The President's Economic Staff during the Truman Administration

When the Council of Economic Advisers opened its doors in late 1946, many regarded the fledgling agency as a contingent of depression doctors armed with a “watered down” version of the Full Employment Bill. Instead, during the Truman era, the Council became, in the words of its second chairman, “an overall general economic advisory staff” generally concerned with major problems affecting the growth and stability of the American economy, including its adaptability to the special demands of international stress. Actually the “transition” of the agency to this broader role was more apparent than real, since the Employment Act itself clearly contained a charter for a general economic staff function if the new staff and its principal chose development in that direction. In the wartime deliberations which led up to the Act, the Congress was concerned not only to prevent a postwar depression but also to improve the integration of the whole economic policy formation process. And, in the final version of the Act, after making a very general policy declaration, the Congress decided, instead of drafting specific substantive solutions which would prejudge the source and nature of future economic problems, to establish procedural machinery to facilitate the intelligent diagnosis and solution of such problems when they did subsequently arise.