A
Brief History of the ESA
The ESA operates today under some 1,200 internal rules and regulations and the dictates of its mission statement. (Click here to read.) Among its many other activities, by the way, the ESA is in charge of drafting mission statements for other agencies. (Click here to read excerpts.) |
The
basic idea for the Extraneous Services Administration goes all the
way back to the Weimar period in Germany, the Golden Age of
inefficiency and intergovernmental squabbling. The noted Social
Democrat theoretician Hans Wallenbach wondered in a 1931 paper
whether “all this chazzerei
(inefficiency and intergovernmental squabbling) is a good thing
already. Also, I need to talk to somebody about installing
sprinklers in the Reichstag. That place is eine
ernste brandgefährdung (a serious firetrap), and I’m not just
pfeifen Dixie (whistling
Dixie).”
By
the early 1970s, however, it was clear that an overburdened federal
bureaucracy was allowing many semi-important governmental activities
to simply fall through the cracks. Taking it as a given that
interagency turf wars made any meaningful cooperation impossible,
then-White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig saw a need for a sort
of catch-all agency to handle all government business that existing
agencies were too harried, fractionalized, or cranky to manage on
their own. (Haig later noted in his memoirs that he also saw an
opportunity to “grab some more power while [he] could, before
Nixon went completely insane and the gravy train ground to a
halt.”) Created under a largely ignored rider to an obscure
highway-funding bill, the still-nameless agency blinked into
existence in July 1974. Haig’s first proposal for a name, the
Catch-All Department, was quickly abandoned, as was his suggestion
to empower a Cabinet-level “Secretary of Catch-All,” whose
primary function would be to bring snacks and extra ice to Cabinet
meetings. Haig was in the process of developing a 10-year action
plan for the still-unnamed agency when President Nixon resigned in
August 1974. Haig promptly abandoned his planning; as he explained
later, “I had a lot of stuff to do.” The incoming Replacement
President, Gerald Ford, made the agency a top priority, naming it
first the Extranious Services Administration, then later the
Extraneous Services Administration, when it was pointed out to him
that “Extraneous” had initially been misspelled. An interesting
historical note: The agency’s first substantial project was
deaccessioning some 37 million scratch pads bearing the first,
misspelled, name. Later, of course, the ESA was the lead agency in
the campaign to design, produce, distribute, take back, and destroy
millions and millions of “WIN” buttons.