Presidential addresses and state papers, Volume 4 (of 7)

Gentlemen:

I wish to express my very great appreciation of the work that you are doing. It would be a good thing for certain critics of our Government to realize the amount of hard, disinterested work for the Government represented by this gathering to which I am now speaking—a work which must in the immense majority of cases be its own reward, and therefore an ample reward; for there is nothing pleasanter than the consciousness of having done well a bit of work well worth doing.

A year ago I appointed the Keep Commission, because I had become convinced that the business methods of our Government were by no means abreast of the times. While I think there is comparatively little corruption in the National Governmental service, and while that little I intend to cut out or have cut out through other agencies than yours, it yet remains true that there is a good deal of duplication of work, a good deal of clumsiness of work, and above all, the inevitable tendency toward mere bureaucratic methods against which every Government official should be perpetually on his guard—the tendency to regard not the case, but the papers in the case, as the all-important matter with which to deal, and to feel a proud sense of duty performed if all those papers are appropriately docketed and referred and minutes made about them, and then referred back, without regard to what has become of the real fact at issue.

As you are aware, the Keep Commission sent out questions to those responsible for the actual work in all branches of the Government service. Answers were received, or are now being received, to those questions, and they furnish a useful aid to the study by the commission of Governmental conditions. But inevitably in the great majority of cases these answers are inadequate to form a basis for definite recommendations, and of course that is what I want from this commission. I do not want a diagnosis of the case; I want a recommendation how to reach the case. I do not want merely to know that things are bad; I want to know what is bad and what is to be done to make it better, so that if legislation is necessary I can recommend it, or if, as I hope will be true in the enormous majority of cases, the matter can be reached by executive regulation, I can see that that regulation is issued. I want to say right here, gentlemen, that I shall value the reports that I receive largely in proportion as they do not call for legislation. There is nothing easier, as all of you know, than to draw up an elaborate minute to show how well things would go on if some one else did something different. I want you, so far as is possible, to recommend something that I can do, something that the heads of the departments can do, so that we can ourselves put a stop to much at least of the evil that exists, remedy much at least of the shortcomings that exist.

With this in view, a number of assistant committees were appointed, consisting of you gentlemen here, carefully chosen men from the Government service, who are already largely responsible for the efficiency of the work done in your several departments and bureaus. It was a compliment to choose you, gentlemen; though it is one of those compliments that take the form of imposition of additional labor. If you were not of the type that I know you to be it would not be a compliment that would be appreciated. These committees, you gentlemen, have been at work for about a month, and you are taking up your work within your specific fields through study of the data already collected by the Committee on Department Methods, through bringing before you men whose knowledge is of expert value, and above all by a thorough study on the ground by experts (for that is what you are) of the conditions and needs within the departments themselves. I shall not enumerate the different committees. They are now at work. You compose them, gentlemen, and all told they have a membership of about seventy individuals.

As I have said, your particular effectiveness lies in the fact that you are dealing at first hand with work with which you are thoroughly familiar. You are not outsiders. You are not engaged in constructing a parlor theory of how the work should be done; you are engaged in recommendations to better the business which you are yourselves to carry through and see made better when those recommendations have been adopted. You have literally an unparalleled opportunity for useful work. As far as I am aware, there has never before been made in this country, or indeed, in any country, such a comprehensive systematic effort to put the country’s housekeeping in order. I need not say to you that it is urgent. A great deal of our Government work has become proverbial for the red tape involved. Of course much of the outside criticism upon red tape is due to forgetfulness of the fact that you and I are responsible to Congress for every dollar we spend, and for every dollar’s worth of work that we do, while the outsider is responsible only to himself or those interested with him, so that we not only have to do what is right and efficient, but have to be able to show that what we have done is right and efficient; and this inevitably means that there must be certain forms observed which the unthinking outsider is apt to stigmatize as red tape. Nevertheless it is true that there is always a tendency in Government work to run to needless red tape. I asked the Keep Commission, for instance, to take up with particular care, through the Assistant Secretaries of War and the Navy, the burden of paper work resting on the officers of the Army and Navy. I remember very well the pride with which a certain high officer in one of the bureaus in the Navy Department, a good many years ago, told me, pointing to a big case of papers, that in that he could find out through the reports of the officers of each battleship how many bottles of violet ink each captain of a battleship was responsible for. I remarked that I did not care a snap of my finger about the number of bottles of violet ink on the ship, that what I wanted to know was whether the men at the guns could shoot; I did not accept the knowledge of the whereabouts of the violet ink as a substitute for shooting. The paper work must be subordinated in the departments and bureaus to the efficiency of the work itself, keeping only enough of it to make a record of what is done.

