Dear Scholars,

As the Truman Scholars Association closes its 2010-2011 year, I wanted to share with you our 5-year strategic plan that the board has been working on all year.  Those of you that attended the 2011 National Conference have seen it, but to the rest of the community, keep reading.

Starting with a two-day in-person meeting in October, the board spent significant time developing a 5-year strategic plan for the organization.  This plan draws from where we have been as a community and guides us as we continue to grow and evolve.  I would like to thank former TSA board members, former Foundation Executive Secretary Fred Slabach (MS ’77), and Scholars in the community at large who put a great deal of thought into TSA as an organization.  Your comments, encouragement and vision contributed greatly to the final plan this board put to paper.  To this year’s board, thank you for taking on such a huge project on top of the National Conference.

TSA also started on some of its 5-year goals, including the Lost Scholars Project, TSA’s initiative to obtain updated contact information on all Scholars.  This year we updated contact information for over 100 Scholars in the Truman Scholars Database.  Thanks to Jane Rock Constanza (WY ’91) who helped with the project and to all of those of you who submitted updated contact information for Scholars on our website. 

TSA is an all-volunteer organization, and I am humbled by the commitment, passion and work that so many of you put into it.  We’ve done a lot this year as a community, and I’m proud to have been a part if it.  I hope this strategic plan will serve future boards well, and that you all will get involved with TSA at whatever level you can, be it the board, committees or small projects.

Sincerely,

Adair Ford Boroughs (SC '01)

President

Truman Scholars Association

Elmer B. Staats, Chairman Emeritus of the Harry S. Truman Foundation, passed away on July 23, 2011. Below is an except of an obituary posted on FedBlog, a publication of Government Executive magazine.

The world of public administration and accountability in government lost a giant this weekend.

Elmer B. Staats, a longtime public servant whose federal career culminated in a 15-year stint as Comptroller General of the United States and head of the General Accounting Office, died of congestive heart failure at Sibley Hospital in Washington. He was 97.

According to a GAO release, Staats started his career in 1939 at the Bureau of the Budget, now the Office of Management and Budget. He ended up serving at the agency under Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. In 1966, Johnson named him to head GAO, where he served until 1981.

Continue reading the article here.

- During President Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration, he helped to organize the civilian effort that won World War II.

- In the Truman Administration he—along with my father Charles Murphy—began the first-ever structured government-wide approach to creating a Presidential legislative agenda.

- President Eisenhower appointed Elmer to be Deputy Director of OMB.

- President Lyndon Johnson appointed him to a fifteen-year term as Comptroller General of the United States, heading the General Accounting Office.

- President Reagan appointed Elmer to his first of three 6-year terms as a Truman Scholarship Foundation Trustee (and the Trustees elected Elmer to be Chairman).

"Elmer Staats was the first real head of what was then called the [BoB’s] Division of Legislative Reference...

"Very early on the president [Truman] approved the concept of trying to get together a total picture of what legislation might be recommended to the forthcoming session of Congress.  Accordingly, the Budget Bureau annually called for the legislative programs from all of the departments and agencies; subsequently the bureau’s staff separated the proposals into several categories.   First there were those items important enough to be considered by the president for inclusion in his legislative program.  Then there were items which were of a minor nature, but about which the president certainly had to know since he would be asked to support them in his budget.

"Another category consisted of items which had to do with expiring laws. . . .  Before Elmer and I started working on this operation there had been a number of instance in which the White House in an earlier era had been caught short with a sudden realization that a law would expire in the thirtieth of June and that nothing had been done about setting the stage to get it continued.

"And finally, there were those items which seemed to us, on the first go-round, to be so far afield that they should not receive serious consideration by the White House..." (1)

"[G]iven the close adjunct relationship which this function had with the [White House] special counsel’s office. . . , we were never quite sure who we were working for, the budget director or the counsel, but that didn’t really make too much difference.  The only time the budget director said we had to come back and check with him was if a very large amount of money was involved; otherwise we went ahead and worked with Clark Clifford and Charlie Murphy." (2)

"I worked closely with four presidents on the budget, and am often asked which of the four was most deeply involved in the budget process.  It has been an easy question to answer: President Truman.  He understood the budget process, having served on the Appropriations Committee in the Senate; he had a retentive mind and could remember figures from one year to the next; and he did his homework. . . .  [He] was the only president of the United States who ever held his own press briefing on the budget." (3)

- A founding member in 1939 of the American Society for Public Administration, which he later served as National President;

- A founding member in 1967 of the National Academy of Public Administration, which established an award in his honor; and

- A member or chairman of more than a dozen government commissions