From Taft to Hoover to Grace to Gore, a Century of Commissions on Waste

Every few years a President announces a commission to find waste in the federal government. A distinguished chairman is named. A staff is hired. A report arrives, thick enough to prop open a door. The press writes a story with a large number in the headline. And then, with remarkable consistency, the government goes on being the government.

That is the cynical summary, and it is partly right. But it is also incomplete. A century of these efforts leaves a record, and the record is more useful than the cynicism. Some commission ideas became law and have lasted a hundred years. Others died in a drawer. The difference between them is not the quality of the report. It is the political machinery behind it. Let me take the question the way a careful argument should: define the terms, lay out the dates, and draw the conclusion from the evidence.

Terms

A commission on waste here means a body created by a President, or by Congress with presidential support, to study the organization and spending of the executive branch and recommend changes. It is not an inspector general's audit, a congressional investigation or a budget proposal. It is a one-time study with a charge to find savings and improve efficiency.

The central question is: what makes such a study succeed? Four factors recur in the record, and I will name them now so that you can watch for them as we go.

1. A sponsor who can act. A recommendation needs someone with power to carry it out.
2. A fit with Congress. The executive can reorganize only to the extent that Congress allows, and spending is Congress's power.
3. A concrete product. A specific structure, such as a budget office, beats a general call for efficiency.
4. A constituency. Every wasteful program has beneficiaries who will defend it. A reform needs defenders of its own.

1910 to 1913: the Taft Commission on Economy and Efficiency

The story starts with William Howard Taft. In 1910, early in his presidency, Congress appropriated money for a Commission on Economy and Efficiency, and Taft appointed it, with Frederick Cleveland, a pioneer of budget reform, as chairman. The commission studied how the federal departments were organized and how the government prepared and presented its finances.

At the time, the federal government had no executive budget. Each department submitted its own requests to Congress, and Congress put the pieces together through its committees. The President did not present a unified plan for revenue and spending. The commission recommended exactly that: a national budget prepared by the President and submitted to Congress as a single document. In 1912 the commission's report on the subject, titled "The Need for a National Budget," was sent to Congress with a message from Taft.

Congress did not act. Taft lost the 1912 election, the idea lay unadopted, and the commission was wound down. Here is the lesson: a good idea with no constituency in Congress can wait.

Result. Short term, ignored. Long term, vindicated. The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, signed by President Harding, created the Bureau of the Budget in the executive branch and the General Accounting Office, later renamed the Government Accountability Office, as a legislative-branch auditor. It is the most successful product of any commission on this list, and it took nine years and a world war to arrive. For a related study of the era, see Woodrow Wilson Wanted a Government of Experts, and Washington Still Runs on It.

1937: a note on Brownlow

Before the Hoover commissions, a brief detour. In 1937 President Franklin Roosevelt's Committee on Administrative Management, known as the Brownlow Committee after its chairman, recommended strengthening the President's staff and consolidating agencies. Congress balked at the broader plan, but the Reorganization Act of 1939 gave the President limited reorganization authority and led to the creation of the Executive Office of the President. The pattern repeats: the narrow, structural piece passed; the sweeping piece did not.

1947 to 1949: the first Hoover Commission

In 1947 the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government was created, and former President Herbert Hoover was chosen as its chairman. It is the commission everyone means when they say "the Hoover Commission." The postwar government had grown enormously during the depression and the war, and members of both parties wanted a systematic review.

The commission worked through a set of task forces and delivered its findings to Congress in early 1949, in nineteen reports with 273 recommendations on the organization of departments, personnel, budgeting and the management of specific programs. It is usually described as the most successful commission of its kind. A large share of its recommendations, a majority by most accounts (one 1955 study counted 116 fully implemented and another 80 mostly or partly), were adopted in whole or in part. Many were carried out through the Reorganization Act of 1949, which allowed the President to submit reorganization plans that took effect unless either house of Congress voted to reject them. That mechanism, the one-house veto over reorganization plans, deserves its own note. After 1983, as covered in INS v. Chadha Killed the Legislative Veto and Left Congress Fewer Tools, a one-house veto was held unconstitutional, so the form of that tool is no longer available.

