A Strategy for the Seventies: Circular A-95 and US Regional Planning

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan issued Executive Order 12372, revoking a relatively obscure publication issued by the Office of Management and Budget in 1969, Circular No. A-95. One of many policy changes that were part of a broad effort to rebalance how power was shared between the federal government, the states, and municipalities, Reagan’s pen stroke ended what for many planners had been a critical piece of urban policy during the 1970s. Part of President Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s Great Society programs, an era when federal assistance to state and local governments in support of domestic policy increased significantly, A-95 had established a coordination and review process that local governments receiving federal funding for planning development projects would be required to follow. The program was designed to force local governments to engage in more comprehensive regional coordination. For the next 12 years, almost every planner across the country, at some point or another, worked within the A-95 process. But researchers who examined A-95 during its short life struggled to produce solid evidence of its effectiveness. Absent a clear metric of the program’s success or failure, the history and legacy of the A-95 program has since been largely neglected. This paper explores the history of Circular A-95, a booklet issued by the US Office of Management and Budget to guide the implementation of the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968. We argue that the rules contained in the A-95 circular should be understood as an effort to create a framework for regional planning. Using primary documents and secondary literature, we conclude that the program deserves to be re-read as an important attempt to use federal power to establish a pragmatic national planning policy in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century.