The 1915 reorganization report exhaustively catalogued all 187 state agencies

Evidence

The commission’s recommendations, which took 44 pages to summarize, were backed up with 375 pages of remarkable detail. The governments of other states—every other state—were analyzed. So were every one of New York State’s 187 agencies. Included were descriptions of each agency’s powers, tabulations of the laws which had, over the years, given them those powers, analyses of how their powers overlapped those of other agencies, descriptions of the power they would be given under the proposed reorganization plan, lists of the personnel of every existing and every proposed agency, the salaries and duties of the personnel, the organization charts (some of which, folded for inclusion in the bound report, opened out to a full five feet in length). — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 465

Categorization

• XREF: The five-foot organization charts and exhaustive agency-by-agency catalog recall how bureaucracies visualize and itemize themselves—parallels Max Weber’s rationalization-of-the-state theme. — connects to: New York’s 1915 state government was fragmented across 169 overlapping agencies — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 417