Classical Public Administration

When Woodrow Wilson published his 1887 essay, administration was little theorized in the United States. Administrative governance, though not absent in the nineteenth century, was fledgling, and scholarly analysis of it even more so. Until recently, “the functions of government were simple, because life itself was simple,” Wilson’s essay observed. But as the century neared its end, its activities were “every day becoming more complex and difficult” and “vastly multiplying in number.” “Administration is everywhere putting its hands to new undertakings,” Wilson wrote.Footnote ⁷ In European nations, more experienced in administrative government, scholars had begun to theorize it. But on the American scene, Wilson deemed the study of administration overdue. At the time of his writing, patronage was the defining feature of administrative practice; executive positions were awarded by political parties in return for partisan loyalty. In 1883, the Pendleton Act formally ended patronage by instituting a merit system and creating a Civil Service Commission to craft exams for aspiring civil servants. But into the early twentieth century, its reach was limited. The merit system applied only to a small number of “classified” appointments, about 10 percent of the federal workforce.Footnote ⁸ If there was an unstated theory of patronage-based administration, it was that spoils kept administrators responsive to the political demands of those they represented.

Wilson’s essay sought to establish a novel paradigm of administration fit for the new century: one that maintained its traditional commitment to responsiveness while asserting itself as a scientific, managerial practice separate from political and normative questions. Like others in the Progressive period, Wilson embraced the use of professional, science-minded organizational tools to manage the complexity of modern, industrialized life. Wilson was not unsympathetic to patronage’s populist vision. “Regard for public opinion is a first principle of government,” his essay asserted, arguing that “administration in the United States must be at all points sensitive to public opinion.”Footnote ⁹ But he insisted that this sensitivity could and should be maintained, even improved upon, by a neutral merit system of career professionals. “Administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics,” he argued, holding that “administrative questions are not political questions.”Footnote ¹⁰ Administration, per his field-defining essay, was the “detailed and systematic exaction of public law,” thus “removed from the hurry and strife of politics” and more akin to a science or a “field of business.”Footnote ¹¹ Wilson so believed in the non-political quality of administration that he urged Americans “not to be frightened at the idea of looking into foreign systems of administration for instruction and suggestion,” arguing instead that they adopt the neutral administrative bodies utilized in peer nations.Footnote ¹² He celebrated the advance of “a technically schooled civil service,” which would be “prepared by special schooling and drilled, after appointment, into a perfected organization, with appropriate hierarchy and characteristic discipline.”Footnote ¹³ “By making the service unpartisan, it is opening the way for making it businesslike,” Wilson wrote encouragingly of civil service reform.Footnote ¹⁴

At the turn of the century, other early scholars of public administration joined Wilson in asserting commitments to neutral administration separate from, but in service of, democratic political ends. In 1900, Frank Goodnow, a professor of administrative law who in 1914 would become the president of Johns Hopkins University, published Politics and Administration: A Study in Government, which, as the title suggested, affirmed Wilson’s distinction between the two domains. “Politics has to do with … expressions of the state will,” Goodnow held. Administration, by contrast, had “to do with the execution of these politics.”Footnote ¹⁵ Administration would remain democratic so long as it remained accountable to political ends. It “must be subjected to the control of politics, and it is to be hoped that the expressed will of the state shall be executed,” Goodnow elaborated.Footnote ¹⁶ By the 1920s, this perspective had become accepted doctrine in the burgeoning field, which adopted the Progressive era’s faith in expertise, rationality, and organizational hierarchy. In a 1926 Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, Leonard D. White, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, declared that administration was non-political—ultimately concerned with “the most efficient utilization of the resources,” akin to the “scientific management” craze of the same era—but kept responsive to political ends via the supervision of the chief executive.Footnote ¹⁷ A year later, on the thirtieth anniversary of “The Study of Administration,” W.F. Willoughby’s Principles of Public Administration endorsed the ideals that prewar scholars from Wilson onward had: merit-based, neutral administrative bodies overseen by and kept accountable to the political leadership of the chief executive.Footnote ¹⁸

