Hoover Commission

Yeah, exactly.

So these efforts to promote business thinking to improve efficiency and cost saving in the US military received a major boost with the 1947 Hoover Commission, which you describe as a watershed moment when the newly transformed military establishment embraced business management as a core model for its operations.

What was the Hoover Commission, and what were some of its recommendations?

The Hoover Commission was this big investigation charged by Congress about reforming the executive branch.

It was part of this longer, broader tradition of government reform.

It was about more than just its avowed purpose of practical improvements, right? It was part of this partisan political theater of tarring your opponent's administration with charges of waste and bloated government.

But what distinguishes it in this story is how it fits in the recognition after World War II that the national security state in the making is something unique in scale and scope.

So just as Congress and military leaders were drafting the blueprints for the emerging Cold War national security state, the Hoover Commission brought in this team of corporate executives and management consultants to advise on what to do with the Pentagon.

And I'm your professor, Lindsey Cormack.

There were actually two iterations of the Hoover Commission, one under President Truman in 1947, and then a second under President Eisenhower in 1953.

Recommendations from these particular efforts led to legislation that consolidated several offices and created new major federal entities, such as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which was then later decoupled into separate entities, again for government efficiency.

In other words, these efforts and some others to make government more efficient leave behind real lasting change.

Yet other efforts at various times before and after the Hoover Commissions have made a lot of noise and left the government worse off.

The full history is far too dense for us to get into today.

So today, as Greg said, we're gonna focus on more recent history to understand how we might actually fix some of our broken things and tame our vast federal bureaucracy.

It's not a partisan statement.