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IntroducingPublicAdministrationTextbookchapter3.pdf
85
CHAPTER
3
The Continuous Reinventing
of the Machinery of Government
Keynote: The New Feudalism 86
What Is the Machinery of
Government? 89
Fine-Tuning the Machinery 89 The Rise and Fall of Governmental
Machinery 90
The Administrative Architecture
of the US Government 91
Executive Branch Machinery 94 Separation of Powers 96
State and Local Government
Machinery 98
State Government 102 County Government 102 Municipal Government 104 Towns and Special Districts 105 Local Management Machinery 105 Metropolitan Government 106 Continuous State and Local
Reform 108
Reforming the National Machinery
of Government 108
The Brownlow Committee 110 The Hoover Commissions 111 The Ash Council 112 The President’s Private Sector Survey
on Cost Control 112 The National Performance Review:
“Reinventing Government” 113 Reinvention in Reverse 115 The Obama Revolution—The Return
of Big Government 116 The Micromanagers 117
The Pressure for Privatization 118
Strategies for Privatization 119 Privatization in the Military 120 The Nonprofit Gambit 122 The Faith-Based Initiative 123 Voluntarism and Philanthropy 125
A Case Study : The Revolution in the British Machinery of Government (1979–2014) 128
CHAPTER OUTLINE
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86 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
KEYNOTE : The New Feudalism
In 1958, economist John Kenneth Galbraith published The Affluent Society. This book described American society as one in which scarcity of resources was not a major problem but where “private affluence and public squalor” existed continu- ously side by side.
Today, this trend is becoming even more pronounced. Journalists such as Michael Lind are observing a “new feudalism” that “reverses the trend of the past thousand years toward the government’s provision of basic public goods such as policing, public roads and transport networks, and public schools.” Lind concludes that “in the United States—to a degree unmatched in any other industrialized democracy—these public goods are once again becoming private luxuries.”
When public services deteriorate—especially in urban areas—those with enough money, increasingly, buy their way out of the problem. They send their children to private schools and hire private police. And in the best feudal tradition, they retire each night behind walled towns where guards at a gate check the iden- tity of all who seek to enter. And we are not just talking about apartment buildings with doormen. We are talking about millions of citizens living in suburban “gated communities” with their own private police, private streets, and private parks.
While most popular in California, Texas, Arizona, Florida, and Virginia, such private residential communities are springing up throughout the United States, pat- terned after the comprehensive mini-cities that have long been popular with retirees in the Sunbelt. What is new is that middle- and upper-income families of all ages are opting to pay hefty private taxes (community fees) and submit to stringent environmental regulations to lead the good life away from urban ills. According to the American Housing Survey, conducted by the US Census Bureau, the number of people living in gated communities rose to almost 11 million households in the last census (2010), up from slightly more than 7 million in 2001. Ironically, according to political analyst Timothy Egan, “The very things that Republicans in Congress are trying to do away with for the nation as a whole—environmental protection, gun control, heavy regulation—are most pronounced in these predom- inantly Republican private enclaves.”
These new-fashioned feudalists, who are decidedly libertarian concerning the outside world, are surprisingly socialistic concerning the private, inside world of their gated mini-cities. They willingly accept a wide variety of community regula- tions that they would challenge as unconstitutional in other contexts—from gun control to restrictions on exterior paint colors, lawn maintenance standards, and prohibitions on basketball hoops over garages. Homeowners must abide by com- mon mandates, including the carrying of special identification, getting permission for more than a set number of visitors, and paying user fees for a wide variety of services such as trash collection, cable TV connections, and time on tennis courts.
The new feudalism also extends beyond the guarded gates. During the Mid- dle Ages, many of the castles on the Rhine River in Western Europe were built to enforce the collection of tolls on that portion of the river controlled by a local warlord. These modern day electronic “castles” can also enforce the collection of tolls on a similarly private means of transport. For example, the California Private Transportation Corporation, with state approval, built a ten-mile, $128 million,
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87Keynote: The New Feudalism
four-lane road in the median strip of an existing but highly congested southern California freeway in 1995. Users had to have a transponder installed on their vehicle’s windshield that can be read by an electronic monitor—the “castle”—as they entered the road. Periodically a computer billed the driver’s credit card or mailed an old-fashioned paper invoice. Anyone seeking to avoid these silent sen- tries would have their license plates photographed and face state-sanctioned fines of up to $300.
Gerald S. Pfeffer, the managing director of the corporation that built and oper- ated this road, which was the nation’s first fully automated toll road utilizing elec- tronic transponders to collect tolls, explained his company’s philosophy: “We’re another example of private enterprise filling a gap in government services—the Federal Express of roads.” But critics complained that the highway is elitist in that people who can afford the $2.50 rush-hour toll speed along in their luxury cars, while those who can’t afford an extra $5.00 a day—more than $1,000 a year—for the round trip must creep along with the poor on the old public freeway. Pfeffer sees nothing wrong with that: “You get what you pay for—the great American way.” Besides, toll roads and bridges have long been common in the United States. What was new here was someone collecting tolls for profit and not for govern- ments. But not for long either. In 2002, the Orange County Transportation Author- ity purchased the private project for $207 million and then operated the toll road (although admittedly it is somewhat surreal to drive by the empty toll booths con- structed for the road, as the Authority uses electronic toll collection or fast track cameras).
Millions of citizens obviously feel that having private police, roads, and parks are well worth the cost in money and possible personal restrictions. The problem is that the larger sense of community is often lost. Citizens living in their affluent private enclaves are less likely to vote for spending on public services that they do not use, such as traditional public schools, public parks, and public roads. Indeed, the California legislature specifically authorized the private road because it per- ceived that there was not sufficient public support to pay additional taxes for new public roads.
The result of this trend toward private services is that the needs of citizens who do not have a “going private” option may be ignored. And because these enclaved communities tend to be overwhelmingly white, this leads to a further balkanization of the body politic. The essential question here is: if certain citizens can afford to buy their way out of common public problems, what kind of public services does that leave for the rest of us? It used to be that the “leading” (meaning richer) citi- zens would make an effort to solve the problems of their communities because, for better or worse, they were part of it. Now they can just hide behind their walls.
Even people living in the heart of a big city can buy better public services for themselves by creating a “business improvement district”—a quasi-government paid for by taxes on property owners within the district. Almost a thousand of these districts nationwide provide extra sanitation, policing, and other services for their residents. New York City has perhaps the most extensive network—where over 69 different districts operate in the city as a public private partnership provid- ing an annual $100 million in services and programs, all under the coordination of the New York City Department of Small Business. Thus many of the richer
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88 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government
neighborhoods in New York City are cleaner and safer because their residents can afford to pay for private sanitation services and private police.
This new feudalism is just one side of the increasing privatization of the public sector: here, citizens, as is their right, buy the amount of “public” services they can afford. The other side of privatization has government itself contracting for the private provision of public functions. Thus increasingly trash is collected, public buildings are cleaned, and streets are repaired not by public employees but by pri- vate sector employees of companies with government contracts. This is often less expensive because such workers are typically paid less than public employees— especially when fringe benefits are considered.
The traditional machinery of government—the administrative structures by which public purposes are achieved—is increasingly being called into question by an angry citizenry that does not always see the contradiction between wanting ever greater government services at ever decreasing costs. Thus privatization, even with its feudal aspects, is seen by some as one means of lowering the overall costs of gov- ernment, by others as a means of reducing services to the poor, and by still others as a means of eliminating large elements of government altogether. But however it is viewed, and despite the continuing danger of social balkanization, it remains one of the most important tools in reinventing the machinery of government for the twenty-first century.
For Discussion: Why is it that citizens living in gated communities are less likely to be involved in civic affairs? What does the trend toward gated communities imply for overall public support for increasing taxes and improving public services?
BOX 3.1 Selling the Brooklyn Bridge!
Someday soon public sector infrastructure assets such as toll highways and bridges will be appearing in a pension or mutual fund near and dear to you. State and local governments throughout the nation are strapped for cash, anxious to downsize via privatization and increasingly seeing their saleable infrastructure as cash cows waiting to be milked (meaning sold or leased). Just as investment brokers packaged commercial real estate (apartments, office buildings, shopping centers, hotels, etc.) into Real Estate Investment Trusts now readily sold on stock markets, they are currently on the verge of packaging public sector infrastructure (highways, bridges, airports, water systems, etc.) into a new investment option. Tolls or user fees can yield substantial and consistent profits. For example, according to journalist Emily Thornton, “Roads to Riches” (Business Week, May 7,
2007), a $3.8 billion deal for a toll road in Indiana concluded in 2006, allows the investors to break even in year 15 of a 75-year lease. Thereafter, they expect to earn “as much as $32 billion in profits.” Analysts typically assess the value of infrastructure assets at 40 times annual toll revenues. At this rate, the Golden Gate Bridge at the head of San Francisco Bay could sell for $3.4 billion. Remember that old story about the city slicker having a bridge in Brooklyn to sell to some rube from the country? Well, it is no longer a joke. Thornton concludes: “If permission were granted by New York City to charge the same tolls as the George Washington Bridge, a private owner might shell out as much as $3.5 billion for it.” Then part ownership of the bridge could end up in your pension fund—and you could be that proverbial rube from the country.
C H A P T E R 3
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89What is the Machinery of Government?
WHAT IS THE MACHINERY OF GOVERNMENT?
The machinery of government consists of all of the structural arrangements adopted by national, state, or local governments to deliver their legally mandated programs and services. This of necessity includes the central management arrange- ments of government. In all jurisdictions, the organization and eventual reorga- nization of executive branch agencies is the everlasting machinery of government issue.
Fine-Tuning the Machinery
In 1733 English poet Alexander Pope wrote the following:
For forms of government let fools contest— That which is best administered is best.
These two lines from his An Essay on Man became so well known that Alexander Hamilton, in The Federalist, No. 68 (1788), took the trouble to quote them, denounce the sentiment as “political heresy,” and then go on to acknowledge, “Yet we may safely pronounce that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.” Ever since, one test of govern- ing efficacy has been Hamilton’s ideal of “good administration.” The machinery that a government creates to work its will must be judged by the quality of public administration that it yields. But many political analysts of Hamilton’s generation as well as today would argue that no matter how good the quality, it is the quantity that is the crucial thing. Senator Barry Goldwater’s often stated warning during his unsuccessful 1964 presidential campaign still resonates: “a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”
Hamilton’s contemporary, Thomas Paine, the pamphleteering propagandist of the American Revolution, wrote in Common Sense that “society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.” This certainly reflects the sentiments of the modern Republican Party in the United States. Indeed, this party took control of the US Congress during the 1994 midterm election, running on a platform that differs only in detail with Paine’s contention. This can all be summed up in the proposition that “government is best which governs least.” New England writer Henry David Thoreau began his famous 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience” with this motto, which has also been attributed to Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and many other doubting Thomases about government.
But if so many good and wise people believed so strongly that government should be “least,” how and why did it grow so large? Has the machine grown too big for its most elemental task of producing Hamilton’s “good administration”? The task of this chapter is to examine the machinery of government and its effects on administrations good and bad. Always remember, however, that most of the debates over reinventing government and the best public management practices are not about fundamentally changing the nature of governing institutions but
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90 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
about fine-tuning the machinery. To use a mobile metaphor: it’s not about rein- venting the automobile; it’s about getting more miles per gallon of fuel using fewer and less-expensive parts.
The Rise and Fall of Governmental Machinery
Whenever government seeks to address a major issue, it leaves new machinery in its wake. Thus the civil rights movement that began in the 1950s left the Commis- sion on Civil Rights (created in 1957) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (created in 1964). The environmental movement that began in the 1960s left the Environmental Protection Agency (created in 1970). The war on ter- rorism that started at the World Trade Center in 2001 has created the Department of Homeland Security. And the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009 left us with the The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and Automobile Recovery Task Force.
Governmental entities, once established, tend to last a long time and not change easily. They develop constituencies that support their cause. Often they take on new causes that also enhance their support. For example, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission initially dealt only with cases of workplace discrimi- nation. Today, as federal courts reinterpret the nature of discrimination, it is the nation’s prime enforcer of workplace sexual harassment prohibitions as well (see Chapter 12 for more on this).
There is gravity at work in the machinery of government. What goes up can also fall down. For example, the Civil Aeronautics Board, created by the federal government to regulate the airline industry in 1938, was abolished in 1985 as economic deregulation became fashionable. The Office of Technology Assessment, created in 1972 as a support agency of Congress to be an objective source of infor- mation on policy alternatives for technology-related issues, was abolished in 1995 as a newly elected Republican-controlled Congress sought to cut costs. In 1996 the Bureau of Mines within the Department of the Interior gave 1,200 of its employees the shaft. This 85-year-old agency was abolished by a Congress less interested in the concerns of big labor unions than in big-budget savings.
But even when a piece of the government machine is sliced off, it is seldom completely thrown away. For example, Bureau of Mines’ workers engaged in coal mine safety were transferred to the Fossil Energy Division of the Department of Energy. And even the most fervent advocates of abolishing the Department of Com- merce believe it would be wise to retain the National Weather Service and the Bureau of the Census, even if only in scaled-down forms. This can even apply to rel- atively new government creations. Take, for example, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. This is the non-partisan, non-political agency originally created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) with two goals:
To provide transparency of ARRA-related funds To detect and prevent fraud, waste, and mismanagement of those funds
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91The Administrative Architecture of the US Government
Later, through the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2012, the Board’s authority was expanded to include oversight of all federal funding for the post-economic recovery efforts supported by the federal government. Then under the Disaster Appropriations Act of 2013, the Board was mandated by Congress to use its resources to provide oversight of Hurricane Sandy funding.
