from a lackluster $50 million in fiscal 1971 to only $1.1 million last year.

Wary. Of more concern is a possible conflict of interest, since Litton is presently at loggerheads with the Navy because of cost overruns amounting to $547 million. Last week a congressional hearing made the point that Ash had gone to the Pentagon in June to ask for a bail-out similar to Lockheed's Government-guaranteed loan. Ash argues that contracts are handled by the Navy, not by the OMB Director, but any contracts as big as Litton's are bound to affect the budget. If a proposal came up to bail out Litton, Ash would find himself in an untenable position, especially since Nixon has given him so much power over the Executive Branch.

Though it is understandably wary of the presidential appetite for power, Congress probably does not have all that much to worry about in the case of the super-Cabinet. The Government is strewn with the wreckage of earlier attempts at reorganization, and Nixon's may end up in the same heap despite all of the fanfare. In any case, dissenters in the bureaucracy will still be able to frustrate an activist President in their customary way: going on the sly to the press, to sympathetic members of Congress or to aroused constituencies among the public. A super-Cabinet does not necessarily make a super-President.

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