COMMISSION ON ORGANIZATION OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH OF THE GOVERNMENT (Water Resources and Power Report) Part 5-Muscle Shoals, Ala. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 1955 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SPECIAL SUBCOMMITTEE ON WATER RESOURCES AND POWER The special subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, in the Chemical Engineering Building, Tennessee Valley Authority, Muscle Shoals, Ala., at 10 a. m., Hon. Robert E. Jones, Jr. (chairman of the special subcommittee) presiding. Members present: Representatives Robert E. Jones, Jr., Martha W. Griffiths, Henry S. Reuss, and Glenard P. Lipscomb. Also present: William C. Wise, staff director; William L. Sturdevant, professional staff member; Robert Morris; and Orville S. Poland, general counsel, Committee on Government Operations. Mr. JONES. The subcommittee will come to order. This is a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Operations for the purpose of considering the Hoover Commission report on water resources and power and the task force report of the Hoover Commission. The purpose of our meeting in the Muscle Shoals area is to obtain information and comments and the evaluation by the people in the area of the Hoover Commission's various recommendations. I will introduce the members of the subcommittee. On my right is Congressman Reuss, a member from the State of Wisconsin; Congresswoman Griffiths from the State of Michigan, more particularly Detroit. On my left is Congressman Glen Lipscomb, of California. Of course, we are delighted to be here today. We have a long list of witnesses and in order to hear all of the witnesses it is our thought to hold the meeting as long as necessary, late into the afternoon or maybe in the early part of the night. The committee hopes during the course of our stay here, either today or tomorrow, to visit some of the physical properties located in the Muscle Shoals area, particularly the powerhouse and the electrical dispatch area at Wilson Dam, and also some of the chemical operations, if time permits. Our first witness today is the senior Senator from Alabama, Senator Lister Hill, the coauthor of the TVA Act, who, through his vision, foresight, and effort, obtained passage of the TVA Act along with Senator George Norris, with the approval of President Roosevelt. Not only did he sponsor the legislation but he has been its good keeper since that time. Senator, we are delighted to have you here today and to have you review for us your opinions on the Hoover Commission's recommendations which have been submitted to the Congress pursuant to the act of 1953. We are delighted to have you, sir. STATEMENT OF HON. LISTER HILL, A UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF ALABAMA Senator HILL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee. May I express to you my thanks for this opportunity to appear before you? May I also take a moment warmly and heartily to commend you, Mr. Chairman, and the members of this committee, on the fine work you are doing. Just yesterday at Nashville you made a most shocking disclosure, but a most important one-a disclosure that most probably never would have been made, and never would have come to light, but for the work of this committee. I count as one of the great honors and privileges of of my life the fact that I was permitted to serve in the House of Representatives for a good many years, and I know the burdens upon you and the many demands upon your time. I know the needs for you back in your own congressional districts. I think it is a wonderfully fine thing that you should take this time to go all over the country in order to give to the people an opportunity to express their views on this Hoover Commission report, and to bring out the facts which all of the people of the United States should have. May I say this: We of Alabama are awfully proud that the chairman of the committee is our own Bob Jones. Mr. JONES. The Senator always speaks with the voice of authority. Thank you, sir. Senator HILL. Thank you, sir. And speaking with authority, may I say that we in Alabama know how able and how devoted and how tireless and indefatigable Bob Jones always is in working and fighting for the people of this valley, and all the people. His presence here today in bringing his committe here is another evidence of the outstanding and magnificent service that he is rendering as a Congressman from this district, and which he is rendering to the whole United States. Mr. JONES. Thank you very much Senator. Senator HILL. Mr. Chairman and ladies and gentlemen of the committee, last summer when the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government released its report on water resources and power, I scanned it hastily, and leafed through the task force studies on which the Commission's conclusions were reportedly based. I was disappointed and dismayed, if I may say, at the tenor of the documents, but the pressure of business then before the Senate prevented me from making the careful examination of the text and tables which the invitation to appear before your committee prompted. The disappointment I experienced when I examined the material in Washington in June was multiplied upon more thoughtful reading in October here in Alabama. In fact, I have a sense of outrage now for today I am more fully aware of the substance of the documents, the intent of the recommendations. Mr. Chairman, I come before you to say, and with deep regret, that in my judgment the report on water resources and power submitted by the majority of the Commission displays such bias and prejudice, is based on such misleading data and unsupported dogma, is so little informed with a sense of the obligations of public service, that its recommendations as a whole should be rejected by your committee, ignored by the Congress to which the findings were addressed, and repudiated by the public. In reaching this