In the United States, the national machinery of government is far more inher- ently conservative and, in consequence, far more hesitant to change than many other comparable—albeit smaller—democracies, such as Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. However difficult to change, the elements of the machinery of gov- ernment are not immutable. They can and should be changed as societal needs alter. There is one commonly asked machinery-of-government question. It was posed by Representative Newt Gingrich in a December 1994 speech accepting his par- ty’s nomination to be Speaker of the House: “When you see a large government bureaucracy, is it an inevitable relic of the past that can’t be changed, or is it an opportunity for an extraordinary transformation to provide better services and better opportunities at lower cost?” This is one of those questions for which there is only one possible answer: everybody wants “better services” and “lower costs.” But are you willing to tinker with your government machine to get them? One need only look at the recent effort by French President Francoise Hollande to redraw the French administrative regions from 22 to 14—in an effort to reduce levels and layers of bureaucracy which was met with widespread disapproval and scathing criticism (Bilefsky, 2014).
THE ADMINISTRATIVE ARCHITECTURE
OF THE US GOVERNMENT
A constitution provides the basic political and legal structure, the architecture, that prescribes the rules by which a government operates. James Madison wrote in The Federalist, No. 57 (1788), that “the aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.” While Madison asserted that the first aim was to find appropriate “men,” he would certainly reconsider that word if he were writing today. To be sure, he would use a sexually neutral term such as people, individuals, or persons. But this does not go far enough—because the primary task of rulers in all modern constitutional systems is administration. So “administrators” should replace “men” in Madison’s political philosophy because administrators are those who run a constitution. The echo of Woodrow Wilson’s famous statement that “it is getting harder to run a constitution than to frame one” is loud and clear (Wilson, 1887). Madison is generally considered the primary framer of the Constitution. But if he had lived to see what his handiwork had wrought, he would be much more concerned about running it.
The Constitution, with its famous opening words “We the people,” asserts that the source of its authority is the people as opposed to the states. It then assigns
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92 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
powers to the various branches of government and in doing so, structures the gov- ernment. It limits the powers that any branch may have through a system of checks and balances. Most significantly, it denies certain powers to the national govern- ment by reserving them for the states and the people.
American politics has grown up around the Constitution and has therefore been “constitutionalized.” Many domestic political issues are eventually treated in constitutional terms—for example, civil rights, crime, pornography, abortion, and impeachment, to name but some of the more obvious cases. Only the realm of foreign affairs has substantially escaped this tendency, although the war on terror has increasingly brought back questions of the rights of prisoners to the American courts. In addressing matters of government and politics, Americans are likely to pose as the first question, “Is it constitutional?” Only afterward is the desirability of specific policies and government arrangements considered on their own merits. In the 1819 case of McCulloch v. Maryland, the Supreme Court explained how to tell if something is constitutional: “Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are constitutional.”
Unlike the British parliamentary machinery of government that evolved over hundreds of years, the American machinery was created at one moment in time for its specific purpose. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was truly the world’s first inventing-government movement. And the government it created was designed to be inefficient. Because of their experiences under British rule, Americans have historically been suspicious of a too-efficient government, feeling that an overly efficient administration of public affairs could eventually eat into political liberties. Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for the Court in Immigration and Naturaliza- tion Service v. Chadha (1983), offered this opinion:
It is crystal clear from the records of the [Constitutional] Convention, contemporaneous writings and debates, that the Framers ranked other values higher than efficiency. . . . The choices we discern as having been made in the Constitutional Convention impose burdens on governmental processes that often seem clumsy, inefficient, and even unworkable, but those hard choices were consciously made by men who had lived under a form of government that permitted arbitrary governmental acts to go unchecked.
The modern US Supreme Court then reaffirmed the value of inefficiency when it asserted in the Chadha case that “there is no support in the Constitution or deci- sions of this Court for the proposition that the cumbersomeness and delays often encountered in complying with explicit Constitutional standards may be avoided, either by the Congress or by the president.” The Court unanimously declared its support for red tape, the treasured procedural safeguards that protect us even when we do not wish to be protected, and the law’s delay. And they have done this as they stated in the Chadha case because “with all the obvious flaws of delay, untidiness, and potential for abuse, we have not yet found a better way to preserve freedom than by making the exercise of power subject to the carefully crafted restraints spelled out in the Constitution.”
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93The Administrative Architecture of the US Government
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94 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
Executive Branch Machinery
One glance at an organization chart of the US government and we can see imme- diately that the most complex part of the machinery of government lies in the executive branch; the other two branches seem small by comparison, with compar- atively few subdivisions (see Figure 3.1). While the inefficiency of the separation of powers is to be highly valued for its protection of basic liberties, this is no excuse for individual agencies to be inefficient as organizations. Indeed, the whole thrust of American public administration reform over the past century has been to create efficient subunits within an overall inefficient system.
Although the executive branch has the most complex structure, the other two branches are also of interest from a machinery-of-government point of view. For example, the US Supreme Court has ultimate administrative responsibility for the entire federal court system. And while most citizens know that the legislative branch contains the Senate and the House of Representatives, not so many realize that other important agencies are located in this branch, ranging from the Architect of the Capitol and the US Botanic Garden to the Library of Congress and the Gov- ernment Accountability Office (GAO). This last agency is of critical importance, allowing Congress to exercise financial oversight of the executive branch. The GAO would be severely diminished if its functions were located within the executive branch, as it frequently is within democracies based on the British parliamentary system. (The GAO’s work is discussed in more detail in Chapter 14.)
The executive branch, headed by the president, contains the machinery that serves to implement national policies established by both constitutional and legis- lative means. There are three main categories of organizations in the structure of the executive branch: (1) executive office agencies, (2) executive departments, and (3) independent public bodies.
Executive Office Agencies The Executive Office of the President (EOP) is an umbrella office consisting of the top presidential staff agencies that provide the president help and advice in carrying out major responsibilities. These include, as you might expect, some agencies that are concerned with “head office” functions of policy, planning, and resource allocation, such as the Office of Management and Budget, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the National Security Council. But some exist to signify important national priorities, such as the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Council on Environmental Quality.
Executive Departments There are 15 executive departments. As a group, they constitute the president’s cabinet. This is an institution whose existence relies on custom rather than constitutional provision, even though its chief members, the secretaries of the federal executive departments, must be approved by the Senate. It came into being as a single body because President George Washington found it useful to meet with the chiefs of the several executive departments. While all subsequent presidents have considered it necessary to meet with the cabinet, their attitudes toward the institution and its members have varied greatly. Some presi- dents have convened their cabinet only for the most formal and routine matters, while others have relied on it for advice and support. The president’s cabinet differs
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95The Administrative Architecture of the US Government
from the cabinet in the British parliamentary system in that, in the United States, the executive power is not shared by the cabinet as a whole but is constitution- ally vested solely in the president. This is famously illustrated by a story about Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War he called his cabinet together to discuss a pressing matter of war policy. Wanting to get a sense of their feelings, he called for a vote. They all voted “nay.” Lincoln alone voted “aye.” Yet, as president, he declared, “The ayes have it.”
At the present time, cabinet membership consists of the secretaries of 15 execu- tive departments, the newest member being the secretary of Homeland Security. But a substantial part of the executive branch is not represented in the cabinet. From the earliest days, presidents have accorded to others the privilege of attending and participating in cabinet meetings. In recent years, the US ambassador to the United Nations and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, among others, have been accorded cabinet rank to symbolize the importance of the functions they represent. However, not all cabinet members are equal. The “inner” cabinet refers to the federal departments of State, Defense, Treasury, and Justice—because they (and their secretaries) tend to be more prominent and influential in every adminis- tration than the rest of the cabinet. While all cabinet secretaries are equal in rank and salary, the missions of those in the inner cabinet tend to give them an advan- tage in prestige, access, and visibility denied to those who head the remaining (the “outer”) cabinet.
For better or worse, according to political scientists Edward Weisband and Thomas M. Frank (1975), “Cabinet meetings in the United States, despite occa- sional efforts to make them into significant decision-making occasions, have, at least in this century, been characterized as vapid nonevents in which there has been a deliberate nonexchange of information as part of a process of mutual nonconsul- tation.” The president’s cabinet has never functioned as a unified team. The Ameri- can machinery of government, which requires cabinet secretaries to be responsible both to the president and the Congress (with its competing interests) makes that virtually impossible.
The structure of US government departments is a reasonably deft selection of topics likely to need a national focus by government. But these topics are not the only ones that could be represented at this level. They represent choices among com- peting priorities. There is no federal Department of the Environment, for example, which means that environmental issues must be voiced through other departments. While the Clinton administration called for such a new department, its Republican opposition in the Congress not only opposed it but made efforts to repeal much of the environmental protection legislation such a department would administer.
Independent Public Bodies Independent establishments and government corpo- rations form the third main area of the US national machinery of government. They range in purpose from public business corporations (such as the US Postal Service, the Export-Import Bank of the United States, and Amtrak—the National Railroad Passenger Corporation) to important regulators and watchdogs (such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Commission on Civil Rights) to foundations committed to worthy purposes (such as the National Science Founda- tion and the African Development Foundation).
Corporation
An organization formed under state or federal law that exists, for legal purposes, as a separate being or an artifi cial person. It may be public (set up by the government) or private (set up by individuals), and it may be created to carry on a business or to perform almost any function. It may be owned by the government or by a few persons, or it may be a “publicly owned corporation”—owned by members of the general public who buy its shares on an open stock market such as the New York Stock Exchange.
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96 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
A regulatory commission is an independent agency established by Congress to regulate some aspect of US economic life. Among these are the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Such agencies are, of course, not independent of the US government. They are sub- ject to the laws under which they operate as these laws are enacted and amended by Congress. Independent agencies and regulatory commissions can be divided into two categories: (1) those units under the direct supervision and guidance of the president, and therefore responsible to him, and (2) those not under such supervi- sion and guidance, and therefore not responsible to him.
Independent executive agencies, with rare exceptions, are headed by single administrators appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. These administrators serve at the pleasure of the president and can be removed by the pres- ident at any time. In addition, they must submit their budget requests to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is located within the Executive Office of the President, for review and clearance. Examples of independent executive agen- cies include the Central Intelligence Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the General Services Administration, and the Small Business Administration.
Government corporation is the term used for a government-owned corpora- tion or an agency of government that administers a self-supporting enterprise in the following situations:
1. When an agency’s business is essentially commercial. 2. When an agency can generate its own revenue. 3. When the agency’s mission requires greater flexibility than government
agencies normally have.
Examples of federal government corporations include the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Amtrak, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. At the state and municipal lev- els, corporations (often bearing different names, such as authorities) operate enterprises such as turnpikes, airports, and harbors. As we discuss later in this chapter, there has been an increased push, especially under Republican admin- istrations, for many government corporations to be dissolved or sold to private entities.
Separation of Powers
The executive branch organizations discussed in the previous section maintain important powers within their individual spheres. But as even the most casual observer of American government will recognize those powers are significantly constrained by the core principle of separation of powers established by the Constitu- tion. This separation of powers among executive, legislative, and judicial branches, in theory, makes a tyrannical concentration of power impossible. While the Con- stitution contains provisions in separate articles for the three branches of govern- ment, there is a significant difference in the grants of power to these branches: the
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97The Administrative Architecture of the US Government
first article, dealing with legislative power, vests in the Congress “all legislative powers herein granted”; the second article vests “the executive power” in the pres- ident; and the third article states that “the judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” The drafters of the Constitution were very familiar with Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1783) which asserted that: “In all tyrannical governments the supreme magis- tracy, or the right both of making and of enforcing the laws, is vested in one and the same man, or one and the same body of men; and wherever these two powers are united together, there can be no public liberty.” Thus Justice Louis D. Brandeis writes in Myers v. United States 272 US 293 (1926): “The doctrine of the sepa- ration of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787, not to promote effi- ciency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was, not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy.”
Viewing the relationships between the administration of Barack Obama and the Republican-controlled House of Represenatives in 2011 provided observers with a contemporary example of just the types of friction that Brandeis described over 80 years ago.
But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must
first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other— that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.
Source: James Madison (1788) The Federalist No. 51.
BOX 3.2 James Madison on the Separation of Powers
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98 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT MACHINERY
American subnational governments are individually smaller than the national gov- ernment but collectively far larger (see Table 3.1). The number of public employees is a good indicator of this disparity. The federal government, excluding the armed forces, has just about 2.7 million civilian employees. But state and local employ- ment exceeds 17 million. The machinery of government at the state and local levels parallels the national model with legislative, executive, and judicial branches. The Tenth Amendment, the last part of the Bill of Rights, holds that the “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” This means that whatever the federal government cannot constitutionally do for the people, the states and their subunits must or may do. Significantly, the national Constitution does not mention cities, counties, or any other type of local government. They are all crea- tures of their states; their powers are derived from state law; and what a state gives a state may later take away.
