The Administration: A Sense of What Should Be

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in size." When Goddard took over, he began borrowing young doctors and scientists from the PHS, used them to help clear up a backlog of 1,450 new applications for drug approval and to review 3,000 drugs approved from 1939 to 1962. He hopes to wipe out the backlog by July.

∙ WELFARE ADMINISTRATION. Neither Gardner nor anybody else is very happy with how Welfare doles out the dole. Only 8,000,000 of the 35 million Americans officially classified as poor are actually receiving some form of relief. The agency gives out $4 billion a year —and spends an appalling $350 million doing it. Reason: under political pressure to keep chiselers off the rolls, Welfare workers often spend 90% of their time investigating eligibility requirements. Most of the recipients, however, are unemployable—2,000,000 are too old, 3,500,000 are too young, 900,000 are mothers who have no place to leave their children, 600,000 are totally disabled. Wide inequities exist in payments because each state sets its own standards: a dependent child in Mississippi gets a pitiful $8 a month for all his needs while one in Minnesota gets $52.50. Despite such proposals as a guaranteed annual wage or a negative income tax aimed at drastically increasing the sums given to relief recipients, Gardner has a more modest goal—a standard nationwide "floor" for payments.

∙ VOCATIONAL REHABILITATION AD MINISTRATION. With an outlay of $313 million, the agency helped to convert 150,000 physically or mentally disabled people into jobholders. Ultimately, they will pay back in taxes more than five times the amount spent to train them. Chief problem: a backlog of some 5.5 million disabled people to be served.

∙ ADMINISTRATION ON AGING. The newest HEW agency, it has a $10 million budget to find ways to ease the anguish of age. One of its programs is "Foster Grandparents," in which old people work with abandoned children.

∙ ST. ELIZABETHS HOSPITAL. A Wash ington, D.C., mental hospital partially supported by $10 million in federal funds, it has 7,000 patients. Also supported by HEW are Washington's Gallaudet College, the world's only institution of higher learning for the deaf, Howard University and the American Printing House for the Blind.

Clearly, the domain is just too vast for one man to master—but then, so are the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. itself. Gardner is no empire builder—but neither is he without ambition. In 1960 a woman suggested that he would make a logical Under Secretary of HEW in lohn F. Kennedy's embryo Administration. "I'll be Under Secretary of nothing," Gardner retorted. "Well then, maybe Secretary," said the woman. "Ah," said Gardner, "that would be something else."

The American Commitment. Having landed the job, Gardner moved into a fifth-floor office in HEW's unprepossessing limestone headquarters, where he discusses his favorite themes with a free-flowing eloquence that he rarely manages to achieve before large audiences. One theme is the importance of the individual. "The central purpose of laws and government in a free society," he says, "is to make the world manageable, so that the individual human being may have the maximum amount of freedom to grow and develop. That's what my department is