Government Reform Before DOGE: NPRG and the Hoover Commission

Greg Jackson (0:01)

This is Rewind.

Lindsey Cormack (0:03)

Rewind.

Greg Jackson (0:07)

It's around 11 o'clock in the morning, September 29th, 1947 We're inside a stately meeting room at the White House, where at least 11 of 12 men have gathered to be sworn in to a government commission. President Harry Truman, a Democrat, welcomes this bipartisan group of six Democrats and six Republicans. Two from the House of Representatives, two from the Senate, two from the Executive Branch, in this case, the Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, and Arthur S. Fleming of the US Civil Service Commission, and six private citizens. The stakes for this commission are high. They're charged with taming a bloated federal bureaucracy. See, two years earlier, in May 1945, six weeks into Harry's presidency, he sent Congress a blunt message. The machinery of the Executive Branch had grown so fast to fight World War II that nobody was quite sure how to run it in peacetime. Congress took several months to agree, but that December, it handed him limited authority under the Reorganization Act of 1945 Signing the bill into law on December 20th, Harry released a statement. It begins with, under the authority of the act, I shall undertake a systematic review of the government agencies with a view to regrouping their functions in the most efficient and economical manner, and abolishing such functions or agencies as may not be necessary. But just one year later, in 1946, voters enduring meat shortages and runaway prices in the still recovering post-war economy became impatient with this reform effort. They took it out on Harry Truman's party at the ballot box in the November midterm election, handing Republicans full control of Congress for the first time since the 1928 election. Before the Great Depression and before the New Deal answered that crisis with its own wave of new federal agencies.

And the new Republican majority did have an answer on prices and the controls.

The shortages, they argued, came from the federal price ceilings themselves. Nobody sells at a loss.

So, come March 1947, the Senate voted to abolish the Office of Price Administration and what was left of the wartime control agencies outright. One vote, two goals. For these Republicans, shrinking the government was the price policy.

Come 1947, two of the loudest voices of that critique were Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and Republican Congressman Clarence Brown. Together, these men wrote a bill ordering a sweeping independent audit of Truman's own executive branch. And here's the part that went unsaid.

Plenty of Republicans expected this commission to hand its findings to the next president. A Republican one. Harry Truman was polling like a man who wouldn't survive 1948 And the report wasn't due until after that election. Harry signed the bill anyway on July 7th, 1947, handing his political opponents a license to go digging through his own administration. Bill co-sponsor Clarence Brown is among the commission's members.

As is a bespectacled, heavy set 72-year-old Republican who, 14 years earlier, left office as one of the most unpopular presidents in American history. Herbert Hoover. Of all the names in this group, his is maybe the most surprising. We're just shy of two decades since the Great Depression started, and a lot of people put the blame for the crash squarely on Herbert's shoulders. His name became attached to some of the period's worst times, like the tent encampments of many homeless Americans dubbed Hoovervilles. And yet, here he is, called back to public service. And that brings us back to our room in the White House on September 29th, 1947

President Harry Truman opens the meeting himself. By most accounts, something close to a pep talk before getting to the day's housekeeping business. Then Congressman Clarence Brown puts a name forward for Chairman, Herbert Hoover. I can only imagine that this raises a few eyebrows, but it carries unanimously and without much debate. Because by Herbert's own later account, this was actually settled months ago. Congressional leaders came to him that spring, telling him the bill was stuck unless someone agreed to chair it. And he said yes on one condition, no report until after the 1948 election. Yes, Herbert has just agreed to lead what we might call today a Department of Government Efficiency.

The Hoover Commission, as it's known, was officially called the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, or COEB, or COEB, which isn't as catchy as 2025's Doge. You see, as a consequence of the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s, the US federal government had grown exponentially to respond to those incredible challenges. If you'd like to learn more about those periods, I'd invite you to check out my other podcast, History That Doesn't Suck. But today, we're focused on more recent history of government bureaucracy reform and attempts to make it more efficient. Every generation of leaders inherits a government that feels too slow, too wasteful, or too tangled up in its own rules. The desire to tame the beast is nothing new, but it's an incredibly hard task. Welcome to Government That Doesn't Suck. I'm your professor, Greg Jackson.