I propose, therefore, that we reduce the present 12 Cabinet Departments to eight.

I propose that the Departments of State, Treasury, Defense, and Justice remain, but that all the other departments be consolidated into four:  Human Resources, Community Development, Natural Resources, and Economic Development.

Let us look at what these would be: 

—­First, a department dealing with the concerns of people—­as individuals, as members of a family—­a department focused on human needs.

—­Second, a department concerned with the community—­rural communities and urban communities—­and with all that it takes to make a community function as a community.

—­Third, a department concerned with our physical environment, with the preservation and balanced use of those great natural resources on which our Nation depends.

—­And fourth, a department concerned with our prosperity—­with our jobs, our businesses, and those many activities that keep our economy running smoothly and well.

Under this plan, rather than dividing up our departments by narrow subjects, we would organize them around the great purposes of government.  Rather than scattering responsibility by adding new levels of bureaucracy, we would focus and concentrate the responsibility for getting problems solved.

With these four departments, when we have a problem we will know where to go—­and the department will have the authority and the resources to do something about it.

Over the years we have added departments and created agencies at the Federal level, each to serve a new constituency, to handle a particular task—­and these have grown and multiplied in what has become a hopeless confusion of form and function.

The time has come to match our structure to our purposes—–­to look with a fresh eye, to organize the Government by conscious, comprehensive design to meet the new needs of a new era.

One hundred years ago, Abraham Lincoln stood on a battlefield and spoke of a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”  Too often since then, we have become a nation of the Government, by the Government, for the Government.

By enacting these reforms, we can renew that principle that Lincoln stated so simply and so well.

By giving everyone’s voice a chance to be heard, we will have government that truly is of the people.

By creating more centers of meaningful power, more places where decisions that really count can be made, by giving more people a chance to do something, we can have government that truly is by the people.

And by setting up a completely modern, functional system of government at the national level, we in Washington will at last be able to provide government that is truly for the people.

I realize that what I am asking is that not only the executive branch in Washington but that even this Congress will have to change by giving up some of its power.