Government By Grassroots

When the Secretary of Agriculture reorganizes his department, inauspicious bureaus like the Soil Conservation Service are supposed to adjust with stoic indifference. But in eighteen years of advising farmers how to make their lands more valuable, the Soil Service has developed a strong esprit de corps. Working with other federal bureaus, the Service has saved so many millions of acres that its attitude on erosion control has become almost fanatical. Thus its protest was understandably loud when Secretary Benson announced his new plan which will strip the Soil Service of most of its functions, and delegate conservation control to the states.

Ever since 1935, when Congress established the Service to improve the ineffective state college conservation programs, the colleges and the reactionary Farm Bureau Federation have striven to return conservation "to the grass-roots." Admittedly taking politics into account, Benson has complied: in spite of his vigorous denials, conservation seems destined to fall back into the arms of the lethargic College Extension Departments.

The new decentralized conservation program will sacrifice economy, talent, and effectiveness. Administrative costs, among the lowest in the federal government when the Service was run from seven offices, will skyrocket under the control of forty-eight states. With state control, the staff of trained men from the Soil Conservation Service will probably be diluted by less experienced fill-ins.

The Benson plan requires that the states pay a large share of their conservation expenses; this means that poor but deeply eroded states like Arkansas will falter in land-saving measures. Threats of floods encompassing entire river-valleys will find separate state conservation agencies powerless to employ the control measures which formerly the Soil Conservation Service would use as a matter of course.

If in the past the Soil Service has made slightly inflated claims, its boasts have kept both the farmers' eyes on conservation and the service performing ambitiously. The widely-acknowledged success of the Soil Conservation Service is reason enough for Benson to leave Conservation under national authority. When millions of acres are in critical need of attention it is foolhardy to gamble ruining the conservation program merely to delegate control to lower levels. Such turning from proven success to risk is extravagant payment for the label "government by grassroots."