0.3 Knowledge for governance: social science perspectives on science  (Page 9/10)

The evolution of the Bureau of the Budget (BoB, which became the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, in 1974) provides an example of the increasing complexity of the federal government. Percival Brundage, The Bureau of the Budget (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970). Prior to 1921, the president did not submit a consolidated budget to the Congress. Instead, individual cabinet departments and independent agencies submitted their own budget proposals directly to relevant congressional committees. In 1921, Congress created the Bureau of the Budget within the Treasury Department as a means of encouraging the preparation and submission of a more coordinated, consolidated budget. With the rapid expansion of federal emergency agencies during the first years of the New Deal, the organizational position of BoB within one of several cabinet departments made the federal budget process increasingly inefficient.

One of the key recommendations of the Committee on Administrative Management was that BoB should become one of three agencies within a newly created Executive Office of the President (EoP) and thus in close proximity to the president himself. As it turned out, the refashioned BoB was to become not only a presidential budget tool but also the arbiter and enforcer of presidential policies throughout his government.

Although the report had nothing to say about the role of research within the federal government and therefore cannot be regarded as a precursor of attempts to create a consistent government science policy, it helped set the stage in two ways: it recognized sound data as essential for governance; and it led to the creation of the Executive Office of the President, the organizational home of several World War II emergency agencies (including the Office of Scientific Research and Development, headed by Vannevar Bush), which eventually would house several incarnations of a presidential science advisory system.

The seeds for that study were sown in November 1933 by the three-member National Planning Board—namely, Frederic Delano, Wesley Mitchell, and Charles Merriam. Karl, Executive Reorganization and Reform in the New Deal, op. cit. , 203-04. Each developed his own ideas about national planning, with Merriam developing a concept for a governmental and political plan, which he completed and shared with members of what then was about to become the National Resources Committee. Roosevelt then asked Merriam to prepare a memorandum on the subject, which he did in cooperation with Brownlow. The memorandum eventually led to creation of a report by the Committee on Public Administration of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), which was transmitted to Roosevelt early in 1937. It opened with an introduction by Brownlow on The Purpose of Reorganization: “There is but one purpose, namely, to make democracy work today in our National Government; that is, to make our Government an up-to-date, efficient, and effective instrument for carrying out the will of the Nation. It is for this purpose that the Government needs thoroughly modern tools of management.” Karl, Executive Reorganization and Reform in the New Deal, op. cit. , 229.