THIS IS A BOOK THAT IS LIKELY TO STIR HEATED DEBATE IN SOME PARTS OF the public management community in terms of both substance and methodological approach. It emphasizes problems and limitations that have emerged from a path and agenda that represent some core beliefs of the public administration/public management field. The book’s approach emerged because I have attempted to sort out the differences between the reforms that come from those core beliefs and the acknowledgment that there are issues that cannot be resolved in a way that satisfies many scholars and practitioners. So I begin this volume in the...

IT IS NOT SURPRISING THAT THE US PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION FIELD DURING the twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries has emerged with a strong interest in management reform. Growth in the role of government in the American society during this period has provoked attention to the way that the public sector operates. At the same time, major shifts in the US economy have challenged the assumption that the United States will continue to expand and grow. This has occurred at all levels of government, illustrated by efforts in state, local, and federal jurisdictions.

It is not an exaggeration, however, to characterize...

ONE OF THE CONSTANT THEMES IN THE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION LITERAture revolves around the debate about the relationship between public management and private management.¹ This topic is found throughout the history of the academic public administration field, and the debate about similarities and differences between the two sectors is chronicled in a wide range of journals and books. The exchange takes many different forms, a number of which relate to or have an impact on the topic of federal management reform. Despite its constancy as a topic, the pendulum of opinion has swung back and forth over the years, emphasizing either...

AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF GLOBALIZATION IS ONE OF THE DISTINCT changes that has occurred in the public administration/management field over the past two decades. Developments in technology and travel opportunities over these years have almost erased the boundary lines between domestic American administrative scholarship and what has traditionally been termed “comparative administration.”¹

Even the Government Accountability Office (which usually focuses only on behaviors and issues within the United States) has found it useful to draw on examples across the globe as it examined a number of administrative reform efforts within the federal government.² Evidence of globalization is found in the programs...

THE FEDERAL MANAGEMENT REFORM EFFORT THAT DEALS MOST DIRECTLY with the relationship between the public and private sectors is found in circular A-76, issued originally as an executive order by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966. While this is the official pronouncement that has served as the basis for subsequent changes, it was not the first time that competition between the federal government and the private sector was on the policy agenda.¹

Indeed, the outlines for what can be called “the contract state” date back to the Revolutionary War and stimulated attention by the framers of the Constitution. Phillip Cooper has...

MOST OF THE REFORM AREAS THAT ARE INCLUDED IN THIS BOOK RARELY provoke the interest of the general population, and few make the headlines of daily newspapers or coverage on nightly network news. But personnel policy reform is an exception to this pattern. It is common for Americans to link their skepticism about the role of government to the individuals who work for the government. There has been a tendency within the United States to hold those individuals—often career civil servants—responsible for the policies that they implement that may not be popular in all parts of the American...

YEARS AGO HAROLD SEIDMAN INTRODUCED HIS BOOK ON FEDERAL ORGANIzation by writing: “Reorganization has become almost a religion in Washington. . . . Reorganization is deemed synonymous with reform and reform with progress. Periodic reorganizations are prescribed if for no other purpose than to purify the bureaucratic blood and to prevent stagnation. Opposition to reorganization is evil.”¹

This chapter deals with federal government reforms involving reorganization. It examines the authority provided to the president to make these moves with limited congressional controls, the ways that this authority has been used, and the arguments that have been devised to support reorganization...

THERE IS PERHAPS NO OTHER REFORM AREA THAT MORE DRAMATICALLY illustrates the difference between a parliamentary system and the US system of shared powers than the budget process. For years I would be asked the same question by Australian friends when the US president released his budget: “Tell me again, what does that budget mean?” It was difficult to explain to my friends that many presidential budgets were dead on arrival to Congress and that observers of the American scene should not focus on that document to determine what policies and programs would be supported with federal dollars.

For someone...

IT IS SOMEWHAT UNUSUAL TO FIND A DISCUSSION OF FEDERALISM AND intergovernmental relations (IGR) included as one of the topics in the management reform portfolio. But the debate over these issues illustrates a number of the elements that are found in other reform issues and discussed in this book. Many of the scholars who focus on federalism and IGR tend to downplay the management aspects of federalism and intergovernmental relations and, instead, emphasize such topics as fiscal patterns, structure of government, and constitutional requirements and legal limitations.¹ While all of these topics clearly influence management behaviors and expectations, efforts to...

EFFORTS TO INTRODUCE PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT PROCESSES INTO the federal government can be viewed both as ends in themselves as well as means to other management reform goals. Performance measurement activities have been linked in one way or another to other reform efforts discussed in this volume. In large part they are a way of answering the “so what” question. They have been initiated as ways to assess impacts of contracts, to determine how personnel changes meet their goals, to reveal whether reorganization efforts achieve what has been proposed, to determine whether budget proposals are made on the basis of performance...

THIS DISCUSSION OF SIX DIFFERENT MANAGEMENT REFORM EFFORTS IN THE US federal system indicates that there is a variety of approaches that make up the management reform portfolio. Each of the efforts discussed in this book—budgeting, reorganization, personnel management, contracting, federalism, and performance measurement—represents a specialized community within the public management field, defined by experts, theories, and explicit agendas for change. Many of these efforts emerged from attempts to make government more like a business, highlighting competition, entrepreneurism, markets, and efficiency. Several of the efforts were accompanied by support of interest groups that could advocate for them within...