Friday, March 31, 2017

Government Reorg: Nixon and Taft

A nice recap of past efforts to reorganize the goverment here.at the Monkey Cage by Andrew Rudalevige

I've a particular fondness for the Nixon effort, but hadn't known about Taft's effort (William Howard, that is). Why fondness for Nixon, a man good liberals loved to hate?  May have written this before, but my boss at ASCS was able to get the Directives Branch into IBM MT/ST's (Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriters) fairly early.  Somehow the people at the White House learned about the capability, and we were drafted into typing and retyping a document for the proposal.  IIRC it was 100-200 pages, describing the reorganization of cabinet offices into four big departments.  Very hush-hush, and something of a let-down when it fizzled.  I wrote "we"--actually at the time we had two male typists, both good, but who soon left, one for the Army, the other for greener pastures.

Anyhow, the lessons of history do not portend great success for Mr. Kushner.

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