The Executive Reorganization Act, passed in April 1939, authorized the creation of the Executive Office of the President, to include six presidential assistants. It also enabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt to transfer the Bureau of the Budget to the Executive Office, to establish the National Resources Planning Board within the Executive Office, and to create a liaison officer for personnel management to enlarge the president’s control over the federal bureaucracy. Reflecting Roosevelt’s desire to streamline the executive branch and enable better policy planning and coordination by the White House, the Act was an important step in strengthening and modernizing the presidency.
Yet the Executive Reorganization Act was significantly weaker than the executive reorganization bill Roosevelt had sent to Congress in January 1937, and it thus marked not only a significant milestone in the development of the presidency but also a compromise reflecting the vicissitudes of Roosevelt’s second term. Wanting to improve the administrative and management capacity of the presidency as the federal bureaucracy expanded rapidly and often confusingly with the proliferation of New Deal agencies, Roosevelt established the President’s Committee on Administrative Management in 1936. The committee proposed a number of reforms including: expanding the president’s staff; moving the Bureau of the Budget from the Treasury Department to the White House; establishing a powerful planning agency in the executive branch; consolidating the many independent government agencies into 12 cabinet departments reporting directly to the president; reorganizing the civil service and greatly extending the merit system. Taken together, the proposals would not simply have strengthened the executive branch but also would have substantially freed executive reorganization from congressional control and created a far more powerful administrative state controlled by the White House. Some scholars have seen in the executive reorganization bill the central aim of a Third New Deal in which the administration sought to add enhancing the capacity of the executive branch to the First New Deal of 1933 and the Second New Deal of 1935 that had created the modern regulatory welfare state.
But in the political context of Roosevelt’s second term, the executive reorganization bill stood little chance. It was followed soon thereafter by the court-packing plan, which provoked great public and congressional resistance. Together, the two proposals raised the specter among conservatives of dangerous executive aggrandizement at the expense of both the legislative and the judicial branches. As other events of 1937 and 1938 diminished Roosevelt’s influence in Washington and helped create a conservative coalition in Congress, and as the course of Nazi Germany enabled critics to warn of an American dictatorship, the executive reorganization bill encountered growing opposition. In April 1938 the overwhelmingly Democratic House of Representatives defeated the president’s proposal by eight votes. The bill was revived in much weaker form in 1939, lacking such important features as civil service reform and creation of new executive departments, exempting key independent agencies from reorganization, and enabling Congress to veto reorganization plans. The Executive Reorganization Act then won passage in April and took effect July 1, 1939. On September 8, Roosevelt established the Executive Office of the President.
Further reading: Barry D. Karl, Executive Reorganization and Reform in the New Deal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963); Richard Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt's Government: The Controversy over Executive Reorganization, 1936-1939 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966).
World History