Result. Largely adopted. Why it worked: the sponsor was a former President with bipartisan credibility, Congress had created the commission itself and so felt a sense of ownership, and the reorganization statute gave the executive a fast path for acting on the recommendations. Notice that the commission worked because it used Congress rather than going around it.

1953 to 1955: the second Hoover Commission

A second Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch was created by Congress in 1953, again with Hoover as chairman, and sent its final report to Congress in June 1955. It is generally described as having had less impact than the first, and I leave the exact share of its recommendations that were adopted to the historians, because I could not confirm a figure. The general pattern is plain enough, and it is my argument rather than a measured finding: proposals that touch the scope of the government's activities, rather than its administration, tend to meet resistance from the groups that benefit.

Result. Mixed to weak, by common account. The lesson is one worth drawing: a commission that asks the government to reorganize itself gets a hearing, and a commission that asks the government to do less is likely to meet organized opposition.

1982 to 1984: the Grace Commission

President Reagan created the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in June 1982 by executive order, with J. Peter Grace, the chairman of a large industrial company, as chairman. It was staffed by executives lent by the private sector, who examined the departments with the eye of a business manager. The commission delivered its findings on January 12, 1984, with 2,478 recommendations, and its public headline was a claim that implementing them could save roughly $424 billion over three years.

That figure got attention, and it also drew scrutiny. In February 1984 the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office issued a joint analysis of the proposals rather than adopting the commission's numbers, and critics argued that many of the estimates were overstated or depended on policy changes Congress would not accept. Some of the recommendations were adopted. Many, I would argue, were not, because they would have required Congress to change the laws that created the programs, and the programs had constituencies.

I would say this about the Grace Commission. Its great virtue was to put the question in business terms: what would a well-run organization do with these functions? Its great weakness was the headline number. A claim of a very large sum, when official analysts decline to adopt the arithmetic, damages the credibility of the legitimate recommendations in the same report. A reformer should publish the figure that can be defended, not the figure that makes the front page.

Result. Partial, in my reading. The headline savings were disputed by official analysts. My argument is that the recommendations that required statutory change lacked champions in Congress, and that the headline estimate invited challenge.

1993: the National Performance Review

In March 1993 President Clinton announced the National Performance Review and put Vice President Al Gore in charge. Its report, issued on September 7, 1993 under the title "From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less," made 384 recommendations and projected savings of $108 billion over five years.

The effort produced results that were tangible and also controversial. The Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, which President Clinton signed on October 13, 1994 and which the White House presented as part of the review, changed the laws governing federal purchasing, including a preference for commercial items.

The review also had a distinctive style. It promoted "reinventing government," with an emphasis on customer service and on empowering employees, rather than on reducing the scope of programs. That is a legitimate management philosophy, but it differs from a conservative critique that questions whether a function belongs in the federal government at all. The review aimed to improve how some things were done. By its own description it focused on how government should work, not on what it should do.

Result. Moderate. Procurement reform was enacted; the broader promises of savings and cultural change were hard to measure. Why: the sponsor was strong and the reforms were administrative, so they could move without a fight over the size of government.

The timeline at a glance

What the pattern teaches

Now to the argument. Here is what I draw from the record, in numbered steps.

