242 The Federal Responsibility for Leadership 



agree or disagree with minorities that get their hands on the controls. 

 It is just as unheahhy for a democracy to have public policy too largely 

 influenced by small groups of self-appointed saviors and guardians as 

 it is to have such policy disproportionately determined by small groups 

 directly interested economically in resources development. Each of 

 these groups has a necessary contribution to make, but the real test of 

 progress in our attention as a nation to resources conservation and 

 development is the extent to which we can succeed in involving larger 

 groups of the population in this important area of public policy. 



There is a recent tendency to go along tacitly with the organiza- 

 tional confusion and increasing overlapping which has characterized 

 efforts at resources conservation and development over the years. This 

 is alarming. There is too much of an acceptance of our long-standing 

 troubles in the resources field that result from lack of organizational 

 soundness. I sense some of this in Mr. White's paper. 



Without some fundamental reorganization there can be no basis for 

 intelligent national policy, for involvement of the public at large, and 

 for fixing responsibility in a democracy as it needs to be fixed. 



The creation of the Department of Defense has not solved the prob- 

 lem of organization for national defense. But it has at least provided 

 a start for making some of the most important choices clearer. We 

 may not have been able to identify all the choices clearly enough and 

 some decisions may have been questionable, but I don't think that 

 most people would advocate a return to the previous situation as a 

 solution to our problems. 



Yet, at the federal level, we have actually done little to rationalize 

 the growing but scattered resources functions in water, land, min- 

 erals, etc. 



In water resources, we have actually retrogressed from the achieve- 

 ments of 1920, when the Federal Power Act became law. From an 

 interagency committee designed to co-ordinate river basin develop- 

 ment, the Federal Power Commission was later converted to a regu- 

 latory and planning agency. I know that there were reasons for the 

 change about ten years later, but the fact remains that little has been 

 done to pick up the threads and go forward. Some moves were made 

 to broaden the base of the Interior Department by moving some addi- 

 tional resources functions into the Department and by taking less re- 



