Co-ordinating the War on Poverty

As originally planned, the war on poverty was to be co-ordinated at the Washington level by the Office of Economic Opportunity and in each community by a community-action agency (CAA). But neither institution succeeded in that purpose: Sargent Shriver chose to make OEO an operating rather than a co-ordinating agency; in the communities, the CAA's lacked the power to enforce co-ordination among community institutions and, in any case, like OEO, became absorbed in operating programs—and sometimes in organizing protest. To fill the vacuum, the federal government created a new co-ordinating structure for urban programs—Model Cities—that has proved successful to a promising degree. The federal government needs to conceive a single system for co-ordination of intergovernmental programs, extending from the Executive Office of the President to the neighborhood. In the cities, it should be built upon the Model Cities mechanism; in nonurban areas, upon multicounty organizations created by the states. The entire system should be overseen by a unit of the Executive Office of the President, created or designated for that purpose. It should have regional staff that would, among other things, develop their roles in the intergovernmental system on an individualized basis with the states.