TABLE 3.1
Governments in the United States 2012
State Ranked
by Size
(square miles)
General Purpose Governments
Special Purpose
Govts
Total All
Governments Counties Municipal
Towns/
Townships
School
Districts
Special
Districts
United States 90,056 3031 19,519 16,360 12,880 38,266
NorthEast
Rhode Island 1,544
133 - 8 31 4 90
Delaware 2,488
339 3 57 - 19 260
Connecticut 5,543
643 - 30 149 17 447
New Jersey 8,722
1,344 21 324 242 523 234
New Hampshire 9,349
541 10 13 221 166 131
Vermont 9,616
738 14 43 237 291 153
Massachusetts 10,544
857 5 53 298 84 417
Maryland 12,405
347 23 157 - - 167
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99State and Local Government Machinery
TABLE 3.1
Governments in the United States 2012
State Ranked
by Size
(square miles)
General Purpose Governments
Special Purpose
Govts
Total All
Governments Counties Municipal
Towns/
Townships
School
Districts
Special
Districts
United States 90,056 3031 19,519 16,360 12,880 38,266
Maine 35,379
840 16 22 466 99 237
Pennsylvania 46,054
4,897 66 1,015 1,546 514 1,756
New York 54,554
3,453 57 614 929 679 1,174
South
West Virginia 24,230
659 55 232 - 55 317
South Carolina 32,020
678 46 270 - 83 279
Kentucky 40,407
1,338 118 418 - 174 628
Tennessee 42,144
916 92 345 - 14 465
Virginia 42,774
518 95 229 - 1 193
Mississippi 48,431
983 82 298 - 164 439
Louisiana 52,378
529 60 304 - 69 96
Alabama 52,420
1,208 67 461 - 132 548
Arkansas 53,178
1,556 75 502 - 239 740
North Carolina 53,819
973 100 553 - - 320
Georgia 59,425
1,378 153 535 - 180 510
Florida 65,757
1,650 66 410 - 95 1,079
Missouri 69,706
3,768 114 954 312 534 1,854
(Continued)
(Continued)
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100 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
TABLE 3.1
Governments in the United States 2012
State Ranked
by Size
(square miles)
General Purpose Governments
Special Purpose
Govts
Total All
Governments Counties Municipal
Towns/
Townships
School
Districts
Special
Districts
United States 90,056 3031 19,519 16,360 12,880 38,266
Oklahoma 69,898
1,852 77 590 - 550 635
Texas 268,596
5,147 254 1,214 - 1,079 2,600
Midwest
Indiana 36,419
2,709 91 569 1,006 291 752
Ohio 44,825
3,842 88 937 1,308 668 841
Iowa 56,272
1,947 99 947 - 366 535
Illinois 57,913
6,963 102 1,298 1,431 905 3,227
Wisconsin 65,496
3,128 72 596 1,255 440 765
South Dakota 70,115
1,983 66 311 907 152 547
North Dakota 70,698
2,685 53 357 1,313 183 779
Nebraska 77,347
2,581 93 530 417 272 1,269
Kansas 82,278
3,826 103 626 1,268 306 1,523
Minnesota 86,935
3,672 87 853 1,784 338 610
Michigan 96,713
2,875 83 533 1,240 576 443
West
Hawaii 10,931
21 3 1 - - 17
Washington 71,297
1,900 39 281 - 295 1,285
Idaho 83,568
1,168 44 200 - 118 806
(Continued)
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101State and Local Government Machinery
TABLE 3.1
Governments in the United States 2012
State Ranked
by Size
(square miles)
General Purpose Governments
Special Purpose
Govts
Total All
Governments Counties Municipal
Towns/
Townships
School
Districts
Special
Districts
United States 90,056 3031 19,519 16,360 12,880 38,266
Utah 84,935
622 29 245 - 41 307
Wyoming 97,813
805 23 99 - 55 628
Oregon 98,378
1,542 36 241 - 230 1,035
Colorado 104,093
2,905 62 271 - 180 2,392
Nevada 110,571
191 16 19 - 17 139
Arizona 113,990
674 15 91 - 242 326
New Mexico 121,590
863 33 103 - 96 631
Montana 147,039
1,265 54 129 - 319 763
California 163,694
4,425 57 482 - 1,025 2,861
Alaska 665,384
177 14 148 - - 15
Source: US Census of Governments (2012) Available at: http://www.census.gov/govs/nts
The primacy of state over local law is the essence of Dillon’s rule—a rule famously formulated by Judge John F. Dillon in his 1911 Commentaries on the Law of Municipal Corporations. The rule outlines criteria developed by state courts to determine the nature and extent of powers granted to local governments. It holds that municipal corporations have only those powers (1) expressly granted in the city charter, (2) necessarily or fairly implied by or incidental to formally expressed powers, and (3) essential to the declared purposes of the corporation. “Any fair, reasonable, substantial doubt” about a power is to result in denying that power to the corporation. In some states, the rule has been relaxed, especially in dealing with home rule cities. The essence of Dillon’s rule was upheld by the Supreme Court in Trenton v. State of New Jersey (1913).
(Continued)
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102 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
State Government
The elected chief executive of a state government is the governor. The responsibil- ities of a governor usually parallel those of a US president, on a smaller scale, but each governor has only the powers granted to the office by the state constitution. Some states severely limit executive powers, while others give their governors pow- ers, such as the item veto, that are greater than those possessed by the president of the United States. The term of office for a governor is four years in all states except Arkansas, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont, where it is two. Currently, 38 states have limits on the number of terms that their governors can serve, with most allowing two or three four-year terms, and a few, such as Virginia, only allow- ing a single four-year term. In one sense, it is a misnomer to call a governor the chief executive of a state. The reality is that most state constitutions provide for what amounts to a plural executive, because governors, in marked contrast to the US president, typically must share powers with a variety of other independently elected executive branch officers, such as a secretary of state, an attorney general, a trea- surer, and an auditor (or controller). Consequently, a governor’s informal powers as a lobbyist for his or her initiatives and as head of his or her party may often be far more useful than the formal authority that comes with the office. Nevertheless, the management job of a governor compares favorably in terms of responsibility to those of the highest-paid corporate executives. In comparing the leading corpora- tions in the world, over 30 of the states have more than 200,000 employees which would rank them in the top 20. Walmart, the largest employer with over 2.2 million employees would be followed by California with just over 2.1 million.
The lieutenant governor is the elected state official who would replace the gov- ernor should he or she be unable to complete a term of office. The office parallels that of the vice president in the national government but differs in that in many states the lieutenant governor is separately elected and thus may be of a different party from the governor. This can sometimes cause considerable friction when the two officeholders are political rivals—and especially when, as in California, the lieutenant governor assumes some of the governor’s powers to act whenever the governor is out of the state. Arizona, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, West Virginia, and Wyoming have no lieutenant governors. In four of these states, the president of the state senate would succeed to the governorship; in the other three, the secretary of state would.
The story is often told of Calvin Coolidge, then the lieutenant governor of Mas- sachusetts, who met a woman at a dinner party. She asked him, “What do you do?”
He replied, “I’m the lieutenant governor.” “How interesting, you must tell me all about it,” she said. Coolidge then replied, “I just did.” While Coolidge was notoriously tight-
lipped, his summation of the limited responsibilities of the office of lieutenant gov- ernor was drawn from reality.
County Government
The county is the basic unit for administrative decentralization of state govern- ment. Although it is typically governed by an elected board or commission, there
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103State and Local Government Machinery
is a movement at present toward a county administrator or executive (sometimes elected). In Louisiana, the comparable unit is called a parish; in Alaska, it is a borough. In 2011, the United States had 3,033 county governments. Each state determines for itself how many counties it will have. The elected officials of county government have a bewildering array of titles. According to Dade County, Florida, Commissioner Harvey Ruvin, speaking in 1989, county officials “are supervisors in California, judges in Texas, jurors in Louisiana, freeholders in New Jersey, county legislators in New York, commissioners in Dade. If I tell somebody from New York I’m a commissioner, they think I’m the dog catcher. No wonder the public and the media focus on governors and mayors.”
The county seat is the capital of a county, where the courts and administrative offices are located. In much of the United States, the county seat was located in the geographical center of the county so that it would not be more than one day’s ride on horseback from the farthest part of the county. This is why there are so many counties. Because few citizens ride horses to government offices today, it would seem to make a lot of sense to combine many counties and thus realize substantial savings from having fewer county clerks, county sheriffs, county courts, and so on. But which clerk, sheriff, or judge is going to quietly resign? The conundrum of reforming the machinery of government can often be summarized by the phrase “You can’t get there from here!” Of course, the multiplicity of governing entities allows for greater democratic control in that government is kept closer to the peo- ple. Nevertheless, reformers constantly ask if the benefits derived are worth the extra costs of fragmented government. Numerous consolidations between county and municipal governments have occurred in recent decades. A prominent example is the recent consolidation of Jefferson County, Kentucky, with the city of Louisville into a unified metropolitan (metro) government. We will examine the concept of metro government later in this chapter.
BOX 3.3 The Meaning Professor Tanis Janes Salant has classified the forms of county government as follows:
1. Commission Form. An elected county commission or board of supervisors, which is the most common form of county government, has legislative authority (e.g., to enact ordinances, levy certain taxes, and adopt budgets), as well as executive and administrative authority (e.g., to administer local, state, and federal policies, appoint county employees, and supervise road work). Typically, however, administrative responsibilities are also vested
BOX 3.3 The Meaning of Gubernatorial
Gubernatorial is the strange word that refers to things pertaining to the office of governor. It comes from the Greek kybernan, meaning “to direct a ship.” The Romans borrowed the word from the
Greeks as guberno. Then the French took it and sent it across the English Channel as governor. When the word is used as an adjective, it goes back to its Latin roots: gubernatorial.
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104 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
in independently elected constitutional officers, such as a county sheriff, treasurer, coroner, clerk, auditor, assessor, and prosecutor.
2. Commission-Administrator. There are three basic types of this form, some of which also have additional, independently elected constitutional officers. About 786 counties have one type of this form. A. Council Manager. The county council or board, which is the legislative
body, appoints a county manager who performs executive functions, such as appointing department heads, hiring county staff, administering county programs, drafting budgets, and proposing ordinances.
B. Chief Administrative Officer. The county board or commission, as the legislative and quasi-executive body, appoints a chief administrative officer to supervise and coordinate county departments, but not appoint department heads, and to prepare budgets, draft ordinances, and oversee program implementation.
C. County Administrative Assistant. The county board or commission, as the legislative and executive body, appoints an administrative assistant to help carry out the commission’s responsibilities.
3. Council-Executive. A county executive is independently elected by the people to perform specific executive functions. The county board or commission remains the legislative body, but the county executive may veto ordinances enacted by the commission, with the commission having override power by an extraordinary majority vote. The county executive’s authority and responsibilities are much like those of a mayor in a strong mayor-council municipality. About 383 counties have this form.
Municipal Government
Municipal refers to something of local government concern—such as municipal bonds or municipal parks. It implies that the thing it modifies is of internal concern to a state—as opposed to international concern. It comes from the Latin word municipium, which was a self-governing body within the ancient Roman Empire. A city is a municipal corporation chartered by its state. A political subdivision must meet various state requirements before it can qualify for a city charter; for example, it must usually have a population above a state-established minimum level.
A city council is the legislative branch, typically unicameral, of a municipal government. The duties and size of city councils vary greatly, but in almost all cases the most significant functions include passing ordinances (local laws) and controlling expenditures.
A mayor is the elected chief executive officer of a municipal corporation, the chief ceremonial officer of a city. In most modest-sized and small cities, the office of mayor is a part-time job. He or she may be directly elected. The smaller the city, the more likely that the election will be nonpartisan or that the city council will select a mayor from among its members; then the mayor simply presides as the first among equals on the council. While many big-city mayors such as Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg have become national figures, no mayor has ever been able to make the leap directly from city hall to the White House—or has even been able to get a major party’s nomination for president.
Unicameral
A legislature with only one chamber, as opposed to a bicameral one with two—typically a house and a senate. Nebraska is the only state with a unicameral legislature.
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Towns and Special Districts
A town is an urban population center—larger than a village but smaller than a city. Typically, its state statutory powers are less than those possessed by cities. The New England town combines the role of both city and county. It usually contains one or more urban areas plus surrounding rural areas. The town meeting is a method of self-government, suitable for only the smallest jurisdictions, where the entire citizenry is eligible to meet to decide local public policy. The town meeting is still the governing body for 88 percent of all New England municipalities. According to journalist Robert Preer (1986), town meetings today are most likely to be con- trolled by special interests and the town’s bureaucracy. Attendance is slight. Even though quorums are set at only 1 or 2 percent of registered voters, meetings are often canceled because of the lack of a quorum. “Raises and promotions pass with ease because meetings are so often packed with employees and their families and friends.” Preer concludes that the modern town meeting “is a microcosm of national politics. In both cases, power has shifted from an apathetic and unorganized public to special interests, the mass media, and a bureaucratic-technocratic elite.”
A special district is a unit of local government typically performing a single function and overlapping traditional political boundaries. Examples include trans- portation districts, fire protection districts, library districts, water districts, sewer districts, and so on. Because special districts are such useful devices, they have been multiplying rapidly. In 1942 there were only 8,299 of them in the entire United States. Today there are more than 37,000—not including school districts, and they are the fastest growing governments in the nation. In 2011 they constituted more than one out of three American government entities.
A school district is a special district for the provision of local public education for all children in its service area. An elected board, the typical governing body, usu- ally hires a professional superintendent to administer the system. School districts often have their own taxing authority. Many are administratively, financially, and politically independent of other local government units. The total number of school districts has been constantly shrinking because of the increasingly common phe- nomenon of merging two or more districts. There were more than 108,000 school districts in 1942; today there are under 13,000. But the decline in the number of school districts has slowed greatly in the last two decades—from 14,400 districts in 1992 to 12,900 in 2012. Remember education still remains the largest public sector employer within state and local governments and the public prefers to maintain strong local control over this function.
