agencies. Oldest of all these Presidential agencies was the Office for
Emergency Management (OEM), which was created by an executive order
dated May 25, 1940. Others were the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW), the
National Housing Agency (NHA), the National War Labor Board (NWLB), or
more shortly (WLB), the Office of Censorship (OC), the Office of
Civilian Defense (OCD), the Office of Defense Transportation (ODT), the
Office of Facts and Figures (OFF), presently absorbed into the Office of
War Information (OWI), the War Production Board (WPB), which superseded
the earlier Office of Production Management (OPM), the War Manpower
Commission (WMC), etc. Earlier there had been the Office of Price
Administration and Civilian Supply (OPACS), but was replaced under the
Emergency Price Control Act of January 30, 1942, by OPA. Later OWI was
created by executive order, as was also the Office of Economic
Stabilization (OES). The Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion
(OWMR), one of the last of the war agencies to appear, was established
by the War Mobilization and Reconversion Act of October 3, 1944.[61]

CONSTITUTIONAL STATUS OF PRESIDENTIAL AGENCIES

The question of the legal status of the presidential agencies was dealt
with judicially but once. This was in the decision, in June 1944, of the
United States Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia in a case
styled Employers Group of Motor Freight Carriers _v._ National War Labor
Board,[62] which was a suit to annul and enjoin a "directive order" of
the War Labor Board. The Court refused the injunction on the ground that
at the time when the directive was issued any action of the Board was
"informatory," "at most advisory." In support of this view the Court
quoted approvingly a statement by the chairman of the Board itself:
"These orders are in reality mere declarations of the equities of each
industrial dispute, as determined by a tripartite body in which
industry, labor, and the public share equal responsibility; and the
appeal of the Board is to the moral obligation of employers and workers
to abide by the nonstrike, no-lock-out agreement and * * * to carry out
the directives of the tribunal created under that agreement by the
Commander in Chief." Nor, the Court continued, had the later War Labor
Disputes Act vested War Labor Board's orders with any greater authority,
with the result that they were still judicially unenforceable and
unreviewable. Following this theory