The best known, perhaps, of all these executive planning agencies was the National Resources Planning Board, and, I am sure, you all remember that amazing outfit. Most of them had no statutory authority to engage in planning but they have nevertheless engaged in planning and some of them have completed their plans and are ready to put them into effect whenever the opportunity offers and their plans-mark you-do not exclude road building. Nearly all of this new bureaucracy, nearly all the new agencies representing it, have been busily engaged in post-war planning ever since this war started. These new executive agencies have gone even further than the old ones and they have made orders, directives and proclamations which affect the activity, the industry, the business, and the very life of all the people of this country, and in instance after instance they have done this without any authority of law whatever. Then when the war came, it was necessary for the Congress, as every previous war Congress has had to do, to pass broad war powers acts, and that has resulted in the creation of still more new agencies. The Congress has been able to recapture very little of this usurped authority from the bureaucrats because, until the convening of the 78th Congress, at least, it lacked an independent majority large enough to pass the necessary remedial legislation. He talked at length of the usurpation of power of the executive branch bureaucrats: I simply warn you that unless you insist upon exercising your rights and privileges as citizens of the United States, and unless you are resolved henceforth to keep your own Government and not permit it again to be transferred to the bureaucrats in the executive agencies, the bureaucrats will take over the post-war road building program just as they took over the depression road building program, and you will have another WPA. I am sure I need not explain to you how this was done at one time or how it may be done again. And I say to you that the principal reason why you should do this and do it now is because if you don't do it, these executive agencies will do it for you, just as they did in the days of the WPA. I say to you that it is incumbent upon you to prepare and to formulate your plans now for post-war road construction in cooperation with the Congress, which will enact the basic law under which those plans are to be carried out. You will notice I said the Congress and the country must do this and that I did not say the Government must do it.Many of them (the people) seem to be of the notion that the Government means an administration in power, and particularly the executive agencies of that administration.in my opinion this planning is a job that should be done by the Congress and the country. He stressed the need for programs to transition to peacetime activity: He said that he had a prepared speech on what they (AASHO) ought to do about post-war planning but decided not to give it and proceeded extemporaneously. Congressman Mott, Oregon, a member of the House Committee on Roads also addressed the Convention and had a lot to say about the invasion of the Congress's authority by the Executive Branch and of the demise of the National Resources Planning Board.
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