In his first annual message to Congress on 3 December 1929, President Hoover remarked that it had been a committee of distinguished experts ‘under American leadership’ that proposed a plan ‘looking to a revision’ of the ex-allied powers' reparations claims against Germany. In his words, his administration had ‘denied itself any participation in the war settlement of general reparations’ as US claims were ‘comparatively small’, arising mainly from ‘the costs of the army of occupation’. Thus, in effect, the calibration of US interest in adopting even an informal role in the process of forging a further, final reparations settlement was distinctly different from what had informed Hughes' policy in 1924. This was underscored by the Hoover administration's original refusal, still maintained in mid-January 1929, to endorse Owen Young as chairman of the expert committee.

Subsequently, Kellogg informed Ambassador Howard ‘in strict confidence’ that while Washington still saw the political responsibility for settling reparations as lying with the European powers, it desired that they should have ‘any advice or assistance’ possible from American experts. Yet he also emphasised that the new US administration desired to leave matters largely ‘in the hands of Mr. Young’, after it had finally approved his chairmanship. As Castle noted, if the European governments ‘got in a jam where they could not organise’, Young would be asked to ‘communicate confidentially with the President’. But there would be no decisive engagement. Once they had commenced, the Hoover administration took care to dissociate itself from the Paris proceedings.