Local Management Machinery
Local government leadership in the majority of jurisdictions overwhelmingly con- sists of part-time elected volunteers. Tens of thousands of citizens of middle- and small-sized local governments serve as elected or appointed unpaid (or symboli- cally paid) council, commission, and board members. Often these amateurs appoint a full-time professional manager. The council-manager plan is a form of municipal government in which an elected city council appoints a professional city manager to administer the city government. A county-manager system offers the same essen- tial structure at the county level.
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A city manager is the chief executive of the council-manager system of local government. In contrast to the heads of other types of government, the city manager is an appointed chief executive serving at the pleasure of the council. The concept originated early in the twentieth century by progressive reformers who wanted to replace political bossism with municipal experts. To do this effectively, they created the concept of an administrative chief executive armed with critical administrative powers, such as appointment and removal of administrative officials, but denied any political powers, such as the veto. The city manager concept was sold to the cities as being just like a corporation with its board of directors. The dichotomy between administration and politics (remember Woodrow Wilson) on which the system was premised was implemented by putting all of the policymaking and political func- tions into the city council, essentially abolishing any separation of powers in the traditional sense at the local level. The decision-making ability of the council was ensured by (1) creating a small council, typically from five to nine members, elected through at-large, nonpartisan elections, and (2) permitting the council to hire and fire the city manager, their expert in the implementation of community policies.
Present council-manager systems often deviate from this traditional model. Many, particularly in bigger cities, have large councils, partisan elections, and sep- arately elected mayors, and some if not all of the council members are elected from a ward or district. In fact, some recent federal court decisions have required ward elections in some cities because at-large elections make it more difficult for minority candidates to be elected. In some larger cities, a variant of the system has evolved, utilizing a chief administrative officer often appointed by the mayor.
The council-manager system has been criticized by some political scientists as being unresponsive to some elements of the community and supported by public administration experts for its effective management in the public interest. Yet even when a city manager delivers effective public management, it is important to remem- ber that he or she is working in an expressly political environment. The best manag- ers are those who are able to neatly balance political pressures with service delivery, thus addressing the real needs of the public.
The mayor-council system is a form of urban government that has a separately elected executive (the mayor) and an urban legislature (the council) usually elected in partisan ward elections. It is called a strong mayor system if the office of mayor is filled by separate citywide elections and has such powers as veto, appointment, and removal. Where the office of mayor lacks such powers, it is called a weak mayor system. This designation does not take into account any informal powers possessed by the incumbent mayor—only the formal powers of the office. Hence, someone can be a strong mayor in terms of actual power in a weak mayor system.
Metropolitan Government
Most larger American cities today cover wide geographical areas. They may have an old urban center with sprawling suburbs extending for many miles, connected to the center by freeways and other forms of urban transportation. The governance of such large conurbations or metropolises presents several options and philosophical choices. There could be a single local government covering the whole area and pro- viding for all. There could be, at the other end of the spectrum, total fragmentation,
Ward
A subdivision of a city, often used as a legislative district for city council elections.
At-large
An election in which one or more candidates for a legislature are chosen by all of the voters of a jurisdiction. This is in contrast to an election by legislative district, in which voters are limited to selecting one candidate to represent their district.
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with many suburban local governments, and even fragmentation within the old cen- ter. Or there could be a variety of compromises in between—such as the two-tier government in Miami-Dade County, Florida, where functions are split between an overall metropolitan government and particular localities. The Lakewood Plan, in force in California for many years, offers another option: local governments remain within the county, but they contract for many of their services from the county.
The adoption of the appropriate machinery of government for a metropolis depends on values. Often, richer and predominantly white residents prefer to with- draw to the suburbs and live under a fragmented local government system, which can avoid the costs of aging urban infrastructure and the social costs of policing and welfare in poorer areas. But fragmented local government lacks the muscle to put investment into social capital that benefits everybody—such as extensive tran- sit systems, museums, parks, and land preserves.
It is also difficult to address regional issues such as transportation and eco- nomic development when government authority is highly dispersed among many small governments. A 2003 study by the Brookings Institution attributed many of the state of Pennsylvania’s economic and environmental problems to one of the nation’s most fragmented systems of local government (see Box 3.4).
BOX 3.4 Government Fragmentation: The Pennsylvania Story
Pennsylvania is known for many things. From such historical treasures as Independence Hall, Gettysburg, and Valley Forge, to its culinary masterpieces of cheesesteaks and soft pretzels, the Keystone State has many distinguishing qualities. For those interested in the study of local government, Pennsylvania may be most known for its incredibly fragmented system of local governance. According to the Census Bureau, Pennsylvania has 2,630 local governments, amounting to one unit of general government for every 4,760 residents of the state. While the abundance of local governments may provide for an intimate relationship between the government and the governed, the fragmented nature of the system has also come under increased criticism for its inability to deal with many of the problems facing the state.
A 2003 study by the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, found that the highly decentralized structure of Pennsylvania’s governments works against strategic planning for economic development, transportation, and environmental preservation—thus placing the state at a competitive disadvantage with other states. In particular, the thousands of small
governments and authorities stymie planning for business development, open-space conservation, and growth supported by public infrastructure. The effects of fragmentation are most pronounced in the area of land management, where state law delegates land-use authority to 2,566 municipalities, placing these important decisions at a level of government with very limited capacity to manage them. While many analysts both in and outside the state have brought the problems of fragmentation to the public’s attention, there have only been nine municipal mergers since 1956 and very limited changes to the state’s planning code. When the Brookings Institution returned to Pennsylvania in 2008 it found that little progress had been made in breaking down the baroque design of government in the Keystone State despite much debate and discussion. Even with evidence accumulating on the disadvantages of fragmentation, Pennsylvanians are very hesitant to make any moves that transfer power from the level of government that is closest to them.
Source: Adapted from Brookings Institution (2003, 2008).
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108 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
Conversely, it’s no coincidence that one of the finest transit systems in North America is in Toronto, Canada, where Metro Toronto provides a strong metropoli- tan government approach. Of course, many wealthier Americans would rather not have any local government at all, but rely instead on private corporations to service their (often gated) communities, distant from urban problems and exempt from both urban costs and urban politics. It’s an option some like, but such a degree of civic disengagement is not for everybody.
Continuous State and Local Reform
The progressive reform movement left in its wake some reform institutions that continue to encourage improvements in state and local government machinery. At the beginning of the twentieth century, municipal research bureaus—private non- profit good government organizations—were established in most major cities. This “bureau movement” emphasized fact finding and the application of the scientific method to urban reform; this was in marked contrast to the simplistic “throw the rascals out” tactics of earlier reform efforts. The New York Bureau of Municipal Research, founded in 1906, pioneered with investigations of wasteful municipal spending (double billing, work paid for but not performed, etc.) that, when it was published, so shocked the community that real administrative reforms followed. The investigatory approach of the New York Bureau (now called the Institute of Public Administration) was then imitated in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, Kansas City, San Francisco, and elsewhere.
The bureau movement was the primary vehicle for developing, and then advo- cating, the implementation of many administrative innovations that we take for granted today—for example, executive budgeting; uniform accounting standards; merit system selection and staffing procedures; retirement systems; uniform crime statistics; and in-service training. This movement was the source of much of the early scholarly research in public administration. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that academic public administration was almost wholly created in its initial stages by scholars associated with the various bureaus.
REFORMING THE NATIONAL MACHINERY
OF GOVERNMENT
It all started with the conquest of England in 1066. William the Conqueror appointed commissioners to make an inventory of the assets of his new kingdom. This report, known as the Doomsday Book (because its findings were as beyond appeal as a Doomsday judgment), is the predecessor of today’s royal or presidential commissions and committees. Ever since, prime ministers and presidents have used these devices to investigate a matter of public concern and to issue recommen- dations for improvement. There is great public satisfaction to be had in bringing together a group of responsible, respected, supposedly objective but knowledgeable citizens to examine and report on a national problem or major disaster.
Such commissions have proven to be handy devices for a modern president who, when faced with an intractable problem such as crime, pornography, or urban
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109Reforming the National Machinery of Government
riots, can appoint a commission as a gesture to indicate his awareness of con- stituent distress. Whether that gesture has meaning or sincerity beyond itself is inconsequential for its immediate effect. By the time a commission makes its report–– six months to a year later––attention will have been diverted to other issues, and the recommendations can be safely pigeonholed or curtailed.
Often such commissions (or committees) have been used to tinker with the machinery of government. Evolution inexorably marches on. Just as birds are now thought to be all that is left of the dinosaurs, the modern performance review can trace its lineage to the Doomsday Book. Both are efforts by the prevailing regime to assess a present situation so that it can be better repositioned. William the Conqueror used his assessment to restructure England’s tax system. A later William—President William Jefferson Clinton—used his to try to reinvent gov- ernment. The advent of the 1990s reinventing-government movement once again made reorganization a fashionable theme in the practice and literature of American public administration.
Just as every new generation writes its own history, each new managerial gen- eration has its own ideas about the “one best way”—even if that means multiple ways. What has been genuinely new here is that governments at all levels are actually being forced by events to change the fundamental ways in which they operate. They must literally rethink (reinvent) how they operate because they can no longer afford to simply do what they have been doing—with reorganization here and a new public relations effort there—to assuage their critics. In the United States, there have been no less than ten major reform efforts or commissions in the last 100 years. A book by Ronald Moe actually details and compares the themes and causes espoused in each effort. Our review here will focus on just five—see Table 3.2 below.
TABLE 3.2
Major Commissions to Reform Federal Bureaucracy
Name Chair Year(s) President Result
Brownlow Commission
Louis Brownlow 1936 Roosevelt Enhanced presidential control of bureaucracy
First Hoover Commission
Herbert Hoover 1947–1949 Truman Strengthened the Executive Office of the President and enhanced agency management
Second Hoover Commission
Herbert Hoover 1953–1955 Eisenhower Nothing significant
Ash Council Roy Ash 1971 Nixon The Bureau of the Budget became the Office of Management and Budget
Grace Commission J. Peter Grace 1982 Reagan A handful of minor bureaucratic adjustments
National Performance Review
Al Gore Jr. 1993 Clinton A somewhat more streamlined and customer-friendly bureaucracy
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110 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
The Brownlow Committee
However, the classic example of government reorganization, the one that to this day is still the most significant, is the structuring of the executive branch recommended by the President’s Committee on Administrative Management in 1936–1937. This committee was popularly known as the Brownlow Committee, named after its chairman, Louis Brownlow, a major figure in the development of city management as a profession. The two other members of the committee were Charles Merriam of the University of Chicago and Luther Gulick of Columbia University and the Institute of Public Administration in New York City.
Government grew rapidly during the New Deal period, and there was little time or inclination for planning. It was largely believed that there existed many poorly conceived and poorly implemented organizational designs that were neither economical nor effective. These poor designs were often a reflection of the consid- erable political conflict between the executive and legislative branches. Both the president’s office and the Congress had deliberately contributed to this problem by establishing programs in new organizations or agencies only with regard to political objectives—without taking managerial considerations into account. This persistent struggle over organizational control would be addressed by the Brownlow Committee—which provided the first formal assessment of government organiza- tion from a managerial perspective.
The Brownlow Committee submitted its report to President Roosevelt in January 1937. The core proposals of the committee were simple enough. Essentially the report indicated that “the president needs help” and professional staff members who possess a “passion for anonymity.” This particular passion seems to have faded in recent years, along with the public’s belief that a modern president writes his own speeches.
Overall the committee recommended a major reorganization of the executive branch. The president agreed and appropriate legislation was submitted to Con- gress in 1938. But Congress, in the wake of the president’s efforts to “pack”—to enlarge and thus control—the Supreme Court, and fearful of too much power in the presidency, killed the bill. The president resubmitted a considerably modified reorganization bill the following year, and Congress passed the Reorganization Act of 1939. This law created the Executive Office of the President, brought into it the Bureau of the Budget (later to be the Office of Management and Budget) from the Department of the Treasury, and authorized the president to prepare future reorga- nization plans subject to an after-the-fact congressional veto.
The Brownlow report, the Executive Office of the President, and many of the other recommendations of the Brownlow Committee that would eventually become law have been sanctified by time. Yet the Brownlow Committee’s major proposals initially aroused considerable controversy. Modern scholars now recognize that there were different schools of thought regarding the development of public admin- istration. The executive administration school, espoused by Frank J. Goodnow, viewed the roles and functions of government almost exclusively as opportunities for executive actions. In contrast, the legislative administrative school, as espoused by Brookings Institution head William F. Willoughby, viewed the relationship and especially the accountability of administration to the legislative branch as a central focus. This latter school believed that there was a considerable distinction between
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111Reforming the National Machinery of Government
what was meant by “executive” and “administrative” and that the Constitution gave administrative power mainly to Congress. The argument over who has more power over the machinery of government, the executive or the legislature, reso- nated in the mid-1990s with the budgetary struggles between the president and Congress over the size and scope of the governmental machine.
While Congress was considering the Brownlow Committee’s various proposals, the forces opposed to an increase in the “administrative” powers of the president at the expense of Congress marshaled their arguments. One of the most eloquent was Lewis Meriam’s 1939 Reorganization of the National Government. As the Brownlow Committee was arguing for increased presidential power, Meriam was cautioning against it. After “noting Hitler’s rise to power within constitutional forms,” he warned his readers that “proposals to vest great powers in the execu- tive” might not work “to preserve democracy as we have known it but seriously to endanger it.”