1. Structure beats slogans. The most durable result, the executive budget and the audit office of 1921, was a structural change that gave the government a new way to make decisions. Reforms that rewire how decisions are made last longer than reforms that count savings.
2. Congress must be a partner. The first Hoover Commission, created by Congress, with a statute that made adoption easy, was the most successful. Commissions that bypass Congress produce recommendations that sit on shelves. This is not a bug in the system; it is the Constitution at work. Article I gives Congress the power to create offices, appropriate money and make the laws that run the programs. A President cannot reform what only Congress can change.
3. Efficiency is easier than scope. Every commission found it easier to improve how an activity is done than to ask whether it should be done. Procurement reform passes. A proposal to end a program meets the program's defenders. A conservative who wants to shrink the government must be prepared to win the argument about scope, not just the argument about efficiency.
4. Honest numbers protect credibility. The Grace Commission's $424 billion headline invited challenge. The next commission that makes a large claim should show its arithmetic, and let a neutral scorekeeper such as the Congressional Budget Office verify it.
5. Constituencies decide. A reform that creates a defender, such as the auditor general or the budget office, survives. A reform that has only a report, no matter how thick, has no one to defend it.

The steelman and the answer

A fair skeptic will argue that this whole enterprise is futile. The government has grown despite a century of commissions. Some of those commissions were exercises in public relations, intended to give the appearance of action. The reports are long and the results are small. The skeptic's conclusion is that we should stop commissioning studies and either shrink the government directly or accept it as it is.

That argument has force. The size of the federal government and the total public debt, which stood at $40.56 trillion on November 5, 2026, up from $38.05 trillion a year earlier, are not the product of a lack of reports. And the commissions that tried to reduce the scope of government mostly failed.

But the skeptic's conclusion does not follow. The record shows that commissions succeed when they have the four features listed above, and fail when they do not. The reform instrument is not useless; it needs to be built correctly. Notice, too, that several of the successful reforms came out of the commissions' recommendations years afterward. A report that is ignored today may be the blueprint of the statute that passes in a later decade. The Taft Commission's idea waited nine years. A conservative movement that wants to shrink the government should prepare its reports now, with the same patience.

The right answer to "commissions don't work" is "commissions work when they come with a plan to pass the recommendations." That plan means a statute, a champion in each chamber, a published scorecard and a deadline. Compare Every Agency Should Have to Justify Its Existence Again, the Texas Sunset Way, which describes a sunset process built into state law in Texas so that review is routine rather than occasional. And the Government Accountability Office's own list of long-running trouble spots, covered in GAO's High-Risk List Has Named Some of the Same Programs Since 1990, shows that identification is not the same as correction.

The Founders' view of waste

The Founders had a clear idea of why this matters. The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse in Article I, Section 8, Clause 1, to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." It requires, in Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, that money be drawn from the Treasury only by appropriations made by law, and that a regular account of receipts and expenditures be published. The design is that the people's representatives control the money, and the people can see how it is spent. A commission on waste is, at bottom, an attempt to make that design work in a government that has grown beyond what the Founders pictured.

What a citizen can do

• Read a commission report. The Hoover Commission and Grace Commission reports are in libraries and online archives, and the National Performance Review's report is available from government archives.
• Ask your Representative which recommendations are still pending. Many of the old proposals, such as reorganization authority, have been reintroduced in new forms.
• Check the debt clock at the national debt page and compare it with the promises of savings.
• Support structural reforms with built-in enforcement, such as sunset review, a regulatory budget and a requirement that Congress vote on major rules.

The case in brief

1. Presidents of both parties have commissioned studies of federal waste since the Taft Commission of 1910 to 1913, the first Hoover Commission of 1947 to 1949, the second of 1953 to 1955, the Grace Commission of 1982 to 1984 and the National Performance Review of 1993.
2. The most durable result was structural: the executive budget and the audit office created in 1921 on the strength of Taft's recommendation.
3. Commissions succeed when they have a sponsor who can act, a fit with Congress, a concrete product and a constituency, and they fail when they ask government to do less without a plan to win that argument.
4. Large headline savings that analysts dispute, such as the Grace Commission's $424 billion claim, damage the credibility of the sound recommendations around them.
5. The remedy is not fewer studies but better-built reforms, with statutes, scorekeepers and deadlines.

What you can do: Pick one recommendation from a past commission, look up on Congress.gov whether a bill has been introduced to carry it out, and ask your Representative to cosponsor it.