Ernest Graves
more technical. The civil works program has a lot of technical problems, but it has a
political dimension which had always fascinated my father and fascinated me, too.
At the time the program was moving forward vigorously, while there were many things
to deal with, the people that were running it and carrying it out were succeeding in
moving ahead.
It may not have been easy. But if you're succeeding, that is a reward. Now that we're
in an era where there is much more environmental concern and much more budget
stringency, and the development of the country is more mature, they're not able to do
much.
There haven't been authorization acts. The funding is way down. There are not that
many new starts. Perhaps the people that are trying to do it now aren't getting the same
satisfaction that we got when we were able to go ahead and do things.
So I did enjoy the program. Perhaps there was a watershed between my initial period
and the period when President Carter became president.
I started out in the fall of '75. So I had that period and all of '76. There were certainly
frustrations because the Office of Management and Budget was resisting policy reform.
We were trying not necessarily to change the policy in a way that would cause us to be
allowed to have more projects, but to resolve a lot of policy issues about what you
could and could not do, what the government would and would not pay for, in order
to build the projects or not, to get authorization or not.
We were having difficulty doing this. But when President Carter came along with his
water project review, we didn't get anything constructive done during that period. A
lot of us thought that was 90 percent of the game. If the White House could put up
enough flak, they would just stymie the program and this would accomplish the end of
not allowing this work to go ahead.
I think that was a frustrating period. The way we handled the water project review gave
most of the people involved in it a lot of satisfaction.
Q:
I'll bet.
A:
Don Duncan, for example, who was one of the main civilians at OCE that worked on
it. Don had been on the staff of the Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors. But
then he came up to the policy office in OCE. He was one of the principal guys that
worked with me on the review.
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