Forty years later the only surviving member of the Brownlow Committee would concede a point to Meriam. In considering Richard M. Nixon’s abuses of the enhanced powers of the presidency, which the Brownlow Committee helped to create, Luther Gulick is quoted by Stephen Blumberg (1981) as saying, “We all assumed in the 1930s that all management, especially public management, flowed in a broad, strong stream of value-filled ethical performance. Were we blind or only naive until Nixon came along?” Nixon’s 1970s subversion of constitutional gov- ernment in the United States during the 1972–1974 Watergate scandal that forced his resignation differed only in degree from the subversion of republican govern- ments that has been the hallmark of twentieth-century dictators.
Ironically, Nixon sought to enhance the power of the presidency with the creation of the Office of Management and Budget, yet he accomplished just the opposite. Congress, upset by Nixon’s budgetary double-dealing, created a parallel Congressional Budget Office so that the legislature had its own number crunchers— who presumably would crunch numbers that could be believed. So, in the game of constitutional checks and balances, new machinery of government is often created to check a would-be king.
The Hoover Commissions
The first Hoover Commission (1947–1949), formally the Commission on Orga- nization of the Executive Branch of the Government, chaired by former President Herbert Hoover, was specifically charged to reduce the number of government agencies created during World War II; it did not, however, do so. Instead, it found that “disorder in the administrative machinery makes the executive branch of the Government work at cross purposes within itself” and focused on strengthening the executive branch by providing for a reorganization of agencies so that there would be a coherent purpose for each department. Instead of calling for a reduc- tion of government agencies, the commission made a vigorous call for increased managerial capacity in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) through:
1. Unlimited discretion over presidential organization and staff. 2. A strengthened Bureau of the Budget.
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3. An office of personnel located in the EOP. 4. The creation of a staff secretary (what we now call a chief of staff) to provide
a liaison between the president and his subordinates.
The commission was considered a big success because 72 percent of its recommen- dations (196 out of 273) were adopted, including passage of the Reorganization Act of 1949 and the establishment of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953.
A second Hoover Commission (1953–1955), also chaired by Hoover, is a unique example in the history of American public administration of an important commission being virtually reconvened after four years had passed to continue its work. This second commission recommended the elimination of nonessential government services and activities competitive with private enterprise, based on the assumptions that the federal government had grown beyond appropriate limits and that such growth should be reversed. In contrast to the first commission, the second commission’s recommendations accomplished little. In a mere 18 volumes, the former president and his 11 fellow commissioners rigorously argued that a whole host of government activities should be turned over to the private sector. But the US Congress was not so inclined, and this commission’s recommendations got essentially nowhere. There was no political will to undertake massive privatization in the mid-1950s. This was a banner in the dust that would not be picked up and held high again until the Reagan administration of the 1980s and, more dramati- cally, with the Republican capture of Congress in 1994.
The Ash Council
President Richard M. Nixon’s Advisory Council on Executive Organization, chaired by Roy Ash of Litton Industries, led to the transformation of the Bureau of the Budget into the Office of Management and Budget. The Ash Council’s 1971 rec- ommendations were extraordinarily ambitious in calling for a major restructuring of the cabinet agencies. President Nixon intended to implement this restructuring in his second term, beginning in 1973. But the Watergate scandal (see Chapter 5), which would force his resignation the following year, so dominated his aborted second term that no major domestic policy initiatives were possible.
The President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control
If the second Hoover Commission is to be measured by 18 volumes of output lead- ing nowhere, the 1982 President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control (PPSSCC) can be measured by 47 reports from 36 major task forces with approximately similar results. The executive summary alone was 650 pages in two volumes. Like the second Hoover Commission, President Reagan’s survey was appointed from an ideological position in which it was assumed that a little private sector know-how was all that it would take to put things right in Washington—an age-old belief that has been applied time and time again with great ardor but to somewhat limited effect.
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113Reforming the National Machinery of Government
It now seems that the PPSSCC, which came to be called the Grace Commis- sion, was ill-fated from the start. The first problem was Grace himself. His true feelings notwithstanding, he came across in countless media interviews as an iras- cible old corporate patriarch who was condescending enough to disturb his well- earned repose by deigning to advise a misguided government on the multitudinous errors of its ways. The second problem was the commission’s ignorance of one of the central precepts of modern management—employee participation. While Grace orchestrated this immense management audit by 2,000 private sector volunteers, the committee’s task force largely ignored the expertise that was freely available from within the bureaucracy and the Congress.
Bureaucratic reform historian Donald Savoie reports that both the General Accounting Office and the Congressional Budget Office systematically reviewed the commission’s conclusions and “undermine[d] the Commission’s credibility” when they demonstrated that too many of the proposed savings were nonexistent and too many of the commission’s facts were not factual after all. This however “did not stop the Reagan administration from applauding the findings of the commis- sion and from reporting that it would press ahead with their implementation.” But this was largely a public relations exercise of putting a good face on a poor effort. Perhaps the most highly touted recommendation of the commission that was actu- ally implemented was the proposal that federal employees be issued corporate-type credit cards for official travel. While this offered legitimate savings on time previ- ously spent on completing expense reimbursement vouchers, it was hardly worth the estimated $75 million cost (all private sector donated) for the report.
The National Performance Review:
“Reinventing Government”
The next most comprehensive recent government reform movement was started in 1993 by the Clinton Administration. The National Performance Review—as it was formally called was better known as “REGO” short for “Reinventing Gov- ernment” deriving from a book with that title by Osborne and Gaebler (1992). It represents the confluence of two long-standing influences in American public life: the progressive reform movement and management faddism. Reinventing was logically the continuation of the progressive movement’s philosophy of continuous improvement. This year’s or this generation’s most popular management fad is the comprehensive performance audit as a logically prior step in developing a new strategic vision for a business organization or a government operation. Next year, or next generation, there will be a new management fad, but it will still be within the progressive tradition.
When President Bill Clinton launched the National Performance Review in 1993—a six-month study, chaired by the Vice President Al Gore, aimed at making the federal government more efficient—the language he used was familiar: “Our goal is to make the federal government both less expensive and more efficient, and to change the culture of our national bureaucracy away from complacency and entitlement toward initiative and empowerment. We intend to redesign, to reinvent, to reinvigorate the entire national government.” In pointed and emphasized contrast to the federal government’s last major management reform effort (the Grace Commission), the
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114 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore announce their reinventing-government initiative on the White House lawn in 1993 surrounded by papers representing bureaucratic regulations they promise to discard. This was a truly great photo opportunity. Before most of the cabinet, many members of Congress, and the assembled press corps, Gore then told the president (for the benefit of the press): “Mr. President, if you want to know why government doesn’t work, look behind you. The answer is at least partly on those forklifts. Those forklifts hold copies of budget rules, procurement rules, and the personnel code. The personnel code alone weighs in at more than 1,000 pounds. That code and those regulations stacked up there no longer help government work, they hurt it; they hurt it badly. And we recommend getting rid of it.” The lesson here is that there is not much political mileage in reinventing government in a closet. Better to do it on the White House lawn and let the whole world watch.
Source: Corbis.
Gore report would be researched and written largely by the in-house talent of the federal bureaucracy.
Whereas the Grace Report under the Reagan administration—which based its philosophy on the proposition that only private business executives could fix government—was an abject failure, the implementation of reinvention was quite dif- ferent. The National Partnership for Reinventing Government relied on borrowed federal career officials to do its work. By 1998 it reported savings of $137 billion, a reduction of 351,000 positions in government, and the creation of 340 rein- vention laboratories in government agencies. It should also be pointed out that a significant percentage of those reductions came from the so-called peace dividend- defense reduction and base closures following the end of the Cold War and the break up of the Soviet Union.
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115Reforming the National Machinery of Government
But there were other new themes. Partnership was a key theme: between labor and management (occupational health and safety has been a key focus); between regulatory agencies and regulated businesses; and between government agencies. As was Customer Service—all federal agencies were required to establish customer service standards and measure levels of satisfaction for their interactions with the public. All this was for the common goals of best value for the taxpayer dollar, better service for customers, and better workplaces for employees.
Reinvention in Recess
It must also be said, however, that the NPR report was not unlike its predeces- sors in that it focused on many specific programs and details, as would a conven- tional management consultant’s report. It lacked the root and branch depth of change achieved in those bureaucracies where new fundamental principles have been adopted. It was an endeavor to fine-tune, but not fundamentally change, the existing system. Indeed, one might cynically note that the NPR report was follow- ing the counsel of the Prince in di Lampedusa’s 1958 classic work Il Gattopardo ( The Leopard )—“Change everything just a little so as to keep everything exactly the same.”
Some of the recommendations of the National Performance Review—for example, that the Railroad Retirement Board be reinvented—had a familiar ring, while others, such as the recommendation that the management of the Department of Health and Human Services be reviewed, seemed to be like a Russian matry- oshka doll—a review that contained a recommendation for another review.
In marked contrast are the machinery-of-government changes that have taken place in the last decades in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. These have involved fundamental principles and have been more radical than those of the National Performance Review. In fact, the specific machinery-of-government recommenda- tions of the National Performance Review were relatively few—considering that an organization left in place after a review lives to fight another day and to disregard review recommendations it dislikes once the dust has settled.
The defeat of Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 presidential race ended rein- vention. But by that time, after eight years of the Clinton administration’s reform impetus, the reinventing-government effort badly needed reinventing itself. Its pro- posals were attacked both by those who felt that its principles didn’t fit the tra- ditional values of public administration and by those who felt that its proposals weren’t radical enough. During Clinton’s second term with a Republican-controlled Congress, reinventing efforts became more rhetoric than reality. The Republi- cans’ idea of reinventing meant two things: devolution and privatization. Thus the Republican Congress (with Clinton’s support) devolved the national welfare program (discussed in Chapter 4), and privatization became the watchword of the subsequent Bush administration. Reinvention became a Clinton–Gore tainted word. While many reforms were advocated by the Bush administration, nothing was to be “reinvented.”
Rather, the Bush Administration, after quickly issuing an executive order can- celing the labor management partnership arrangements, promoted much of the same management agenda as its predecessor. Any effort at management reform
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in the Bush administration was, of course, sidetracked by the tragic events of 9–11 and following that, the effort to reconstruct a large new federal agency—the Department of Homeland Security—which would consist of parts of 20 existing federal agencies and units—to combat terrorism and protect America.
There was a smaller management improvement effort led by the central budget office with a set of performance goals with a twist. The twist they provided was to set up an executive score card system where each federal agency would have its performance rated by the Office of Management & Budget across several core management dimensions—human capital, financial controls, e-government goals. Widely known as “getting to green”—because the ratings were color coded and green was the top rating, reinvention as major reform had been relegated to some- thing akin to a kindergarten quarterly progress report.
The Obama Revolution—The Return of Big Government
The election of Barack Obama in 2008 marked a return to the endeavor of govern- ment redesign. The combination of vastly expanded government activity as part of the economic recovery effort and enormous fiscal pressures from mounting deficits and debt served as a catalyst for increased attention on redesign of the federal gov- ernment. While President Obama claimed that his administration’s major expan- sion into areas of the economy such as the auto industry, insurance, and financial securities marked a temporary phase for the federal government, it clearly spelled an end to the idea that the “era of big government” was over. Much to the contrary, government had been placed at the center of steering the nation out of an almost fatal catastrophic economic crises, with the Obama administration exerting influ- ence in many spheres of society that at one time might be unimaginable. Perhaps the greatest example of this new order was the 2009 dismissal of General Motors Corporation CEO Rick Wagoner as part of the deal to have the once-proud auto company bailed out by the federal government. President Obama made it clear to GM’s board that any financial support from the federal government to keep GM afloat was conditional to Wagoner’s dismissal. In essence, the president made GM an offer it couldn’t refuse and Wagoner was gone.
After a generation of efforts to make government behave more like business, the failures of major American corporations, banks, and investment firms had many questioning if some of the reforms had gone too far. With the passage of the Affordable Health Care in 2010, the Obama administration has had to focus on implementing a very complex piece of legislation, with major changes on an unprec- edented scale affecting millions of Americans. Again, not surprising, the President after re-election has chosen to keep the management reform agenda small and low key. Indeed, the Administration’s management change effort has been spelled out deep inside the 2015 budget message—calling for efforts to benchmark perfor- mance and increase productivity levels. (Budget.gov, 2015, p. 39). The OMB is again to provide guidance on how this will be accomplished, never mind that the only federal agency that has an actual productivity measurement system in place is the nearly bankrupt Postal Service and that benchmarking has been passé in the private sector for over a decade.