conclusion I have to some extent followed the practice which all of us must adopt when we are confronted with a variety of recommendations affecting many programs concerning which our information may be incomplete. My judgment of the intent of the recommendations in the report as a whole is based on my awareness of the impact of specific proposals on one program-one organization with which I am closely acquainted, concerned with problems with which I am familiar. I have tested the recommendations of the Commission by their effect on TVA. In that context I can judge and there I am not misled by the generalities. I can recognize misstatements about TVA; I can detect prejudice and appraise intent; I can separate the slogans of propaganda from sober comment based on impartial research. My knowledge, may I say, of TVA is not a recent acquisition. I was one of the authors of the legislation creating TVA when it was considered by the Congress in 1933, and a member of the conference committee which adjusted the differences between the Senate and the House before the measure was finally enacted into law. With my colleagues I watched when the President of the United States affixed his signature in approval of the measure, and this great TVA undertaking began. Ever since, first as a member of the committee having jurisdiction over legislation affecting TVA in the House, and in more recent years participating in the annual review of TVA's appropriation requests as a member of the Appropriations Committee in the Senate, I have been concerned with the problems and the progress of TVA. I am the only member of that conference committee of 1933 now a Member of the Congress, the only one who can bear witness now to the way in which an act of faith stands justified by works. For the enactment of the statute creating TVA was an act of faith. We created a new type of agency. For the first time in the history of Federal legislation relating to resource development a single agency in a limited area was told to look at the job as a whole. This had never been done before. Then, as now in other river valleys, the traditional pattern of Federal administration divided responsibility, encouraged jurisdictional rivalry, increased redtape, assured delay and confusion. We are trying to do something about that problem when we created TVA, when we gave one agency control of the whole river system, and directed it to see the river in relation to the total resource base. We made this new agency, as you well know, corporate in form, independent of the centralized departments of the Federal establishment, and we tried to give the Board authority commensurate with its responsibilities, so that its fidelity and competence could be judged by results. We authorized the Board to acquire the land the program required, to purchase its own equipment and to negotiate its contracts. We told the Board to select its own employees and to establish their rates of pay. We wanted the Board to be able to control its costs, manage its schedules, and be itself responsible for all its acts. We permitted TVA to sue and be sued in the courts. We were uneasy then, as now, about the dangers of administrative centralization. We recognized that too many decisions had to be made in Washington by men remote from the problems and far from the people their decisions affected. So we determined that in the case of TVA the power to decide would be placed in the field, here in the valley, and in the law we directed the Board to establish its headquarters away from Washington and in the region it was to serve. All this was new in Federal legislation. We had faith that it would be successful. We had dreams, in a time when dreams were needed, of the benefits that such a program and such an agency might achieve for the people of this region and the Nation. We could not be certain of results, because such a plan, as I said, had never been tried before. We set up objectives in the act and laid down the general policies to be followed, but we did not intend that Congress or other branches of the executive department should interfere with the day-to-day decisions of the management of TVA. One thing we made crystalclear. Like a watermark on every page of the statute, the basic intent of the act is plain. The objective of the TVA was not simply to create a navigation channel, to control the floods of a capricious river, nor to furnish low-cost power to the people. No project and no program was to be considered an end in itself. The objective of the TVA Act was to build a region, to expand the economic opportunities of the people, to the end that the region and the Nation might be stronger and so more free. If we were successful in this area, if this new device for the administration of the Federal functions in the field of resource development proved to be effective, we hoped that other rivers and other regions might reap the benefits of the pioneering program undertaken in this valley. The enactment of the TVA statute was a milestone in Federal-resource legislation. Yet nowhere, no place in the report of this Commission do I find any analysis, or any appraisal of the magnificent record of more than 20 years. Some of the very problems of administration which we were endeavoring to solve when we created TVA are discussed. The Commission deplores the confusion created when a multiplicity of plans with a variety of objectives are presented for the same water resource. (Commission Report, vol. 1, pp. 12, 16, 32–33; see also Task Force Report, vol. 1, pp. 65-74, 186-189, vol. 2, pp. 799800, 826-829.) It recognizes the frustration and the chaos which result when separate agencies, with different objectives, responsible to diverse managements, compete for public support and public funds in the development of the same resource in the same river basin. But no mention is made of the brilliant record of TVA, the single example in the Nation of what can happen when one agency is created to de |