Search

This article presents news related to public administration in the U.S., as of April 2001. The rapid proliferation of federally sponsored programs to assist communities in many ways has been accompanied by administrative confusion in Washington and in the communities being helped. The article examines problems of community planning and development. If there is to be a single system of coordination at the community level, embracing the multicounty organizations for non-metropolitan areas and the model cities mechanism for urban programs, then there must be a single point of leadership and coordination in the federal government. The inability of state governments to assume their necessary role in the solution of national problems must itself be recognized as a national problem, and one that must be approached and solved through national action like any other national problem. The article also presents comments on the reorganization plan of 1970 proposed by U.S. President Richard Nixon. Reorganization plan has the merit of ending a prolonged and costly inertia in the development of the presidential office.

This article seeks to explore the validity of the assumptions used by Congress and the Executive Branch in setting organizational criteria to be met by nationally subsidized local and regional nonfederal agencies. Multicounty economic development districts are specifically considered to test the proposition that variations in scale, treated as neutral in designing these units, can have negative effects for both the ability of certain local groups to have their interests represented in district policy and for the implementation of national goals through district programs. The data that are available and inferences which can be drawn from them support the hypothesis. Consequently, if predictable and successful national- local organizational linkages are to be established, efforts are needed to produce an explicit set of testable propositions about the interrelationship of organizational scale, structure, and behavior at the subnational level to performance in the achievement of federally defined values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]