Abstract

"Seventies-Era High Technology Entrepreneur Expertise in the Public Interest: Roy Ash and Nixon-era Conglomerate Approaches to Federal Government Reorganization "

Andrew McGee, Smithsonian Institution (andrew.mcgee@gmail.com)

This paper explores the public service career of Roy Ash, co-founder of mid-century, Southern California-based aerospace electronics conglomerate Litton Industries. By the late 1960s, Ash had cast his public-facing lot with the Nixon Administration, styling himself as a “tech industry” entrepreneur who could bring a fresh “business mindset” to the task of government reorganization under Nixonian New Federalism. From chair of the President’s Advisory Council on Executive Organization in 1969 to eventually becoming the first director of the reorganized Office of Management and Budget in the 1973, few figures primarily associated with the private sector have had as significant a role in reshaping the bureaucratic functioning of the 20th century administrative state. Drawing on Ash’s own government documents and speeches, period news reports and magazine profiles, and later assessments of government reorganization, this paper examines Ash’s public service career through the framing of his identity as a “high technology-savvy” entrepreneur introducing new, conglomerate-derived methods of management to the Nixon White House. A direct throughline can be traced from Ash’s model to later calls in the 1990s and 2010s for tech-sector reformation of executive branch procedure.