In the decades following Wilson’s 1887 essay, public administration scholarship had flourished, cohering around his endorsement of neutral but politically responsive administration based in scientific, management-based principles. But in the early decades of the twentieth century, public administration scholars struggled to realize their vision in the actual practice of government. Even under Woodrow Wilson, who rose to the presidency in 1913, American administrative practice remained deeply partisan. During his time in office, Wilson’s pursuit of “neutral” administration was in effect an effort to segregate Washington; Black federal employees who had increasingly populated federal offices since the 1880s were removed in the name of the efficient functioning of the service, while Wilson’s own appointees—white Democrats—continued to benefit from patronage.Footnote ¹⁹ Contrary to his 1887 essay’s support of a merit-based civil service, elements of Wilson’s administrative practice more closely resembled nineteenth-century populism. Into the 1920s, the enforcement of the Pendleton Act remained slow and inconsistent, and significant portions of the federal bureaucracy, including the Bureau of Prohibition, were excluded from merit protections and notorious hotbeds of corruption. Into the early 1930s, as the New Deal vastly expanded the administrative state, neutrality remained a lofty ideal—one frequently sacrificed for political expediency. During President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, many of the emergency agencies created amid the exigencies of economic crisis were exempted from the merit system and remained subject to partisan interests.Footnote ²⁰

As the 1930s advanced, and the footprint of the administrative state grew, calls for reform mounted. As Roosevelt’s first term reached its end, the expanding executive branch he was creating (by the mid-1930s, sixty new agencies, boards, and commissions had been created) had become a sizable political target.Footnote ²¹ Groups like the Civil Service Reform League (under the leadership of public administration experts) voiced opposition to Roosevelt’s use of non-merit appointments, and unfavorable Supreme Court decisions, including its rendering of parts of the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional, made for powerful charges of “administrative absolutism” and executive overreach.Footnote ²² Legal actors, animated by concerns about the administrative state’s legitimacy, worked to impose new procedures requiring that administrative bodies adopt court-like procedures, including norms of due process and proper fact-finding procedures.Footnote ²³

This heightened scrutiny also inspired reform efforts within the executive branch, enabling public administration scholars to enact their vision of nonpartisan administration. Upon beginning his second term in 1936, in an effort to legitimize the growing administrative branch created by the New Deal, Roosevelt created the President’s Committee on Administrative Management. Public administration scholars took on central roles on the Committee; long relegated to the realm of academic theory, they now had the opportunity to realize their vision. Louis Brownlow, a mentee of Wilson then at the Public Administration Clearinghouse in Chicago, was chosen as the Committee’s head.Footnote ²⁴ Other members of the group, which became known as the “Brownlow Committee,” included Luther Gulick, the Director of the Institute of Public Administration, and Charles Merriam, a professor at the University of Chicago. Nearly all of the staff members involved had PhDs in political science or public administration and were eager to apply their studies. Merriam welcomed it as “the greatest opportunity that had ever been offered to a group of political scientists.”Footnote ²⁵

The Committee translated the lessons of early public administration into a practical plan for reform. Their task was to organize the growing administrative state in a way that was both efficient and democratic—and in so doing, they relied on the classical principles of public administration, positing administration as distinct from, but accountable to, political ends.Footnote ²⁶ They alleged that the current administrative state constituted a “headless ‘fourth branch’ of Government” that was “responsible to no one,” including the will of the people as expressed “through their duly elected representatives.”Footnote ²⁷ The Committee’s proposed reforms sought to ensure both competent administration and the “establishment of a responsible and effective chief executive as the center of energy, direction, and administrative management.”Footnote ²⁸ It held that “the merit system … be extended upward, outward, and downward to include all positions in the Executive Branch of the Government except those which are policy-determining in character,” which it depicted as very few in number. “Democratic government today, with its greatly increased activities and responsibilities, requires personnel of the highest order— competent, highly trained, loyal, skilled in their duties by reason of long experience, and assured of continuity and freedom from the disrupting influences of personal or political patronage,” it argued.Footnote ²⁹ And in line with the prewar paradigm, it proposed centralization as a means of ensuring executive control over this neutral administrative body, recommending that more than one hundred existing agencies be reorganized into just twelve departments. Centralization would enable executive oversight; so too would the Committee’s proposals to grant the president more assistants who would aid him in exercising “more direct control over … the great managerial functions of the Government.”Footnote ³⁰

