Word: oeo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...first problem was what to call the new agency. "War on Poverty" had to be dropped because it formed an acronym offensive to Italians; the pallid OEO was adopted instead. To avoid a recurrence of New Dealish alphabet-soup titles, programs were given catchy names rather than initials. VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) was an exception, and so was CAP (Community Action Program). At the local level, though, it was acronyms aweigh. Detroit opened TAP (Total Action Against Poverty). New York insisted on BEST (Basic Essential Skills Training) and QUEST (Queens Educational and Social Team). There was PROP (Portland...
Whipcracking Impatience. Ignoring the guffaws, Shriver brought to the task of shaping programs the same idealism and frenetic urgency with which he infused the Peace Corps. At the suggestion of Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, a longtime friend of the President's who was then a Washington lawyer, OEO was set up as a separate executive office with direct administrative control over three of the war's eight major programs (Community Action, the Job Corps and VISTA) and supervisory responsibility for others at the federal, state and local levels...
Among the major OEO programs that were created...
...fully one-fourth of the youths drawing salaries came from families well above the poverty line. One indiscreet Youth Corps girl tooled to work in a 1965 Thunderbird, was asked to resign. In Macoupin County, Ill., Democratic officials turned the program into a patronage pie for their children until OEO found out and ordered 83 youngsters dropped. Protested one $9,000-a-year Democrat jobholder whose stepson was bounced: "He comes from a broken home, don't he? Anyway, to the victors goes the spoils. You know what I mean...
...success last summer, the President announced plans to turn Head Start into a year-round program for 350,000 needy children, only to discover that it would have cost three times as much money as was available. The upshot was an administrative nightmare. Communities deluged Washington with applications, and OEO had to reject or pigeonhole scores of them...