The Administration: Organization Woman

Poverty may breed poverty, but it has also spawned a vast, ever-growing nexus of federal programs and agencies designed to help the poor. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare alone administers nearly 100 poverty-connected programs. More than 700 local projects concerned with citizens over 65 years of age are sponsored by HEW. Thousands of others across the country provide aid and advice to the needy, the handicapped and the undereducated. To better coordinate the programs, HEW Secretary John Gardner has gathered five major welfare agencies* under one office, named the Social and Rehabilitation Service (SRS). To Washington’s surprise, Gardner went over the heads of HEW’s brightest young men and selected as the first boss of SRS a 67-year-old spinster who glories in the often maligned name of bureaucrat.

Work Is the Key. Mary Elizabeth Switzer has spent 46 years in government, the last 17 as the highly successful head of the Vocational Rehabilitation Administration, which aids the handicapped. “She’s a dynamo,” says Gardner. Breezy and humane, she is also a tough in-fighter known in the cautious corridors of government for her outspoken skill in dealing with timid planners. “She’s the most sophisticated bureaucrat in the business,” says Connecticut Senator and former HEW Secretary Abe Ribicoff, “a do-gooder who really knows how to do it.”

As SRS director, Miss Switzer will draw the same $26,000 annual salary as before, though she will now hold down the biggest administrative job of any woman in government. At a time when the whole philosophy of welfare is undergoing thorough reassessment, she is the first to admit the shortcomings of the present system. The trouble with most welfare programs, she admits, “is that it is easier to support people on relief than to come to grips with the problems that put them there.” Agreeing with critics who charge that welfare programs put a “premium on not working, rather than working,” Miss Switzer says that the answer is more work—both by welfare workers and recipients: “Work is the key to it.”

In her new post, lanky, greying Mary Switzer will administer $4.8 billion in federal funds, oversee 1,900 employees, and be responsible for aiding 7,600,000 Americans (nearly 4% of the population) who now receive welfare payments. Also included in her bailiwick: more than 6,000,000 needy who receive medical services through Medicaid, more than 600,000 children helped with adoption or foster care, 450,000 handicapped children receiving special medical services, more than 250-000 birth control recipients, and millions of elderly citizens.

“I am not an expert in public welfare or social work,” says Miss Switzer, a Radcliffe graduate (’21) in international law. “But I am an expert in finding ways to make programs more responsive.” That is the kind of accomplishment, says she, that is “worth all the sweat and all the tears.”

*The agencies consolidated: Vocational Rehabilitation Administration; Children’s Bureau; Administration of Aging; Medical Services; Assistance Payments Administration.