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Analyzing Robert E. Cushman's study within the context of the Brownlow Report substantiates the argument that the immediate failure of the committee's recommendations-and their influence in the longer term-is best explained within the conceptual framework of changing political orders in American political development. Seventy years later, the field has the historical perspective to see that the committee's work was buffeted by tensions between competing political orders. Today, far from being just an interesting episode in American public administration, we see that the Brownlow Committee's work on regulation, as much as work on executive organization, heralded and enabled a new era of presidential administration.
One of the most recognized themes of the final report of the President's Committee on Administrative Management is that the president needs help (1937, 5). The committees authors, however, focused on more than just the presidency. For the president to manage the government in die most efficient and effective capacity, the executive branch had to become manageable. In October 1935, Louis Brownlow proposed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt a study on administrative management. Twenty-diree years later, Brownlow recalled his justification for diis landmark investigative study: "What is needed is a careful study of the managerial and administrative relationships of the President to all the far flung and complicated agencies of the Federal government" (1958, 334). The committee's focus was on the president as manager and on the "farflung" agencies that he was responsible for within the executive branch.
The members and staff of the Brownlow Committee, especially Robert Cushman, argued that independent regulatory commissions hindered executive branch management in the most damaging of ways. They labeled them a "headless, fourth branch of the Government" (1937, 40). Robert Cushman's study, titled The Problem of the Independent Regulatory Commissions, supported the committee's recommendations in the final analysis. Cushman argued that independent regulatory commissions conflicted directly with the president's ability to provide executive leadership in the coordination of his policy agenda. According to Cushman, the commissions were independent centers of "substantial powers and policy-determination" (220). Quite simply, President Roosevelt's expanded economic intervention conflicted with die independent commissions' separate impact on the economy, and this, for the administration, was a crisis of gargantuan proportion. Thus, as much as any other dilemma of administrative management, Roosevelt...