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If the President is the world's most overburdened man, the Vice President is almost unemployed, his only constitutional duty being to preside decorously over the Senate.* The situation cries for a more equitable sharing of burdens. Gerald Ford, who has filled both jobs, publicly argued in TIME last November that the Vice President should be officially given all the powers of Chief of Staff.
Such relations cannot be legislated, however. While all reasonable reforms encounter unreasoning opposition, none is more vulnerable than the idea of giving the Vice President real authority. The President wants his Chief of Staff to be a man he viscerally trusts, likes, relies on; the Vice President, however, got on the ticket mainly because he represented constituencies different from the President's own. The best that the Vice President can realistically expect, therefore, is to serve his chief—as Mondale did Carter—hi the capacity of senior adviser without portfolio.
The President, of course, should be able to organize his staff as he pleases, but that staff has grown so haphazardly in recent years that it sometimes interferes with good administration. Since Nixon's presidency, White House aides have from time to tune usurped the function of Cabinet officers, congressional liaison aides have tried to dictate policy to the House and Senate instead of reasoning with them, and National Security Advisers have overshadowed Secretaries of State as architects of foreign policy.
Some needed reforms:
-The White House staff should be reorganized. The National Academy of Public Administration spent two years studying means of improving White House staff efficiency and last November issued an excellent report outlining not only reductions but a sensible reorganization. Instead of the present system of two main policy groups (domestic policy and national security), there should be three, devoted to domestic affairs, international affairs and economic affairs. The National Security Council, which, since the era of Henry Kissinger, has been tempted to become a rival State Department, should be reduced to a small interagency committee. Another major policy group should be devoted to long-term planning, a subject now customarily left to universities and think tanks until a sudden crisis reveals that the long term has arrived.
-The White House staff should be reduced. Four hundred are simply too many people to perform what should be the staff's basic functions: presenting the President with impartially organized information and seeing that his wishes are clearly communicated. Instead, the swollen staff tends both to insulate the President from the outside world and to attempt to make policy on his behalf. In addition, the White House staff has acquired unnecessary departments that exist primarily for the prestige of special interests. Examples: Hispanic Affairs, the Aging.