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The Micromanagers
Woodrow Wilson wrote in his famous 1887 essay “The Study of Administration” that “the field of administration is a field of business . . . a part of political life only as the methods of the counting-house are a part of the life of the society,” and “administrative questions are not political questions.” This was institutionalized by the Brownlow Committee recommendations for greater managerial capability on the part of the executive. But as Professor David H. Rosenbloom has observed, Congress responded to this stronger, more managerially capable, presidency “in 1946 by establishing the legal and institutional bases for its contemporary role in federal administration.” Thus when Truman, a Democrat, was president while the Republicans controlled Congress, a divided government brought forth this quartet of laws that sowed the seeds of micromanagement:
1. Administrative Procedure Act (APA) of 1946 : The basic law governing the way federal agencies operate to safeguard agency clients and the general public. The APA specifies the conditions under which administrative agencies (a) publicize information about their operations, (b) make rules, (c) engage in adjudication, and (d) are subject to judicial review. Thus agencies begin with some form of legislative mandate and translate their interpretation of that mandate into policy decisions, specifications of regulations, and statements of penalties and enforcement provisions. The APA requires that rules be published 30 days before their effective date and that agencies afford any interested party the right to petition for issuance, amendment, or repeal of a rule. In effect, while the APA establishes a process of notice and time for comment, it accords administrative rule-makers the same prerogatives that legislatures have in enacting statutes, as long as the rule enacted is consistent with the enabling statute.
2. Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 : A law that dramatically reduced the number of standing committees in the Senate and House, provided for a major expansion of the Legislative Reference Service (now known as the Congressional Research Service), and promoted the creation of a professional, nonpartisan staff for committees, as well as increased staff for individual members. This was the first attempt by Congress to establish an effective staff system to decrease its dependence on executive agencies for information.
3. Tort Claims Act of 1946 : The law that made federal agencies responsible for their torts—legal harms done to another person that can be the cause of a civil court suit.
4. Employment Act of 1946 : The law that created the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President and asserted that it was the federal government’s responsibility to maintain economic stability and promote full employment.
The combined effect of these laws was to unleash a mob of micromanagers. Mem- bers of Congress, once largely limited to policy oversight, now had the opportu- nity to delve into the minutiae of administration on behalf of their constituents. The APA created a rulemaking process that offered unlimited possibilities for influencing rules for pork barrel motivations. The Legislative Reorganization Act
Divided
government
A government in which different political parties control the legislative and executive branches.
Micromanagement
A pejorative term for too-close supervision by policymakers in the implementation of programs. Congress has been accused of micromanagement when it writes detailed rules governing programs into legislation— thus denying line managers any real administrative discretion. But any manager is a micromanager if he or she refuses to allow subordinates to have any real authority or responsibility.
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gave Congress the staff it needed to constantly interfere for their specific political purposes. The Tort Claims Act meant that Congress could effectively lobby agen- cies to redress wrongs to constituents. And the Employment Act meant virtually unlimited justification to pump federal money into selected congressional districts. This process can be seen every time the Department of Defense has been forced into buying more of a weapon than it needs simply because the factory that makes it is in an influential member’s congressional district. As Rosenbloom sarcastically noted, “Turning pork barrel politics into a virtuous national economic policy was no small achievement.” But while pork by its nature is not kosher, for many Amer- icans the very definition of a member of Congress is one who brings home the bacon. This, however, may be changing.
The importance of all this is that Congress has never drawn—as the Brownlow Committee would have liked—a dichotomy between politics and administration; the two are not separate anyway. So what made anyone think that the reinventing- government movement—the latest effort to take politics out of administration by turning grumpy citizens into happy customers—was going to change the situation?
Now, there is much tinkering that the executive branch can do on its own. It can get the Social Security Administration to answer its phones within a reasonable period. It can force Internal Revenue Service auditors to be polite. But this is minor compared to the power of Congress to determine the amount of Social Security payments and the level of taxes. Members of Congress are hardly likely to give up their ability to micromanage—with all the pork for constituents and reelection prospects that implies—for vague notions of greater efficiency. Members thrive on bureaucratic red tape and the opportunities it creates for constituent service. This is why the ombudsman/ombudswoman movement has never gone very far in the United States. This function is happily, even joyously, performed by the elected representatives. It is quite literally what their staffs spend most of their time on— because it is the key to reelection.
The conclusion is in essence quite simple and obvious: to reinvent government, you must also reinvent Congress. And to reinvent state government, you must reinvent the state legislature. Few things are more obvious in the study of public administration than the fact that there exists a strong relationship between the orga- nization of a legislature and that of its executive branch. According to administra- tive analyst Harold Seidman, “One could as well ignore the laws of aerodynamics in designing an aircraft as ignore the laws of congressional dynamics in designing executive branch structure.” Thus “what may appear to be structural eccentricities and anomalies within the executive branch are often nothing but mirror images of jurisdictional conflicts within the Congress. Congressional organization and exec- utive branch organization are interrelated and constitute two halves of a single system.” The British and other parliamentary systems have been able to go much further down the reinventing road precisely because they do not have this problem. There the executive and legislature are, for policy purposes, effectively one.
THE PRESSURE FOR PRIVATIZATION
Just as the Clinton administration wanted to reinvent government, the George W. Bush administration sought to privatize much of it through a major commit- ment to push into the private sector hundreds of thousands of federal jobs. The
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rationale for this, as explained by Bush OMB Director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., isn’t switching jobs from the public to the private sector—the real goal is getting the best deal in terms of quality and cost for the taxpayer. Notice that the underlying phi- losophy of this movement toward privatization comes directly from the Second Hoover Commission Report of 1955.
Nothing is more challenging, indeed threatening, to public administration than the now constant specter of privatization. Indeed, to many on the political right, reinventing is virtually synonymous with privatization. There are essentially two kinds of privatization. First, as discussed in the Keynote, there is the private provi- sion of services with a “public” character, such as private police and private parks. These services are public only in the sense that they are available to any who can pay for them. Second, privatization is the process of returning to the private sector property or functions previously owned or performed by government. Conserva- tive Republicans in particular tend to be in favor of privatizing those government functions that can be performed (in their opinion) less expensively or more effi- ciently by the private sector. Privatization is a broad long-term trend, often fueled with strong and emotional conservative ideology, to reduce government expendi- tures, to turn (or return) government assets and operations to private enterprise, and, thereby, to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of government.
Privatization is almost always predicated on assumptions about public sector versus private sector efficiency and productivity rates. The burden of proof is often on public sector managers to explain why they are not inferior to private enterprise managers and why they should retain their functions in the face of private sector alternatives. Perhaps no responsibility is greater for public managers today than developing the evaluation and management assessment tools needed to assure crit- ics that public sector programs and enterprises are being managed efficiently and effectively.
Generally there are three basic forms or types of government privatization:
1. The sale of government assets (such as a railroad to a corporation or public housing units to their tenants).
2. The private financing of public facilities (such as toll highways in California or Virginia).
3. The private provision of services (such as trash collection or retirement benefits).
Strategies for Privatization
Privatization is the management ideology for those fearful, suspicious, or skeptical of expanding government. It is equally ideal as a tool for those who wish to reduce the size of government. Done properly, it dovetails with the first principle of the reinventing-government movement: that government should be catalytic and steer (set direction) rather than row (do the work).
However, privatization sometimes means that government will neither steer nor row. It will simply get out of an activity altogether. For example, some people strongly believe that government should have absolutely no role in birth control, sex education, broadcasting, or the arts. These activities, if undertaken at all, should be undertaken by private citizens at their own initiative. One counterargument was
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made by the Pulitzer prize winning playwright Arthur Miller. He tells the story of the time he was speaking in defense of government support for theater. A man in the audience asked him, “I manufacture shoes. If the public won’t buy enough of them, why shouldn’t I demand government support?” Miller couldn’t think of a logical and reasoned answer to this perfectly valid question. So he responded with a ques- tion: “Can you name me one classical Greek shoemaker?” Of course, Miller was emphatically not in favor of government control of the arts, but he felt, as many do, that government has an obligation to further its notions of civilization—and that this is often done by subsidizing the arts.
Political analyst E. S. Savas identified four strategies of privatization that together will “halt and reverse the growth of government.”
1. Load shedding: A term that refers to government withdrawing from the provision of goods and services and allowing them “to be supplied by the marketplace or by voluntary arrangements.”
2. Alternative delivery systems: Arrangements “in which government plays a relatively limited role,” including services provided through voluntary or self-service arrangements, competitive markets, franchises, vouchers, grants, and contracts.
3. Imposing user charges for goods and services: Savas argues that government should do this whenever possible in order to expose the true costs of services and, thereby, to increase the chances that alternative delivery systems will evolve.
4. Restoring competition and minimizing government monopolies: Savas maintains that this “requires a conscious strategy of creating alternatives and fostering a receptive climate and mental attitude in favor of giving options to the citizen-consumers of public services.”
Privatization is often pursued on the ideological grounds that government should not provide goods and services that firms in the private for-profit or non- profit sector are able and willing to provide. Government should limit itself to activities that firms in the private sector cannot or will not provide. Policy analyst John Donahue has found that privatization brings both good news and bad news. The good news is that while privatization is not a “universal corrective,” it does present some “real opportunities to make public undertakings more efficient and accountable by enlisting the private sector.” The bad news is that political pressures could just as easily “tend to retain for the public sector functions where privatiza- tion would make sense, and to privatize tasks that would be better left to govern- ment” (Donahue, 1989, p. 13).
Privatization in the Military
The military is the most fundamental unit of government—often predating the government it serves. Remember that it was the Continental Army under George Washington that literally enabled the creation of the United States. But the traditional military is fading rapidly. Until recently, the military performed many of its own support functions. From cleaning sheets to digging latrines, basic aspects of military
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life were handled by members of the armed services. But increasingly, these basic support services are being handled by private, nonmilitary sources. While this “con- tracting out” of services is often seen as cost effective, there has been considerable criticism of the practice in recent years.
Privatization has been subjected to especially heavy criticism in regard to the war in Iraq. As noted in Chapter 1, the United States has hired private con- tractors to provide security services for construction workers who are rebuilding Iraq’s worn-out infrastructure and oil industry. As the insurgency has continued to mount since 2004, there has been consistent criticism of the role that private security forces have played in the war theater. According to a 2005 PBS Front- line report, members of the US military have reported numerous problems with the more than 20,000 individuals who are serving as private security personnel. Among the complaints put forth by US troops are claims that private contractors lack accountability and a clear relationship to the chain of command. There also exists a more emotional disconnect between active military personnel and pri- vate contractors that stems from vast differences in pay rates for similar levels of risk and position. Brookings Institution research fellow Peter Singer noted, “There’s a bubbling resentment . . . and you’re starting to sense a backlash from the military.”
Although the potential problems differ somewhat among the various types of privatization, there is evidence that privatization leads to corruption because of its susceptibility to political influence, difficulties in monitoring contract performance and outcomes, reduced control over services, and limited numbers of competitors who are willing or able to provide services. The Halliburton Corporation has been a lightning rod for many of these concerns. This Texas-based construction company has been awarded a number of contracts from the federal government for recon- struction projects in Iraq. In particular, Halliburton was given a contract worth more than $7 billion to help restore Iraqi oil production. The awarding of the con- tract was controversial not only because Vice President Dick Cheney was once the company’s CEO, but because the contract was awarded without inviting bids from other firms. The Washington Post reported that Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, the top civilian contracting official at the US Army Corps of Engineers, testified that Halliburton’s subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) was given an unusual amount of control over the terms of its no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq’s oil infra- structure. Greenhouse stated, “I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career” (Witte, 2005). To add fuel to the fire, the Defense Contract Audit Agency issued a 2005 report that ques- tioned more than $800 million in expenses that Halliburton charged to the Defense Department.
It might also be remembered that it was these kinds of problems that led to “publicization” of many privately provided services in the first place. The pro- gressive reformers of the municipal research bureaus early in the twentieth century forcefully advocated that the government itself provide services such as street paving and trolley lines as a way of maintaining public accountability. But adverse publicity notwithstanding, the federal government has continued to rely on the private sector to supply a variety of goods and services. Federal spending on
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contracts for goods and services rose from $206 billion in 2000 to $536 billion in 2012. As a percentage of direct federal spending this is an increase from 12 percent to 16 percent.
The Nonprofit Gambit
In chess a gambit is a play, such as the sacrifice of a pawn, by which one seeks to gain a later advantage. Governments at all levels are increasingly using nonprofit organizations for just such strategic purposes. Services previously performed by government are being turned over to them—privatized because they are private organizations—so that government can both save money and get rid of peren- nially troublesome social programs that seek to improve the lot of the poor and unfortunate.
The nonprofit sector is a uniquely democratic phenomenon. In some respects it is the most capitalistic of our economic responses, reacting to marketplace failure i.e. the inability of a society’s free markets to provide a needed service or by filling economic voids with volunteers and charitable contributions. In contrast, more socialistic economies tend to meet similar types of community needs through tax-supported government programs and services. Nonprofits provide a flexible alternative to tax-supported government action.
A nonprofit organization is in many respects a concept rather than a specific entity—and it can be defined in many different ways. The primary essence of a nonprofit organization, however, is that it is organized and operated for public or societal purposes (such as alleviation of poverty) rather than private benefit pur- poses (such as return on shareholders’ investments). A second essential element of a nonprofit organization is its reliance on voluntary action for most of its finan- cial and human resources. Despite common misconceptions to the contrary—and within well-defined limitations—nonprofit organizations can realize profits from their activities and programs, and they can engage in commercial-type enterprises. However, such profits must be returned to the operations of the agency.
Nonprofit organizations range in size and structure from large international religious denominations and seminational hospital chains to small, local, nonin- corporated associations of people with common interests, goals, or concerns. From a relatively narrow, legalistic point of view, we can argue that a nonprofit organi- zation is, in effect, an organization prescribed by the laws, rules, and codes of tax exemption. From a tax-exemption viewpoint, there are two basic types of nonprofit organizations:
1. Publicly supported charitable organizations that engage directly in religious, education, and social welfare programs.
