232 Can We Still Afford a Separate Resources Policy? 



natural resource policies and their reconciliation with fiscal and for- 

 eign policies. To realize this will require a major governmental reor- 

 ganization such as Arthur Smithies has proposed in his study of The 

 Budgetary Process in the United States.'^ On the President's side alone, 

 Smithies' proposals involve the Bureau of the Budget, the National 

 Security Council, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the Treas- 

 ury. Moreover, his sweeping procedural reforms, as he recognizes, will 

 be unavailing unless the prestige of the Bureau of the Budget can be 

 greatly enhanced so that men will not place a higher value on being 

 undersecretary of the Treasury or of State or vice-president of the 

 International Bank than they do on being Director of the Budget. Yet 

 even Smithies does not make it clear that his reforms really depend 

 for their success upon fundamental political change (the need and 

 hence, perhaps, the possibility for which were not so clear when he 

 wrote). 



The nature and extent of the necessary political changes are sug- 

 gested by Samuel H. Beer's analysis of British Treasury Control.^ "In 

 American government [Beer writes] there is nothing really compara- 

 ble to the most important form of treasury control, the requirement of 

 prior approval." He refers to a governmental process which authori- 

 tatively weighs the claims of public health against those of agriculture, 

 of education against transportation, of defense against social services. 

 In his final chapter. Beer tries to explain why Treasury control is 

 effective. He cites a number of reasons: the standards of the civil 

 service, the effect of the plural executive, and the authority of the 

 Chancellor of the Exchequer. The last two clearly imply that disci- 

 plined agreements are reached, based upon a concert of power within 

 the government. Without this Britain could not achieve Treasury con- 

 trol, and without something like it we will not attain its equivalent. 



4 New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955, esp. Chap. X. 



5 Oxford University, England (Clarendon Press, 1957). 



