• U.S.

Transportation: New Scenery for the ICC

3 minute read
TIME

The Interstate Commerce Commission deserves every one of its superlatives: it is the oldest and largest of the federal regulatory agencies — and the most ineffective. Overseeing some 18,000 companies involved in transport by truck, rail, waterway and pipeline, the ICC regulates industries that account for 20% of the gross national product.

But over an 82-year history, its guiding Interstate Commerce Act has become clotted with 200 amendments that run for 425 pages. Johnson Administration economists, testifying in Senate hearings last summer, argued that the ICC was fated to be “a dead hand on industry” and ought to be abolished. Another criticism came last month from the Department of Transportation, which, in a study of rail-merger patterns, scolded the commission for paying scant attention to broad economic questions and for rubber-stamping in “a rather random manner” individual mergers as they come along.

Little Chance. Now the beleaguered agency has a new chief, the first woman ever to boss a U.S. regulatory commission. She is Virginia Mae Brown, 45, a lively brunette and loyal Democrat who was appointed to the eleven-member commission in 1964 by Lyndon Johnson. Having succeeded to the ICC’s annually rotating chairmanship this year, she leads a staff of 1,784 that processes about 6,000 cases a year. “Peaches” Brown, as the ICC’s $29,500-a-year chairman is known, also manages to take care of two children and make frequent trips home to the 700-acre Pliny, W. Va., estate that was deeded to her family in the 18th century by George Washington. No one questions her familiarity with rules and regulations. A banker’s daughter, she is the wife of a Charleston and Washington attorney and a lawyer herself. In West Virginia, she was the first woman to serve as assistant attorney general and later as state insurance commissioner.

Can Peaches overhaul the ICC? There is little chance of that. For one thing, the ICC is the only federal agency whose chairmanship is not filled by a long-term White House appointee. Moreover, Peaches is no activist, except for her spirited championing of money-losing rail-passenger service on the grounds that “the public convenience cannot be hamstrung by the tyranny of figures.” She and the ICC are hamstrung by a frustratingly fuzzy legal charter that authorizes the agency to prescribe rates, regulate routes and oversee mergers, but prevents it from using individual cases as precedents that could establish overall transportation policy. As for the ICC’s many critics, the chairman can only say that “I don’t oppose some of their ideas, but I can’t do anything about them.” She does, however, improve the scenery.

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