Gail Radford

In The Rise of the Public Authority: Statebuilding and Economic Development in Twentieth-Century America, Gail Radford “examines the early history of these agencies, in order to understand the goals of the people who first proposed them, as well as the political struggles and legal pressures that shaped them in their formation and subsequent evolution” (pg. 1). Her work “is an attempt to understand how and why this institution came into being and took its present form” and she believes “that for engaging today’s policy debates such an understanding is a better starting point than a list of the pros and cons of quasi-public agencies. Any attempt to shift away from our reliance on public authorities must address what it was that led public officials to create these mechanisms in the first place” (pg. 2).

Beginning with William McAdoo and Woodrow Wilson’s Federal Fleet Corporation, Radford writes, “Their basic agenda in this situation was to give government the capacity to perform tasks that they believed private enterprise could not achieve alone” as the initial investment and development of trading relationships required time and expense that most companies were loath to expend (pg. 26). The Land Banks solidified this concept when the Supreme Court agreed that “Congress had the final say on what agencies were needed to carry out its fiscal responsibilities” as “a strong agricultural sector was in the national interest” (pgs. 66-67). By the time of the Great Depression, “the appeal of the government corporation to New Dealers was essentially as an expedient solution by which to sidestep immediate problems” by granting both “an escape from required procedures and legal rules that constrained standard units of the federal bureaucracy” while also allowing “some degree of financial autonomy” (pg. 111). Radford writes of the Great Depression, “The relief crisis of the Depression laid bare the irrational structure of American local public finance: the fact that municipalities and counties were expected to meet the many needs of their residents, including infrastructure, education, relief, and much more, almost entirely from the property tax” (pg. 117). Though these public authorities served the variegated needs of the New Deal and World War II, after 1945, the government and “military services were loath to part with the kind of expertise that had been available at…installations [like Oak Ridge and Los Alamos] and came up with the idea of setting up private, nonprofit corporations as a way to creating permanent scientific establishments” (pg. 136). While corporations have declined since 1945, the number of Federally Funded Research and Development Centers has increased (pg. 137).

Radford concludes, “Whatever the downsides [to public authorities], this history demonstrates tremendous ingenuity. This same commitment to an activist public sector continues to exist, and some contemporary statebuilders are experimenting with methodologies that move beyond the public authority formula in order to break out of the logic of the market” (pg. 163).… (mais)