IMPLEMENTATION

By Jeffrey L. Pressman(until this fall. Assistant Professor of Government) and Aaron Wildavsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. 182 pp. $7.50.

Implementation is a scholarly effort to get to the bottom of a problem costing American taxpayers untold millions, perhaps billions. The subtitle reads "How Great Expectations in Washington are Dashed in Oakland Or, Why It's Amazing that Federal Programs Work At All, This Being a Saga of the Economic Development Administration as Told by Two Sympathetic Observers Who Seek to Build Morals on a Foundation of Ruined Hopes."

EDA, enacted by Congress in late 1965, was assigned to Commerce Department with a rush Ito provide "assistance to redevelopment districts where both unemployment and underemp loyment conditions had been persistently greater than the nation as a whole." In short, it has a move to wet down troublesome ghettos before any more "Watts" erupted.

Selected as the starting point, Oakland then held the dubious distinction as the city most likely to explode. More important to EDA and people from the Commerce Department (including Assistant Secretary Foley), Oakland had a highly competent city manager, a non-political city council, competent department heads including a nationally known police chief, and a Port Commission that had gained worldwide recognition for its "Containerization Program." These people, aware of their city's problem, had presented detailed plans to EDA for specific programs for public works which would hopefully provide the jobs needed by the "hard core" unemployed.

What went wrong? More than $20 million had been committed to a handful of major public works projects and another handful of business loans, all in a matter of months. Certainly the Oakland people had the know-how to follow through. Did they? If not, why not?

Three years passed. By mid-1968 Oakland had not exploded nor had its unemployment problem been solved. However, a book then published and written by EDA's Oakland representative seemed to indicate that EDA's Oakland venture had been a major success not only in preventing an explosion but also in solving in large measure a massive and intolerable unemployment situation.

Had the plan succeeded as this 1968 book would lead one to believe? Well, hardly - at least not according to the authors of Implementation if employment of hard core unemployed was a major goal. The writers had a deeper and more personal interest because, as faculty members of the Graduate School of Public Policy, they had been deeply involved since 1965 in an ongoing "Oakland Project" to develop a program of policy research and action in cooperation with Oakland city agencies.

The Oakland Project was then broadened to include a far reaching study of the EDA venture. Involving hundreds of interviews over a period of four years, it was an objective study of what goes wrong when the "best laid schemes of mice and men leave us naught but grief and pain."

Mr. Pressman and Mr. Wildavsky conclude that "Implementation" is the key word here. They detail a horrible story of disagreement over details and petty jealousies between various agencies of all branches of government. Truly, a discouraging, though revealing, saga to the eyes of this vitally on-the-scene observer.

This book should be required reading for all government officials.

The son of Dartmouth Professor of Economics,George Ray Wicker (1870-1917), Mr. Wicker,Harvard Business School '23, a retired realtor andclose observer of the Californian social andeconomic scene, has lived in Oakland since 1953.