Public Works and Work Relief

Report Outline
Changing Function of the Public Works Program
Roosevelt and International Public Works Plans
Results of the American Public Works Program
Proposed Coordination of Public Works and Relief
Special Focus

Changing Function of the Public Works Program

President Roosevelt's determination, voiced in his annual message to Congress, to “quit this business of relief” and provide employment on federally-financed projects for all unemployed persons capable of working signified not only a new approach to the relief problem but a changed attitude toward the function of public works in the general recovery program. The original plan of spending large sums on public works was conceived, not primarily as a means of affording direct employment, but as a method of stimulating industrial recovery. The public works program was to supplement efforts of another sort, toward the same end, put forth by the National Recovery Administration. Provisions for establishment of N. R. A. and P. W. A. were thus embodied in separate sections of the same law, and the two agencies and their functions were regarded as complementary.

In the spring of 1933, before the National Industrial Recovery Act had been passed, the President, in conversations with foreign statesmen preliminary to the World Monetary and Economic Conference, sought to promote an internationally coordinated public works program intended to give world-wide stimulus to industrial recovery. Plans for such an undertaking failing to make any headway at the London conference, the administration proceeded with its own domestic program on a purely national basis. While a certain amount of employment has thereby been provided, the program after two years can scarcely be considered to have fulfilled its major purpose of advancing general recovery.

Recognition of this fact appeared to underlie the President's request for an additional $4,000,000,000 to supply work to those on the relief rolls. The intention is to finance new public works out of this fund, but the appropriation was requested as a relief measure. The plan, in other words, is to use an expanded public works program as a vehicle for transfering the able-bodied unemployed from direct relief to work relief. If this proposal is carried out, the public works program will lose its original character. Although the administration doubtless hopes that additional public works will stimulate business, the emphasis now falls on relief rather than recovery. Tacit recognition of the altered viewpoint toward public works was given by Senator Robinson (D., Ark.), majority when he said in a public statement on February 23 that “the work-relief program was devised to tide the country over the period while business is being revived and enterprises are being resuscitated.” He thus represented the new program as a transitional measure, not as a vital element in the process of reviving business and resuscitating enterprises.