The Administrative Conference of the United States

The Administrative Conference Act of 1964 was finally implemented in early 1968. It creates an unusual body consisting of an official chairman, a ten-man governing council composed half of government officials and half of private per sons, and an assembly of about eighty, of which about two- fifths are private individuals and three-fifths government offi cials. Its work is done under the chairman's direction by part- time consultants, processed through an appropriate committee of the membership, reviewed by the council, and acted upon by the assembly. The conference recommendations are advisory only. The conference has produced some 31 recommendations. About a third have related to minor items of housekeeping or to narrow and hardly disputable topics. The remaining two- thirds, with two or three overambitious exceptions, have repre sented in the consultants' work a substantial contribution to scholarship and, as or when adopted by the agencies or the Congress, a significant advance in the fairness and efficiency of government. In greatly oversimplified terms, perhaps a quarter of the conference recommendations, although only advisory in nature, have been put into effect and another half of them are in one stage or another of adoption. This is a good record for the first three-and-a-half years of the conference and suggests that, although its structure looks odd, it is well adapted to its task.