2. Private foundations, which tend to support other tax-exempt organizations’ programs.
The Reagan administration refocused the nation on the power of voluntary, nongovernmental responses to community problems. The Reagan agenda was predicated on the assumption that issue identification and action responsibility
Marketplace
failure
The inability of a society’s free markets to provide a needed service.
Volunteer
A person who provides a service without compulsion or requirement and typically without compensation. However, with the growth of the voluntary sector, the defi nition of a volunteer appears to be changing. For example, many volunteer ambulance services and fi re departments now pay volunteers for their standby time and/ or for making runs. These paid persons are still called volunteers or paid volunteers as long as their work with the ambulance service is not their primary source of income.
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should be returned to local communities, thus increasing community reliance on nonprofits at a time when the government was simultaneously decreasing the size of, and the sector’s access to, its traditional funding sources. Never in the history of the United States had the third sector been called upon to do so much more with so much less.
The first Bush administration did not signal the arrival of less complex times for the nonprofit sector. In fact, Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign may be most remembered for its “thousand points of light,” a reference to volunteerism and Bush’s belief that a new, more altruistic age had begun throughout the land. Bush first used this metaphor for volunteerism and charity in American life in his accep- tance speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention. In his inaugural address he further defined the “points” as “all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the nation doing good.” Peggy Noonan, who wrote Bush’s acceptance speech, said in her memoirs What I Saw at the Revolution (1990) that the “thousand points of light . . . became Bush’s shorthand way of referring to the network of helping organizations throughout the country, and it became in some circles the object of derision, or at least of good-natured spoofing.” The public as well as the press were initially confused about the exact meaning of the “thousand points.” The metaphor had to be explained so often that it became a symbol of the fractured syntax of Bush’s speech patterns.
Subsequently President Bill Clinton carved out an interesting middle ground between private philanthropic organizations and the federal government. In 1993, Clinton signed the National and Community Service Trust Act, which established the Corporation for National and Community Service. This act brought a wide range of domestic community service programs under the umbrella of one central governmental organization known as AmeriCorps. In 2014, over 80,000 mem- bers of AmeriCorps served with more than 3,000 nonprofits, public agencies, and faith-based and community organizations throughout the country. For example, an individual who volunteers with AmeriCorps may be placed with a group such as the Christian Appalachian Project, which builds homes in the impoverished areas of eastern Kentucky.
Despite programs such as AmeriCorps, the national inhibition toward more direct government funding for social programs has continued. The bottom line is that because of their charitable objectives and highly motivated, often volunteer, workforces, nonprofit organizations are a cheap way to fund a legislative man- date. In these instances, the subcontracting relationship to public funders renders the nonprofit organization at least indirectly accountable to the general public. In many cases, nonprofit board decision making is quite similar to that of a public utility: the nonprofit board is free to make decisions within legislative parameters.
The Faith-Based Initiative
The George W. Bush administration was even more enthusiastic than its prede- cessors about using nonprofit agencies—especially religious organizations—to provide social services. Bush created the Office of Faith-Based and Community Ini- tiatives to further this agenda. And five departments—Health and Human Services,
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Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Education, and Labor—have created centers to further faith-based efforts. The most controversial element of Bush’s initiative was a policy that allowed religious organizations to compete for grants to provide federally funded social services such as drug rehabilitation and health clinics for the poor. This element of Bush’s program was criticized for blurring the separation between church and state by providing direct government payment to religious organizations, but most aspects of the faith-based initiative remained intact throughout his administration.
When Barack Obama took over the presidency in 2009, he made it clear that he would not abolish the White House’s Faith-Based Initiative, but instead announced major reforms to the program. Obama had spent the earliest part of his career working as a community organizer in Chicago, often interacting with churches on projects aimed at improving the lives of residents in the city’s poorest neighbor- hoods. The president emphasized that those receiving Faith-Based Initiative funds could not proselytize the people they help, nor could they discriminate in hiring practices on the basis of religion. Faith-based groups could only use federal dollars for secular programs. See Figure 3.2.
This issue of federal funding is at the heart of the controversy over faith-based efforts at the federal level. Critics are concerned with a possible breach of the estab- lishment clause, the first part of the First Amendment that asserts that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The clause is the basis for the separation of church and state in the United States. Yet the Supreme Court has held in Everson v. Board of Education (1947) that it is not a violation of the establishment clause for the government to pay for the cost of bussing children to religious schools; nor was the tax-exempt status of religious property—at issue in Walz v. Tax Commission of the City of New York (1970)—a violation. Increas- ingly, the Court is taking an attitude of “benevolent neutrality” toward religion. Government activity that has the purpose or primary effect of advancing or inhib- iting religion or that results in excessive government entanglement with religion is proscribed.
One continuing problem with the establishment clause is that, traditionally, many welfare and educational services in local communities have been provided by privately funded religious groups. This has posed a problem as far back as the New Deal. This was a potential problem for the Bush administration until the Supreme Court ruled in the 2007 case of Hein v. Freedom from Religion Foundation that taxpayers had no standing to sue to stop federal funding that they thought violated
Expanded grants and contracts to nonprofit and religious
organizations
Diminish government bureaucracies by channeling
social programs through nonprofit and religious
organizations
The state has a reponsibility to aid the
poor and infirm
FIGURE 3.2
A schematic of the Faith-Based Initiative
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the First Amendment’s so called “wall of separation” between church and state. President Obama seems to see a continued coexistence between federal funding of faith-based initiatives and preservation of the divide between church and state. At a 2009 press conference announcing reform of the Faith-Based Initiative he stated, “I believe deeply in the separation of church and state, but I don’t believe this partnership will endanger that idea.” However, because the case was decided by a five-to-four vote, the Court may have more to say on this issue as its composition changes with the coming years.
Voluntarism and Philanthropy
Nonprofit management, third-sector organizations, and independent-sector pro- grams are only new articulations of the old concepts of charity, philanthropy, and social action. The notions of charity and philanthropy are old, but how they are influencing today’s society is new. In a country where the profit motive is supreme, it is both curious and inevitable that there also exists a pervasive nonprofit sector. In most other societies voluntarism does not play as significant a role in the lives of people as it does in the United States.
This Western tradition of voluntarism has roots in two diverse ideological streams:
1. The Greco-Roman heritage of emphasis on community, citizenry, and social responsibility. The Greco-Roman ideology rests on a foundation of social reform to relieve community social problems, in order to improve the quality of life for all in the community.
2. The Judeo-Christian belief that relationships with a higher power affect our choices, our decision making. Thus, our purpose is not to change people’s lots but rather to alleviate the (preordained) suffering of others, particularly the poor. Under the Judeo-Christian tradition, one does not help others solely from concern for oneself or one’s neighbors but because a deity has given instructions to do so. We have been told to love our neighbors as we love ourselves: one loves one’s neighbor because one loves God first and thus seeks to obey.
These two distinct, historical, ideological themes remain clearly evident today. For example, we can distinguish between cause advocacy, or leadership for social reform, and case advocacy, or individual service to a person or a limited group of persons in need. The influence of the two ideologies has been replayed countless times and in countless ways in the history of the American nonprofit sector. Notice how it is reflected in the following definitions of two types of voluntarism:
Philanthropy is the giving of money or self to solve social problems; it is developmental, an investment in the future, and an effort to prevent future occurrences or recurrences.
Charity is relieving or alleviating specific instances of suffering; it entails acts of mercy or compassion.
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We tend to view these two forms of voluntary action as complementary ele- ments in a nonprofit system. We need philanthropy as well as charity. However, this is not always the case. For example, Andrew Carnegie, an ardent philanthro- pist, abhorred charity. “It were better for mankind that the millions of the rich were thrown into the sea than so spent as to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy. . . . So spent, indeed, as to produce the very evils which it hopes to mitigate or cure” (Carnegie, 1900). Yet from the Judeo-Christian charitable tradition, almshouses, charitable hospitals, orphan homes, and charitable organi- zations such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, the Salvation Army, the International Red Cross, and countless others, have helped relieve untold instances of human suffering.
As this nation was founded on the democratic ideals of both individualism and pluralism, our fundamental notion of how domestic problems (such as poverty, health, childrearing, housing, mental illness, homelessness, and inequitable access to employment opportunities) should be addressed is returning to its historical stable state: community-level problem solving. Our basic approach to dealing with domestic problems has progressed from individual and family-level resolution, to community problem solving (as the country urbanized), to massive state interven- tion, and back toward community problem solving. In part this return to the past has been a negative reaction to the perceived failure of many New Deal and Great Society social programs. Thus, as we enter a new century, the nexus of responsibil- ity for charity and social action once again shows signs of shifting from a national orientation back to one of local control.
Until recently, philanthropy was largely limited to a leisure-time activity of the rich. In the last century, the great industrialists/robber barons and their fami- lies, after making their fortunes, might have donated funds for this or that public improvement. Andrew Carnegie was the most systematic example of this variety of traditional philanthropists. He gave away more than $350 million while he lived. This is equivalent to $6 billion today. But this century’s differing attitudes toward social responsibilities and tax laws have transformed philanthropy from the altru- istic concern of a single individual or family to a huge enterprise that affects and sustains a major portion of our economy and our society. Of course, individual fortunes may still play a huge part—Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda have so far given away $28 billion via their charitable foundation, more than $8 billion of it to improve global health.
To be sure, wealthy people as well as people of all economic means contribute money, time, energy, and property for socially desirable purposes. But the largest share of the available philanthropic dollar goes to endow foundations. There are tax advantages to the donor in doing this. Therefore, using a foundation helps to multiply the total amount of philanthropic funds available for good works.
Now that philanthropy has to a large extent been institutionalized, its role has changed from random charitable or community developmental efforts to sys- tematic efforts to find causes for focused efforts, to alleviate poverty in certain regions, control world population growth, or preserve rare artifacts, to state only three examples. The large-scale nature of philanthropy has caused it to become bureaucratized. No longer will an emotional charitable appeal suffice. A systematic
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A contemporary cartoon of Andrew Carnegie. The popular image of Carnegie is that of an enormously wealthy robber baron giving almost all of his money away before he died. But he is an important philosopher of the movement toward nonprofit organization in twentieth-century America. He sought to create institutions whereby the working classes could better themselves. But they had to be worthy of his largesse. Thus he paid for the construction of 3,000 public libraries— but the local communities had to buy the books and maintain the buildings. He donated organs to 4,000 churches—but only to those that were financially sound and well managed. He created innumerable trusts and foundations as well as museums, institutions for art and music (Carnegie Hall but not the Carnegie Delicatessen across the street), and one of the world’s great universities: Carnegie-Mellon. This man who said, “He who dies rich dies disgraced” did not die disgraced. And when he did die, he gave the world the secret to his success by having this engraved on his tombstone:
Here lies a man Who knew how to enlist In his service Better men than himself .
proposal must be written and maneuvered through the various levels of approval of the requesting organization to the granting organization’s often equally elab- orate bureaucracy. Thus the alternative to government becomes, by trying to do what government has so far failed to do, more like the government than it finds comfortable to admit.
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A CASE STUDY
The Revolution in the British Machinery of Government (1979–2011)
The British machinery of government differs in important respects from that of the United States. It is a system of cabinet, rather than presidential, government. In the British system the cabinet, the collective of ministers, is the ultimate seat of authority, although its existence and role are not provided for in a written constitution. Each minister is an elected member of Parliament, a politician of the ruling party of the day, and is assigned his or her post by the prime minister. The clear division of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches is blurred in the British system, because the executive and the legislature are more closely tied.
Just as the US system puts the three dominant classes of government agencies within the Executive Office of the President, the national executive departments, and independent public bodies, we find in the British system the parallels of Crown agencies, portfolio (cabinet) departments, and public bodies. As in the United States, some of the oldest departments, such as the Treasury and the Foreign Office, have long and independent traditions, and the bureaucracy of “Whitehall” has had a reputation for intransigence and self-serving behavior no less negative than that of the US bureaucracy.
By 1979, the British central machinery of government had evolved into the ideal candidate for substantial reform. It had become large, unwieldy, costly, and secretive. The numbers of public bodies had grown to a point where it was difficult for any one person to understand what they did or to whom they were accountable, much less to assess whether their activities served the public interest or some narrower sectional interest. The legacy of the nationalization of a number of heavy industries that had not been well managed in the 1960s and 1970s represented a serious problem for the country, and their poor performance seemed to play a big part in the overall decline in British economic performance. With this in view, significant reform was necessary. The British system of unitary government, in which there are few of the checks and balances that exist in the US Constitution and in US policymaking behavior, provided circumstances in which far-reaching reform could be undertaken.
The most famous of these reforms, privatization, was not part of Margaret Thatcher’s explicit platform when she was elected in 1979, although it was certainly part of the Conservative Party’s program. Privatization was particularly focused on the nationalized industries and utilities. In Britain these included the petroleum, aerospace, and automotive industries, as well as gas, electricity, and water. Since the 1980s, these were successively sold to the private sector.
The massive reform of the national government departments, the “Next Steps” program, was launched in 1988. By 1992 more than half the British civil service—290,000 people—was included in the 76 new Executive Agencies.
