Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

320 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40)
out the period the recurring tremors had their effect in the office of the
Director out on Connecticut Avenue.
TOWARD A REDEFINITION OF BUREAU FUNCTIONS
Out of the welter of emergency measures, experiments, and planned
programs of the new administration, three impinged importantly on the
Bureau: the initial drive for economy in Federal spending, the effort to
define the relations between Government and non-Government research, and
the exertions on behalf of the common man in his role as ultimate consumer.
Campaigning on a platform of Federal frugality, Roosevelt on taking
office ordered a slash of 25 percent in the funds of every Government depart-
ment and agency, making it retroactive by impounding current as well as
projected appropriations. The 10-percent cut in Government salaries voted
by the previous administration in the Economy Act of June 30, 1932, had
necessitated an 8-day furlough without pay for all at the Bureau but had not
cut the staff.6' As a result of the new 25-percent slash, almost one-third of
the Bureau force was dismissed, and to stretch remaining funds, a second
payless 8-day furlough was decreed for those not separated.62
In mobilizing the resources of the Nation for recovery, Roosevelt ex-
ercised his penchant for creating new agencies, particularly in order to bypass
such of his executive departments as seemed to him ingrown and incapable
of adapting to the New Deal emergency.63 His precedents were the all-
powerful agencies of World War I, his guide Bernard Baruch's report on the
War Industries Board of 1918, which Baruch in 1931 had supplemented with
a detailed program for the creation of a central agency to control industrial
61 Letter, Secretary of Commerce Chapin to Visiting Committee, Nov. 10, 1932 (NARG
40, file 67009/5).
Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt: Crisis of the Old Order, p. 256; NBS Annual
Report 1933, p. 45; Annual Report 1934, Pp. 51, 75. Hearings * * * 1935 (Jan. 4,
1934), p. 131.
A startling economy proposed by Roosevelt in late 1932 involved transfer of the National
Advisory Committee on Aeronautics to the Bureau of Standards. NACA's Langley
Field Laboratory was to be maintained as an independent agency, but considerable
savings in the NACA budget of $900,000 were anticipated in consolidating its Wash-
ington staff with that of the Bureau. Questioned at a House committee hearing about
the transfer, Dr. Briggs admitted he had not been consulted, but he "liked" it, and
pointed out that in Britain, aeronautical research had always been under the National
Physical Laboratory (Hearings * * * 1934, Dec. 12, 1932, pp. 175—77). NACA, now
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which had strong roots
in Bureau aeronautics research, was not of course turned over to the Bureau.
Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal, 1933—1934 (Boston:
Houghton Muffin, 1958), pp. 534—535.