Of course it is impossible to set any actual time limit to the work you are doing, but it would be a mighty good thing to inaugurate the next fiscal year by adopting the new policies and methods in the departmental business. I want to assure you of one thing, and that is that your mere appointment has already produced a very marked moral effect. The good results of seventy men studying local methods and local needs on the ground, in the departments, does not lie only in the knowledge gained; you render a great service by making the men with whom you come in contact feel that they actually share in this movement.

The most magnificent architecture that our race has ever been able to produce—the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages—were made, not by any known architect, not even by any number of architects whose names have ever been recorded. We do not know the name of an architect or builder connected with those great masterpieces. Each was made by a number of men, architects and builders, each of whom felt amply rewarded by the mere fact that he was able to put all the best that there was in him into his work. He did not care to have his name known, he did not desire to be immortalized in connection with the work; he cared only to make the work itself the best that it could possibly be made. There never was an army that amounted to anything in campaign or in battle unless the average soldier had in him the spirit which made him regard the winning of the campaign, the winning of the battle, as in itself the end, and his service, if good enough, as in itself the reward. He might wish other rewards if they happened to come; but if they did not, well and good. The doing the duty is of itself a sufficient reward for any man.

So it has to be if the work of the Government is to be really well done. As Ruskin has said, there are two ways of doing work; to work for the fee, for the payment, and to work for the work’s own sake. The work done simply to get money for having done it will never, under any circumstances, rank with the work done by the man whose sense of self-respect, whose capacity for loyalty to an ideal, makes him discontented unless the work that is at his hand is done with all the skill that heart and hand and brain can bring to it.

Of course, gentlemen, when you come to make your recommendations, you will have to deal with broad principles for the conduct of the Government business; but those broad principles must be supported by definite plans ready to be given immediate effect. I believe in broad principles, but I do not want them so broad that they will not apply to any given case. I want a general scheme, but also a way to make that general scheme effective in each department, each bureau, each section and subdivision touched by your committee. I do not want you in any case to recommend a change simply for the sake of making a change; nothing could be more foolish. But never hesitate for a moment in basing your recommendations upon the conditions actually found and the best way to meet them, no matter how radical may be the departure from established methods required. As I have said before, remember that in the vastly larger number of cases the essential need will not be for new legislation, but for better organization and improved methods under existing law. Now and then you will find where there must be a change in law, but the essential thing will be to change methods so that we can better administer the existing law.

There is, however, one fundamental weakness in the Government service which can not be remedied without additional legislation. That weakness lies in the faulty distribution of work among the different departments. It is one of the most serious of all the obstacles to good executive work, to effective work, and to economy in the public service. No matter how well a bureau or division may be organized and directed, you can not get the best work out of it unless it is associated with, and co-operating with, the other bureaus and divisions which are engaged in cognate lines of work and with which it naturally belongs. Good teamwork is as much needed in the executive civil service as it can possibly be anywhere else. And it is the only way to prevent duplication of work. Your own work is most important, but it covers only half of the field. To put the departments on the best and most economical working basis the President, as I have already recommended, should be given power to transfer any part of the work of a department to another department, as was done in the case of the Department of Commerce and Labor.

In closing I wish to say a word of acknowledgment of the public-spirited and most valuable co-operation of the American Association of Public Accountants, which has been promised to the Committee on Department Methods. I wish to thank them, and I wish to thank you, gentlemen, for the invaluable work that you are doing.