Big, Bulging and Bogged Down

By Hugh Sidey

THE PRESIDENCY

This is a strange time for the U.S. Government. Rarely in the past 40 years has it seemed so unable to act positively, so bogged down in its own miseries and self-pity. Gerald Ford, clonking golf balls on the Palm Springs fairways, and Henry Kissinger, pouting in his seventh-floor State Department barony, have set an example of leadership by blame. If ever there was a time to seize opportunity during crisis (a device extolled by Richard Nixon) and put on a creative foreign policy surge, it is now. The moment cries out for leadership to accept the realities, submerge recrimination and fashion a new view of the future. It might even be exhilarating.

The lassitude, however, is so pervasive now, from the Oval Office to Capitol Hill, that one wonders if we have entered the era in which the sheer size of Government has rendered it incapable of responding to the nation's needs.

They finally produced a new tax bill in Congress, but devising new energy measures is going to be a longer, harder task. In the midst of crises last week, Congress was on vacation, its leadership scattered from Peking to Athens. Nothing seemed to be progressing as well as plans to expand the size of a Congressman's staff by two more people (making a total of 18) or smashing through blocks of graceful old residences near the Capitol to make way for more congressional office buildings, including one monster that could cost $200 million.

The U.S. Information Agency, which with more than 9,000 people is about one-fourth as large as the entire State Department, has done nothing else quite so effectively as oppose a reorganization plan drafted by the prestigious Stanton Commission. The commission logically believes that the cold war, for which the USIA was formed, is over and that most of the agency's function should now be absorbed by the State Department.

The Internal Revenue Service is collecting taxes, certainly, but it is also trying to explain its embarrassing link with "Operation Leprechaun," in which undercover agents, including at least one curvaceous woman, gathered information on the sexual and drinking habits of 30 public figures in the Miami area. There are morning-after doubts that the CIA'S Herculean effort to raise a sunken Soviet submarine could have produced much valuable intelligence. The notion grows that it might have been a $350 million project for men still playing James Bond.

The genial Secretary of the Interior Rogers C.B. Morton has been moved to Commerce. The Republican conservative nominated to replace him is Wyoming's former Governor Stanley K. Hathaway, who allowed, among other things, blanket slaughter of golden eagles erroneously believed to be major predators of livestock.

The Department of Agriculture, which now has 105,907 employees (one for every 26.6 farmers), helped bring us the soybean shortage and the inflationary Russian wheat sale.

The Pentagon, which spends millions on intelligence gathering and assessment, failed to adequately warn the President of the collapse of South Viet Nam's armed forces.

Certainly there are many commendable Government operations. But more and more clumsy, insensitive acts by bureaucracies crowd the news.

These huge assemblies of people seem to drift farther from the national interest toward the preservation of their special worlds.

There are 2,710,536 federal civilian employees in this country, a vast pool of talent (13% of the permanent employees have graduate schooling) that seems to decline in its ability to innovate as the problems and bureaucracy grow. Government employees are the single largest salaried group in the U.S. In many ways they are better paid and more secure in their jobs than their counterparts in the private economy. The men and women in Washington (341,181 civilians, 62,133 military) are exceptionally well-housed, well-vacationed and well-pensioned; their leaders are chauffeured in some 800 finely tuned automobiles. In the Library of Congress there are 320 miles of shelves containing the wisdom and experience of civilization, and 4,200 people to help the rest of us get what we need out of 16 million books and 58 million other items. But right now at least, there are not many people who seem to know what to do with it all.

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