Department of State Administrative Files
Study Prepared by Mr. Marshall P. Jones of the Office of Operating Facilities
Organization of the Department of State
a summary of post-war reorganization proposals and major organizational changes
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The 1949 reorganization of the Department. The appointment of Dean Acheson, a member of the Commission and former Under Secretary [Page 5] of State, to succeed General Marshall as Secretary of State, together with the appointment of James E. Webb, former Director of the Bureau of the Budget, as the new Under Secretary, gave impetus to the Department’s own plans for reorganization.
It appointed three task forces: Task Force No. 1 was charged with the making of detailed recommendations affecting the reorganization of the central administrative and consular offices of the Department, in accordance with the principles laid down in the Peurifoy Plan. Five working groups were established to study and make recommendations concerning the Office of the Director General of the Foreign Service, the budget and management functions, the personnel functions, the general services functions and the consular services functions.
The reorganization took effect as of May 15, 1949. It accomplished the objectives which had been proposed in the Bureau of the Budget report, the Peurifoy Plan and the Hoover Report in that it unified the Department of State activities relating to the administration of the Department and the Foreign Service. The Office of the Foreign Service as a separate entity was dissolved and its functions distributed largely among the Offices of Management and Budget, Office of Operating Facilities and the Office of Personnel. These three offices, together with the Office of Consular Affairs, comprised the main operating structure of the administrative areas of the Department. At the same time a significant proportion of the work of the administrative area which could be decentralized was assigned, together with staff, to the new regional bureaus which had evolved as a result of the work of the Department’s reorganization Task Force No. 2.
Reorganization Task Force No. 2 was commissioned to prepare recommendations concerning the functions of the substantive areas of the Department. The procedure followed by Task Force No. 2 was to assure that the principles laid down in the report of the Hoover Commission were to have the strongest presumption of validity in that they should hold good except where in tests of practical application to concrete situations a departure from those principles was clearly warranted.
The Task Force thereupon established working groups to develop a test pattern for a hypothetical Latin-American regional bureau to which maximum action responsibilities would be given, including economic and public affairs as well as political matters and which would have its relationships to the over-all functional units spelled out. When this test pattern had been developed and reviewed by the steering committee of the task force it was submitted to three working groups, for the other three regional bureaus, for examination and recommendation from the point of view of their areas. As a result of these activities the steering committee came forth with its recommendations on the functions and relationships of a typical regional [Page 6] bureau. The same process was used in developing a pattern of recommendations for the location of action responsibility for economic, public affairs, international organization and intelligence matters.
The recommendations of Reorganization Task Force No. 2 were accepted on the whole and put into effect on October 3, 1949.
In the meantime, Public Law 73, 81st Congress, 1st Session, had been enacted (May 26, 1949). This vested in the Secretary of State full authority over both the Department and the Foreign Service and authorized the appointment of ten Assistant Secretaries. This Act of Congress provided the legal basis for implementing the reorganization of the Department except insofar as any amalgamation of the personnel services of the Department and the Foreign Service was concerned.
The reorganization of the Department, therefore, was substantially as originally recommended in the Peurifoy Plan and modified by the Hoover Commission with two exceptions: The Special Assistant for Press Relations was not transferred to the P area, and the amalgamation of the personnel services has not yet been accomplished. A chart showing the organization of the Department as of October 3, 1949 is appended hereto.1
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