This administration has great ambitions to develop within the Government a business organization. The President of the United States believes that the machinery conducting the affairs of the Government of the United States is about as complete, is about as capable as any machinery that could possibly be devised, providing it has a perfect system of organization and business operation of these affairs.
The experiences of the past have shown that we have gone on in our governmental affairs without due regard to where we were to get out. We have depended upon deficiency bills to help us in our extravagance or our over-expenditures. The time has come when that policy is a matter of the past.
Realizing that it was only possible to carry on the affairs of our Government along business lines, the President sought what he regards—and I know this personally because I have heard him express it many times—one of the biggest and best and most potent business men of the United States of America to take charge of the direction of the budget; and I now have great pleasure in introducing to you, follows, my dearest, closest friend, General Charles G. Dawes, of Chicago, Illinois.
“Mr. Chairman and Members of the Conference:
The trouble with most of the Government meetings is that they do not assume the nature of a business meeting. We have something that is entirely different from the atmosphere which surrounds the meeting of any private business organization.
In my work down here for this year, I look upon the Government simply as a business organization and unless I get formality out of my mind, I do not get close to the people with whom I do business. So this morning I just simply want to explain—because when you can give the reasons for the imposition of discipline and rules of action, you make these rules of action doubly effective.
I want to explain, and grasp this opportunity to explain something of the working of the machinery which has been set in motion by the President, creating by Executive Order for the first time, a machine for the imposition of an Executive plan, and a pressure upon Governmental business. In other words, the President, for the first time, has assumed his responsibility as business head of the organization. He has established certain agencies for the imposition of executive policies and I wanted to explain something about them.
This meeting, itself, is the result of the creation of one of these coordinating agencies by Executive Order. And what is involved in this meeting?
Suppose a private corporation was spending, apart from the interest it paid on its debts, about one-fourth of all its expenditures along one certain line of activity. That is what this Government is doing through the Boards represented here,—Army, Navy, Veterans’ Bureau, etc. Supposing that business had run along for a hundred years and somebody would come in and say to the head of the business, “How much money are you spending on this particular activity?”
“Well, so much, one-fourth of all we spend.”