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Howard Phillips? Sure. But Donald Rumsfeld was who I had in mind. Both Rumsfeld and Phillips pushed system and econ analysis at OEO to kill it. Under Rumsfeld the OEO staff in PPB (policy planning and budgets?) blossomed. But Rumsfeld was moved out and Phillips took over in 1972(?)
After Phillips resigned, Nixon `federalized' OEO, meaning of course the opposite, which was to break up the DC central offices and distribute parts out to regional offices where they were supposed to die under states rights control.
Anyway the real surprise for me was the answer to the second question, who ran the economic program evaluation office in HEW and helped to effectively killed the community action projects in OEO? The answer to that question was Alice Rivlin. I like to think of her as Alice the Axe.
On how to kill poverty programs via economic analysis and oversight of quantifiable outcomes, O'Connor writes:
By 1968, a congressional study found that only three of sixteen agencies had made `substantial progress' towards implementing the system.' [The PPBS system was the DoD/RAND program evaluation system to set goals, define objectives and develop planned programs for meeting objectives]. Within a few years, close observers were sounding the death knell of PPBS. Nevertheless, the brief era entrenched in key areas of domestic policy making, and nowhere more firmly than in the two government institutions that would play the most central role in shaping the course of poverty research: OEO's office of RPP&E and HEW's office of Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE). For economist Alice Rivlin, who succeeded defense analyst William Gorham as director of ASPE, PPB's `most important effect was the creation of an analytical staff at the department level, which brought into the Secretary's office a group of people who were trained to think analytically and whose job it was to improve the process of decision making'. These were the very people who as part of the expanding federal research bureaucracy, would introduce the protocols of systems analysis to poverty research. (175p, Poverty Knowledge, O'Connor A.)
So, as it turned out lowly CG (me) was actually given the duty of writing and implementing some of these ASPE mandated evaluation procedures for student service delivery in an OEO project at UCB for disabled students.
The PPBS system (noted above) required a clear statement of achievable objectives directly referencing the project proposal narrative and a division of the funding period into man-months, man-weeks, man-days, man-hours. The objectives were to be accomplished in the time funded by their requisite percentage of man-hour-dollars allocated in the project grant. The whole thing absolutely smacked of Pentagon bullshit.
It is fascinating to read O'Connor's history of the institutional swings from above. The way these appeared from below was weird and disconnected from the reality of concrete program needs.
The effects of the fed administrative changes went from here's some money go out and do something, to we gave you money now what did you do with it? So we went from being mandated to change the UC system, to justifying our existence. From funding empowerment to funding paranoia.
The only reason we escaped the first few rounds of cutbacks and re-organizations was because our project was part of the Trio Programs Special Services, Upward Bound, and Headstart. Nixon couldn't get rid of Headstart, so he `federalized' it and expected them all to die of starvation under the states. Most programs in the south and rural states did. We lucked out because region nine offices were in SF, about a thirty minute drive away, and our program officer liked us.
While the old OEO was gone, the Trio Programs lived on, except one critical piece, Upward Bound. This was a summer project to get poor students up to speed in the last two years of high school so they could get into a college---where our level of support services would help sustain them. Over about a five year period starting with the last of the Johnson administration DC staff through the Nixon changes the Trio Programs ossified in place and turned into dead projects still running under fixed budgets, where they could idle on into oblivion.
These Riviln econometric styled evaluation systems had the effect of petrified momentum for change, and transformed most of the program motivation into developing various justification schemes for survival. It was quite effective. Since she and others worked at the HEW level, these program evaluation schemes were instituted across the whole social welfare state spectrum.
In the larger view, the same sort of emphasis on program evaluation was and is being put to use to attack the whole range of public education and public services. You simply evaluate them all to death.
For example public school teachers now have to justify their existence in one bullshit evaluation methodology after another. Federal and state public funding distributed under program evaluation and review is now used as a preferred means to kill the public sector. The need to develop endless variations on evaluation methods spawned a whole industry of poverty, education, and welfare evaluation experts.
Of course programs to change the poor have failed, because their problems are not social, psychological, cultural or physical---their problems are economic, they have no money. So, if there is no change in the systemic production of income inequality, nothing else changes..
Under the reign of Neoliberal orthodoxy, free market growth lifts all boats. Therefore, those left behind must have only themselves to blame, and therefore they need social, psychological, cultural or physical rehabilitation programs to change themselves so they will be fit for the rigors of the free market economic system. On the other hand, the free market system based on competition naturally and always produces winners and losers. But on this round, losers are lower income by economic design. So which is it? Losers are produced by economic design, or losers are produced by their own social, psychological, cultural, or physical unfitness?
CG