218 Broader Bases for Choice: The Next Key Move 



while there is a prevailing, benign conviction that agencies working in 

 the same vineyard should co-ordinate their work, it is not clear that 

 the social benefit of such efforts, particularly in peripheral fields, will 

 exceed the costs. As Meyerson and Banfield have pointed out in the 

 housing field, taking account of all possible effects upon other activi- 

 ties may not only be tremendously costly but may paralyze the agency 

 or hold it in a narrow, unimaginative pattern. ^'^ The point is that there 

 is pitifully little evidence as to the influence of different organizational 

 arrangements upon the landscape and the economy. 



Why has the formal co-ordination among federal and federal-state 

 agencies been usually meager? The many efforts at interagency co-ordi- 

 nation either among federal agencies or between federal and state 

 agencies in resources development have yielded a relatively sparse 

 harvest of landscape changes. One of the earlier agents for such col- 

 laboration — the National Forest Reservation Commission — shortly 

 became, in effect, a branch of the Forest Service. Federal agency par- 

 ticipation in the Federal Power Commission activities became largely 

 perfunctory. Neither the Department of Agriculture nor the Depart- 

 ment of the Interior managed to sustain the formal co-ordinating 

 offices which flourished for periods of a few years. The national and 

 drainage basin committee set up by the National Resources Planning 

 Board helped educate their members to deal with more complex 

 issues and prevented much friction which otherwise would have been 

 acute in the burgeoning developments of the thirties. But with the 

 exception of the interagency drainage basin committee, they did not 

 survive agency and Congressional opposition. 



While there are many instances of conscientious representatives 

 working together to exchange information and to reduce the intensity 

 and rancor of conflicts stemming from agency rivalry or inconsistent 

 policy, it is difficult to find instances of major new policies or pro- 

 grams which have flowed from those efforts. They may be regarded as 

 faciHtating services whose rnore lasting benefits showed in broadened 

 outlook and co-operative action on the part of numerous members of 

 agency staffs. The marked trend in river basin studies is away from 

 the administrative complexity of joint efforts of the Arkansas-White- 



'" Martin Meyerson and Edwin C. Banfield, Politics, Planning and the Public 

 Interest (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1955), pp. 320-22. 



