The Administration: Stretching the Limbs

When a Man has Married a Wife, he finds out whether

Her knees & elbows are only glewed together.

—William Blake

The states and cities, indissolubly wedded to the Great Society, have discovered to their chagrin that most of its distributive mechanisms—its knees and elbows—are glued together by a welter of rigid and overlapping legislation.

Never has federal money been more available to communities—and seldom has the source been harder to crack. Five separate agencies subsidize sewage treatment, three programs cater to the needs of deaf children, 30 aid training for teachers. Confusion about where to get what has brought forth so many catalogues that the Administration is preparing a Catalogue of Catalogues.

Of the nearly $15 billion spent annually in 400 federal domestic programs, 70% is handled by state and local governments. To lubricate the process, Lyndon Johnson decided to form and send throughout the U.S. a task force of high federal officials directly involved in making his programs work.

Ridiculous Details. The team is led by a former Governor of Florida, genial Farris Bryant, 52, who is the director of the Office of Emergency Planning but serves also as Johnson's chief engineer and evangelist of creative federalism. Last week federal men boarded one of the President's Boeing 707 jetliners, touched down in Washington State and Alaska to meet firsthand with their state counterparts. So far, the task force of better than a score of federal officials has visited 19 states. The problems they have encountered have been as diverse as America itself.

In Alaska, the federal men were barraged with complaints about restrictions hampering sea imports to the state. In Washington State, officials heatedly complained to the visitors that announcement of a new federal power plant for Grand Coulee Dam caught the state by surprise—and wholly unprepared to provide the needed roadways.

Still in the 1800s. At earlier meetings, Johnson's flying squad heard Maryland officials complain about book-thick federal regulations, going into such "ridiculous" detail as one by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare demanding that nursing homes have doors exactly 4 ft. 2 in. wide. In Kansas, Superintendent of Motor Vehicles L. A. Billings railed against a flood of complicated directives on highway safety: "We have your 13 directives—any one of which would take five years to implement. And you want us to tell you how we'll meet them in one month."

Bryant and his team kept their cool. "Well," one of them admitted, "there is a lack of coordination and coherence in Washington. This is why we're here, isn't it?"