Memo Review - Establishing the President's Community Enterprise Board

President Clinton’s Memorandum Establishing the President’s Community Enterprise Board
September 9, 1993

On September 9, 1993, President Bill Clinton issued a memorandum to the Vice President, seventeen Cabinet secretaries, and senior agency heads establishing the President’s Community Enterprise Board. The memo came weeks after Clinton signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which created the Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities (EZ/EC) program, the centerpiece of the Administration’s urban and rural revitalization agenda.  The program established tax incentives, flexible grants, and regulatory relief to high-poverty communities, together forming the most ambitious federal place-based development effort since Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1966 Model Cities initiative. President

Clinton’s memo sought to stand up the interagency architecture needed to implement this significant new authority successfully.

The memorandum does three things. First, it creates the Community Enterprise Board, chaired by the Vice President, with the Assistants to the President for Domestic Policy and Economic Policy as Vice-Chairs. Second, it directs named agencies to identify, within fifteen days, existing programs whose funds can be channeled toward designated zones and communities. Third, it orders Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Department of Agriculture (Agriculture), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to issue implementing regulations by November 1, 1993, aligning Title XX social services grants with the Act’s criteria. It further directs board members to recommend designation criteria, identify relevant legislative mandates, and advise on regulatory exemptions within their jurisdictions, in line with the goals of the effort.

President Clinton’s memorandum is mostly effective in that it is:

• Clear: The opening paragraph frames the challenge (distressed communities need coordinated federal support) and immediately announces the Board as the solution. Each subsequent section delivers a specific directive to named officials. A reader finishing the memo knows exactly who is responsible, for what, and by when.
• Cohesive: The memo moves logically from problem to structure to directives to deadlines, matching the implementation timeline. It invokes the National Performance Review’s cross-agency philosophy, links it to the empowerment zone legislation, and then spells out obligations. Each paragraph picks up where the last left off.
• Credible: Its credibility comes from two sources: positional authority (the assertive, declarative tone of a presidential directive) and statutory grounding (the memo cites the specific legislation and grant program by public law number). This legal precision provides the confidence and legal grounding needed to act. However, the memo does not provide much about the severity of the problem it addresses.

In addition to enhanced data, the memo could be marginally improved in terms of being: 

• Concise: Several passages are written more like dense legislative drafting than executive communication. For example, the directive on Title XX grants packs three significant conditions into a single clause, without signaling their hierarchy. That said, at roughly two pages, the memo is overall quite concise.
• Compelling: The memo is effective but not particularly rhetorically engaging. Its closest motivating vision is a passing reference to helping “distressed communities and American families achieve economic self-sufficiency,” which feels rather flat for a call to action. A sentence or two grounding the reader in the human stakes of these communities might have given the directives more direct urgency.
• Concrete: The memo is highly concrete in its procedural directives. It names every official responsible, sets firm deadlines, and specifies authorizing legislation down to the subchapter. However, it falls short in describing the problem. “Distressed urban and rural communities” is the only characterization of the communities the empowerment zones are meant to help, and the memo doesn’t describe what successful revitalization would look like. It tells readers exactly what to do, but not so exactly what they are actually working toward.

Overall, Clinton’s memorandum represents a strong example of presidential, directive policy writing. Its structure flows naturally and logically, its instructions are actionable and specific, and its legal citations are precise. The memo might have been stronger if it had simplified its sentence structures, grounded its opening in a concrete description of the communities at stake and the consequences of inaction, and named what success would look like for these communities and for the Federal Government.

Memo Source: Clinton, William J. “Memorandum Establishing the President’s Community Enterprise Board.” September 9, 1993. The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/memorandum-establishing-the-presidents-community-enterprise-board