The National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) was created under the provisions of the Executive Reorganization Act of 1939. The successor to the 1933-34 National Planning Board, the 1934-35 National Resources Board, and the 1935-39 National Resources Committee, the NRPB reflected the desire of President Franklin
D. RooSEVELT to enhance the policy planning and coordination capacity of the PRESIDENCY as part of the New Deal. The NRPB developed a far-reaching liberal postwar program for the nation, though one that found little support among the public and much opposition in Congress, which killed the agency in 1943.
The several predecessors of the NRPB had been concerned primarily about the nation’s resources, especially land and water resources. The NRPB quickly took on a far larger agenda, and building on some of the work of the National Resources Committee focused more broadly on social and economic conditions and policy. With the beginning of World War II in Europe in 1939, the NRPB became the Roosevelt administration’s principal agency for domestic postwar planning, and it produced a series of wide-ranging studies and reports.
Most important among the NRPB’s reports were two that Roosevelt transmitted to Congress in March 1943 and that embodied the development of liberal policy ideas in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The first, Security, Work, and Relief Policies, which had largely been completed by December 1940, was based primarily on late 1930s fears of a chronically depressed economy with high levels of unemployment. It called especially for comprehensive expansion of government public assistance, work RELlEf, and social insurance programs to ensure minimal economic security for all Americans.
The second, more important, and more recently developed report, Post-War Plan and Program, reflected the remarkable wartime expansion of the economy and the related acceptance by liberals of Keynesianism, which stressed the importance of government fisCAL policy for economic prosperity. This second report called for the government to ensure full employment in a “dynamic expanding economy” with “increasingly higher standards of living.” It also contained the basis of the Economic Bill of Rights that Roosevelt would propose in 1944. Together, the two reports urged a much-enlarged government role in ensuring full-employment prosperity, rising living standards, and economic security.
Though reflecting expansive new wartime hopes and aims of liberalism, the NRPB reports generated little support among an indifferent public enjoying wartime prosperity and focusing on the war. Rather, the reports encountered active opposition in the conservative coalition that controlled the Congress after the election of 1942. As a result, the NRPB reports stood no real chance of implementation, were buried by Congress, and quickly faded from public view. Congress, as part of its effort to curb the power of the executive branch and to roll back New Deal programs that seemed unnecessary or vulnerable, terminated the agency a few months after its two landmark reports were made public.
Despite its relatively short career, however, the NRPB was an important agency. Its recommendations reflected the changing liberal program of the war years, especially the new importance of Keynesian fiscal policy to underwrite full-employment prosperity. Its demise reflected the more conservative atmosphere on the World War II home fRoNT and the augmented power of conservatives in Congress. And although its proposals generally went unfulfilled in the short run, it provided an agenda for postwar liberalism and played a significant role in the development of the GI Bill of Rights enacted in 1944 and of the Full Employment Bill proposed in 1945.
Further reading: Patrick D. Reagan, Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890-1943 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); Philip W. Warken, A History of the National Resources Planning Board, 1933-1943 (New York: Garland, 1979).
World History
