¹ There has been a spate of Valley Authority proposals incorporated in bills presented for congressional consideration in which many variants on the TVA pattern have been made. It will be impossible to consider them here, but most of their features have been digested (down to the end of 1946) in two articles: (1) by Wesley Clark in this Review, Vol. 40, pp. 62 ff. (February, 1946), and (2) by Greenleaf, Robert in the Iowa Law Review, Vol. 32, pp. 339 ff. (January, 1947)Google Scholar.

² We need not take the town of Norris as the typical TVA contribution. It was an expensive, permanent town, whose cost was not repeated elsewhere. More characteristic was the construction town for Fontana Dam, where acceptable, portable, temporary houses were used for that portion of the town that would shrink when construction was finished. The amenities furnished there give the kind of example which has beneficially influenced the Corps and the Bureau.

³ Selznick, Philip, TVA and the Grass Roots (Berkeley, 1949)Google Scholar.

⁴ The Federal Power Commission determines the rates, as it also allocates the joint costs among the several purposes on the Army built dams, and approves the power facilities to be installed in structures built by the latter agency. It has no comparable rate making or cost allocating functions for river projects built by the Bureau of Reclamation. This difference in jurisdiction is an accident of history and makes no sense in river system planning and control.

⁵ Four of the TVA owned tributary dams and one of the main river dams were acquired by purchase from the Tennessee Electric Co., when that system was purchased.

⁶ The operating crews at the dams are in respect to other matters under the direction of the Power Manager.

⁷ In the arid West there are some small streams or tributaries where the principal source of flood waters is snow melt and where the soil texture is such that good watershed management could probably greatly reduce or, in some cases, might eliminate spring floods.

Soil permeability in these arid regions, increased by good vegetal cover, might care for all or part of a local flood menace. Similarly, restoration of vegetal cover on the mountain meadows of the inter-mountain region, and the brush covered slopes of the mountains in Southern California would prevent the mud-rock flows that have cursed the towns and villages along the Wasatch front, in Southern Utah, and some of the Southern California cities, when heavy rainstorms descend in fury on these localized areas.

⁸ On the Columbia River system no recent or adequate siltation studies exist, but such evidence as is available (as assembled by Consulting Engineer John Stevens for the Corps of Engineers at the time of the construction of Bonneville Dam) indicates no siltation danger to the main river structures. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that in the inter-mountain basins, in the southwest river systems and on some of the streams of the southeast, siltation is a very real menace to the longevity of river projects and the perpetuation of irreplaceable dam sites.

⁹ See Selznick, op. cit., pp. 124 ff.

¹⁰ See Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, Department of the Interior (Washington, 1949), pp. 69 ff.Google Scholar

¹¹ Of course one of the eight Interior agencies, Indian Affairs, would be transferred out of the resource Departments.

¹² Interior created six field committees—plus one for Alaska—in August, 1948, and named a secretarial representative as chairman for each. Information on which this discussion is based is drawn from the experience of the structure for the Pacific Northwest. Secretary Brannan has also recently selected a third regional representative to cover the Southwest, with headquarters at Salt Lake City.

¹³ During the first two years of the oldest of these regional coordination efforts, that in the Pacific Northwest, the Secretary had no representative. It was the committee alone which was charged with coordinating responsibility, but it leaned heavily upon the suggestions and staff assistance of an Executive Director. The latter's position was highly anomalous because of his staff tie to the Secretary's Washington office and his subordinate status to the Field Committee as its employee. This situation was cleared late in 1948 when the Executive Director was appointed permanent chairman of the committee and as the Secretary's representative reported to Washington through the Departmental Program Committee Chairman.

¹⁴ In Interior bureaus have responded, albeit reluctantly, in a number of important instances during the past four years. The highly centralized and nonregionalized Bureau of Mines has at last regionalized and clothed its regional chiefs with real power. The Office of Indian Affairs has been moving in the same direction since late in 1946 and is making genuine headway toward a responsible, decentralized field structure. The Bureau of Land Management, through new leadership in Washington and in the field, has in the past two years rapidly pushed forward into an active decentralized land management organization. The Bureau of Reclamation burst the bonds of the Chief Engineer at Denver during the War, and it has continued to feed to the regional and district Engineers more and more power to plan and carry through their irrigation functions.

¹⁵ Reorganization Plans Numbers 3 and 4, submitted to Congress on March 13, 1950, incorporate the Hoover Commission policy for giving the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture responsibility for all programs, with minor exceptions, in their respective departments. The Congress permitted the Interior plan to become law, but the Senate vetoed the plan for Agriculture. It can only be a matter of time before the latter Department will be accorded the same treatment as Interior.

¹⁶ See also Hart's, Henry evaluation of the Missouri River Basin Committee in Public Administration Review, Vol. 8, pp. 1–11 (Winter, 1948)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Some of these complexities might be avoided under a more revolutionary revision of the departmental system than has been suggested in any of the official reorganizations thus far proposed. Were the national executive departments regrouped into a handful of super-departmental units, similar to that modelled for Defense, the whole range of resource functions now scattered in three departments might be combined into another super-cabinet unit—perhaps called by some such title as Agriculture and Natural Resources. As in the case of the military model, such a department would need three or four sub-departments charged with management of clusters of operating bureaus or Services. (Dean Samuel T. Dana, of the Hoover Commission Task Force on Natural Resources, was in favor of uniting Agriculture and Interior under a new title of “Department of Conservation.”) This idea has some resemblance to the Departments of Conservation adopted in a number of states for unifying resource work, but the states have not usually included the agricultural duties, which remain with the land grant colleges and the state Departments of Agriculture.

Were a new design adopted, embodying the larger aggregation notion suggested above, it might be justified on the ground that it would reduce the “span of control” strain upon the President and his management staff. It would, however, raise questions of presidential control because of the increased political power centering around such huge departments. Certainly the use of such a principle should be applied throughout the whole executive establishment, if it is applied at all, or difficult “imbalances” would result to the detriment of presidential influence. Unless and until a plan is adopted which would subsume all the Federal resource functions under a single great department, we shall have to rely upon a field representative from the President's office for bringing all resource programs into proper focus within the several regions.