The last federal bureaucrat recently vacated a pinkish brown, glass-box office building at 2000 M Street, Northwest, in Washington, D.C., leaving the premises to the remodeler's work. Although nestled anonymously among its neighbors in the city's new west end, this building was the headquarters for a unique, decade-long attempt at federal economic regulation. It is not likely the building will ever be listed in the National Register of Historic Places. A hundred years hence Washington's springtime tourists will not stand in hushed awe in the meeting room of the Pay Board or marvel at the computer center from which the petroleum allocation program was managed during the Arab oil boycott of 1974. The decisions of the various offices of exceptions and appeals will not be printed on insect- and time-defying paper and bound in sturdy red buckram. The names of the generals in America's first peacetime economic stabilization and resource allocation program are not likely to be remembered, except by those who were directly affected by their decisions.

Yet what went on at 2000 M Street between 1971 and 1981 was important. The activities this building housed—1971 Wage-Price Freeze; Cost of Living Council Phases I, II, III, and IV; the petroleum allocation and pricing programs of the Federal Energy Administration; and the Economic Regulatory Administration of the Department of Energy—all had a lasting impact upon American economic conditions and public administration. In many respects, what happened to the