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129The Pressure for Privatization
In a US context, this would be comparable to a million federal government employees being reassigned to several hundred new agencies whose executives could be immediately removed if they did not achieve their performance targets. Some former departments, such as Inland Revenue (equivalent to the US Internal Revenue Service), were split into as many as 34 Executive Agencies, and each of these was pursuing stated quantitative performance targets. While these reforms are relatively recent, they do represent a disciplined and systematic program of reforming one of the most difficult parts of the public sector to reach and to manage—that is, the work conducted normally
Margaret Thatcher, before and after. At a 1995 book signing the former British Prime Minister holds a copy of her autobiography, Margaret Thatcher: The Path to Power . The photo on the book’s cover shows her as a young woman before she had read Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom . (She was a chemistry—not a politics—student at Oxford University.) The older woman holding her book has a face—and had a career—dominated by the ideas of Hayek. In her book she wrote of the doctrine she took from Hayek; that “each demand for security, whether of employment, income or social position, implied the exclusion from such benefits of those outside the particular privileged group—and would generate demands for countervailing privileges from the excluded groups.” In such a socialist state “everyone will lose.” This is why her mission in life became to roll back the British welfare state.
Source: Alamy.
(continued)
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130 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
A CASE STUDY Continued
within civil service departments, albeit the “operational” rather than the “policy” aspects of that work. In effect, half of the traditional civil service has been placed in corporate-like structures where they will be treated more like corporate employees than public servants. This is the essence of corporatization—more flexibility for managers and less job security for all.
The initial results were dramatic, although the “arm’s length relationship”— meaning no political interference—central to the Executive Agency concept can sometimes break down under sufficient political pressure. Within a decade, the British public sector was changed beyond recognition, with machinery of government changes of the most profound significance taking place. Overall, according to British professor Christopher Pollitt, “in the decade from 1979 to 1990, 800,000 employees were transferred into the private sector, and the share of the gross domestic product accounted for by state-owned industries fell from 11 percent in 1979 to 5.5 percent in 1990.” In effect, the Thatcher revolution cut the British public sector in half.
This revolution in the machinery of government continued even after the revolutionary party was voted out of office. In 1997 when the Labour Party led by Prime Minister Tony Blair took over the British government, he declared, to the chagrin of many of the traditionally socialist members of his party, that the reforms would stay. He espoused a “third way” that went beyond the old left’s preoccupation with state control but not so far as the far right’s “belief that free markets are the answer to every problem.” He sought to have his “New Labour” Party “rebrand Britain.” And a major part of this “rebranding” was Labour’s acceptance of the Conservative Party’s radical reforms of the machinery of government.
A key concept in the British reforms is market testing—a process that requires agencies to buy goods and services from the private sector if savings are to be had. This has led to private contractors building and managing prisons, the Passport Agency hiring outside companies to print passports, and the Inland Revenue contracting out the management of its computer databases. According to reinventing guru David Osborne, “The U.K. has gone further in reinventing government than any other country [other] than New Zealand.” True, New Zealand has jumped into the deep end of the reinventing pool, but it is so small in population (less than 3.5 million) that its reinventing efforts (while correctly termed a true revolution in thinking about how government should operate) have still been difficult to assess. Now three decades into reform, even the most sympathetic observers are still trying to discern what this shift to more horizontally focused government has accomplished (Christensen, 2012).
In Britain, the late 1990s saw the headlong dive into privatization slowing a little. The incoming Labour government of Tony Blair in its July 1998 white paper on local government scrapped the compulsory local government outsourcing the Conservatives had insisted on, replacing it with a broader
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131The Pressure for Privatization
concept of “Best Value.” In April 1999, a true watershed was reached when Conservative opposition leader William Hague, in a major public lecture, conceded that privatization should not displace predominant public funding in health, education, and welfare. This does not mean that the pendulum of privatization will swing back to the division between public and private functions that once existed, but it does indicate that, in Britain at least, a practical rather than an ideological stance on these issues is emerging on both sides of the political fence. The practical approach was continued when the Conservative Party, now under Prime Minister David Cameron, came back
FIGURE 3.3
Employment in the UK public sector, September 2013
Source: Office for National Statistics
(continued)
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132 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
A CASE STUDY Continued
into power in 2010. While austerity measures have forced the administration to substantially cut government programs, the emphasis has been on reforming, not abolishing, the welfare state.
But the proof of all this is in the implementation. Great Britain is way ahead in this game. Of course, it started a decade earlier and during recent years many have argued that the reinvention movement has run out of steam. Nevertheless, the US machinery of government is radically different, and there is no guarantee that the United States could ever catch up, if it wanted to. Different political cultures and different machinery require different administrative solutions.
For Discussion: How have the British reforms influenced public administration in the United States?
The sector of the US economy that has seen the most change in terms of a shift from government to the private sector is health care. Estimates indicate that the production of health care services in the US by the private sector now exceeds 60 percent. There are even calls now for the Veterans Health Administration to allow veteran’s access to private sector providers. What’s your assessment of this trend?
Do you think a similar trend is starting in public education with the advance of charter schools? Remember, the majority of state and local employees work in education.
SUMMARY
The machinery of government consists of all of the structural arrangements pro- vided by a constitutional provision or a statute requiring the delivery of govern- ment services. These arrangements are not immutable. The functions of public agencies can and should be altered from time to time to reflect emerging needs and changing values.
Executive branch machinery has three main categories of organizations: exec- utive office agencies, executive departments, and independent public bodies. State and local arrangements parallel those of the federal level.
The advent of the 1990s reinventing-government movement made reorganiza- tion once again fashionable. But this followed a long tradition of appointed bod- ies given the task of recommending improvements in governing structures. The Brownlow Committee of the 1930s and the Hoover Commissions of the 1940s and 1950s were followed by the National Performance Review of the 1990s. But because of the micromanagers in the Congress, executive agency reforms can never get too far ahead of the legislative will.
Privatization has two faces: (1) the private provision of services for those who can afford to pay for them and (2) the return to private sector functions previously
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133Key Concepts
performed by government. The various aspects of privatization are pivotal to reinventing-government efforts throughout the world. The United States has a uniquely large nonprofit sector that it has been able to use as a vehicle for pri- vatization. Increasingly the term privatization—which has considerable political overtones—is being replaced by the term marketization, meaning more specifically, having government consider the full suite of market-type mechanisms to produce or deliver public services. This could range from various forms of contracting or outsourcing, to new forms of public-private partnerships or joint investment efforts to new types of vouchers or grants.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. What is the role of the US Constitution in framing the national machinery of government?
2. How do state and local administrative arrangements mirror those of the federal government?
3. Why have the major efforts to reform the administrative machinery of the federal government—from the Brownlow Committee to the National Performance Review— been incomplete successes at best?
4. Why is the privatization of government services usually a more attractive option for Republicans than Democrats?
5. How does the nonprofit sector supplement the government’s role in providing social services?
6. How well does contracting out, privatization, or marketization (or whatever term you prefer) work across sectors—police and prisons, schools and hospitals, public utilities and transportation?
KEY CONCEPTS
Bossism An informal system of local government in which public power is concentrated in the hands of a central figure, called a political boss, who may not have a formal govern- ment position. The power is concentrated through the use of a political machine, whereby a hierarchy is created and maintained through the use of patronage and government largesse to ensure compliance with the wishes of the boss. It was a dominant system in American city government after the Civil War and was the main target of the American urban reform effort. Bureau movement The efforts of progressive reformers early in the twentieth century to apply scientific methods to municipal problems. Their efforts led to the creation of research bureaus, which in turn created the academic field of public administration. Cabinet government The British system, whereby the cabinet as a whole, rather than only the prime minister who heads it, is considered the executive, and the cabinet is collectively responsible to the Parliament for its performance. In addition, the cabinet ministers are drawn from among the majority party’s members in Parliament, whereas in the United States the cabinet secretaries are only from the executive branch. Checks and balances The notion that constitutional devices can prevent any power within a nation from becoming absolute by being balanced against, or checked by, another source of power within that same nation. The US Constitution is often described as a system of checks
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134 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
and balances. For example, it allows the president to check Congress by vetoing a bill and Congress to check the president by overriding a veto or refusing to ratify treaties or confirm nominees to federal office. The Supreme Court can check either by declaring laws passed by Congress or actions taken by the president to be unconstitutional. City charter A document that spells out the purposes and powers of a municipal corpora- tion. To operate, a municipal corporation must have a charter like any other corporation. The municipality can perform only those functions and exercise only those powers that are in the charter. If the particular state permits home rule, a city can develop and imple- ment its own charter. Otherwise, it is limited to statutory charters spelled out by the state legislature. Commission A group charged with directing a government function, whether on an ad hoc or a permanent basis. Commissions tend to be used (1) when it is desirable to have bipar- tisan leadership, (2) when their functions are of a quasi-judicial nature, or (3) when it is deemed important to have wide representation of ethnic groups, regions of the country, differing skills, and so on. Constitutional architecture The administrative arrangements created by a government’s constitution—from the separation of powers to the requirement that specific departments be created or services performed. Department A confusing word. While it can refer to a cabinet-level agency of the US gov- ernment, it can also refer to one of the three branches of government: executive, legislative, or judicial. But it is also used as a general term for any administrative subdivision. Thus the Department of the Navy is within the Department of Defense. Dillon’s rule The criteria developed by state courts to determine the nature and extent of powers granted to local governments. The rule was posited by John F. Dillon is his 1911 volume Commentaries on the Law of Municpal Corporations . Executive Office of the President (EOP) The umbrella office consisting of the top presi- dential staff agencies that provide the president help and advice in carrying out his major responsibilities. The EOP was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt under the author- ity of the Reorganization Act of 1939. Since then, presidents have used executive orders, reorganization plans, and legislative initiatives to reorganize, expand, or contract the EOP. Goodnow, Frank J. (1859–1939) A leader of the progressive reform movement and one of the founders and first president (in 1903) of the American Political Science Association. Good- now is now best known as one of the principal exponents, along with Woodrow Wilson, of public administration’s politics–administration dichotomy. Home rule The ability, the power, of a municipal corporation to develop and implement its own charter. It resulted from the urban reform movement of the early twentieth century, which hoped to remove urban politics from the harmful influence of state politics. Home rule can be either a statutory or a constitutional system and varies in its details from state to state. Item veto The executive power to veto separate items in a bill. This is also known as the line-item veto. While many state governors have item veto, especially to reject additions to their exeuctuve budgets made by legislatures, efforts to give the President a budgetary line item have failed. Even when passed, the Supreme Court struck it down in only two years after the law enacting it. When then President Clinton actually began using the line-item veto, several entities filed suit to have the Act declared unconstitutional and were affirmed in a combined case, in a 6–3 ruling, Clinton v. City of New York , 524 US 417 (1998). Nationalization The taking over by government of a significant segment of a country’s pri- vate sector industry, land, transportation, and so on, usually with compensation to the for- mer owners. Socialist governments tend to favor extensive nationalization. Indeed, the level
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135Bibliography
of nationalization is an accurate measure of the degree of a nation’s socialism. Ironically, even conservative and nonsocialist governments have resorted to nationalization but in an effort to save a collapsing firm or service, rather than in ideological fervor. A recent variation was the 2009 stock purchase and bailout of General Motors and Chrysler by the Obama Administration to rescue the failing auto industry. Nonprofit organization An organization created and operated for public or societal pur- poses (such as alleviation of poverty) rather than private benefit purposes (such as return on shareholders’ investments). Many non-profits are set up as 501 C-3 organizations—which means any contributions provided to them are tax deductible. Ombudsman/ombudswoman An official whose job it is to investigate the complaints of the citizenry concerning public services and to ensure that these complaints will reach the atten- tion of those officials at levels above the original providers of service. The word is Swedish, meaning a representative of the king. Ombudsmen and ombudswomen are now found in many countries at a variety of jurisdictional levels. Many of the functions of ombudsmen in American local, state, and national governments are performed by members of their respec- tive legislatures as casework. Parliamentary system A means of governance whose power is concentrated in a legislature, which selects from among its members a prime minister and his or her cabinet officers. The government—that is, the prime minister and the cabinet—stays in power as long as it com- mands a majority of the Parliament. When the government loses its majority (loses a vote of confidence), elections must be held within a prescribed time period (or at least every five years in British practice). Thatcher, Margaret (1925–2013) The conservative prime minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 1990. Elected as the first female prime minister in British history, her championing of free-market economic policies, coupled with an assertive role in world affairs, created an ideological style of leadership that came to be known as “Thatcherism.” Third sector All those organizations that fit neither in the public sector (government) nor the private sector (business); a generic phrase for the collectivity of nonprofit organizations or organizations that institutionalize activism to deal with issues and problems that are being ignored by the public and private sectors.
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RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Downs, George W., and Patrick D. Larkey (1986) The Search for Government Efficiency: From Hubris to Helplessness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. An explanation of why efforts to reform government tend to operate in ignorance of previous reform efforts and why all such schemes have only “a minuscule chance of successful implementation.”
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138 The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government C H A P T E R 3
Kamarck, Elaine C. (2007) The End of Government . . . As We Know It . Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. An insider’s view of government machine reform efforts from the chief of staff to Vice President Gore during the Reinventing Government effort.
Moe, Ronald C. (2003) Administrative Renewal: Reorganization Commissions in the 20th Century . Latham MD: University Press of America. The definitve guide to the land- mark ten federal commissions that have sought to reform and reorganize the federal government—from preambles to disappointing results.
Osborne, David, and Peter Plastrik (2005) Banishing Bureaucracy: The Five Strategies for Reinventing Government, 2nd ed. New York: Penguin Putnam. More stories of govern- ment organization turnarounds; touted as the “sequel” to the 1992 Reinventing Govern- ment because Osborne is the senior author of both books.
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