In 1939, when the passage of a “Reorganization Act” enabled Roosevelt to carry out the reform, many of the committee’s recommendations, including centralization, were made law.Footnote ³¹ For the public administration scholars who had long aspired toward neutral, centralized administration against the realities of patronage, it was a major victory, a step toward closing the gap between administrative theory and practice. In the wake of reform, confidence in scientifically derived, neutral administration was at its height. An edited volume by Luther Gulick—The Papers on the Science of Administration—compiled the public administration scholarship used by the Brownlow Committee, presenting it as canon.Footnote ³² State-level reorganization efforts in line with those of the Brownlow Commission ensued.Footnote ³³ It was, in the words of one scholar, a moment that saw a “contagious conviction in a public administration which was nearing the stature of a science, a public administration in which it would be possible to put values and ends to one side, or to assume them as constants, just as is done in the pure sciences.”Footnote ³⁴ At its core was faith in “an integrated, hierarchical administrative organization responsible to the command of the President” as enacted by the 1939 Reorganization Act.Footnote ³⁵ It was more than just reform: it was the “high noon of orthodoxy in public administration theory in the United States.”Footnote ³⁶ In the decades following Wilson’s 1887 essay, the field had not only developed a theory of administration, but enacted it in the practice of American government.

Reconceptualizing Wartime Administrative Theory

On the eve of the Second World War, public administration scholars had reason to feel confidence in their discipline. Its principles, developed from the Progressive era onward, had been realized in the 1939 Reorganization Act, which reconfigured the structure of the administrative state. In 1937, at the fiftieth anniversary of Wilson’s canonical essay, reiterations of his call for administrative study were stronger than ever before.Footnote ³⁷ In 1939, the American Society for Public Administration was founded; a year later, it launched a journal, Public Administration Review, with Leonard D. White as its editor in chief. In the early 1940s, the transition to wartime sustained interest in administration and its study. With New Deal agencies flourishing and wartime ones emerging, the administrative state continued to grow dramatically; twenty-six new agencies were created in wartime, and the size of the civilian federal workforce tripled between 1940 and 1943.Footnote ³⁸

But just as the field seemed to arrive at a place of disciplinary legitimacy and political influence, it faced new scrutiny. The growth of the administrative state stimulated interest, but it also brought critique. Americans chafed against wartime domestic agencies like the Office of Price Administration, which they found autocratic, overly rigid, and lacking in opportunities for democratic participation or redress.Footnote ³⁹ Their concerns about administration’s threat to citizens’ freedoms were augmented by critics who pointed to Nazi Germany as a cautionary example of administration’s threat to popular sovereignty, individual autonomy, and rule of law.Footnote ⁴⁰ Conservative opponents of the state capitalized on the opportunity to critique it, and concerns about the incompatibility of administration and democracy mounted; in the 1940s and 1950s, administrative bodies that in the prewar period had benefited from relative “judicial deference” became subject to new efforts—led by diverse actors from Congress, the American Bar Association, and the legal profession at large—at judicial and legislative oversight.Footnote ⁴¹ The Supreme Court applied heightened scrutiny to administrative decision making, and the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 set new standards for agency operations, requiring that they make public the details of their decision-making processes, notify interested parties of rulemaking, and heed a “bill of rights” for those affected by agency actions.Footnote ⁴² The same year, the Legislative Reorganization Act initiated institutional reforms of Congress in an effort to afford it greater supervision over agency activities.Footnote ⁴³

Wartime awareness of administration’s perils also initiated a reckoning among scholars of public administration, who were acutely aware of the new scrutiny applied to administration in wartime and came to share the public’s concerns about administration’s threat to democracy. Many administration scholars absorbed critiques holding that totalitarian states in Europe exemplified the dangers of neutral administration in service of any ends, prompting them to question the separation of politics and administration that defined the Wilsonian paradigm. Writing for Public Administration Review in 1943, David Levitan, a Special Assistant to the Chairman of the War Production Board, noted that “the outstanding development during the twentieth century in the field of public administration has been the evolution of a separate discipline concerned with the execution of public policy, as distinguished from the function of policy determination.” “The study of administration has become a study of techniques, a study of the ‘means’ as distinguished from the ‘ends,’” he wrote. But wartime made administrators like Levitan wary of this conceptualization of administration as a politically neutral, scientific tool. “It is in this tendency to regard it as a tool which, once perfected, can be used for the effectuation of any policy decision, for carrying out any purposes, that the danger lies,” he warned.Footnote ⁴⁴ Treating politics and administration as separate was a “dangerous fallacy” that needed to be corrected in order to “avoid transplanting into this country from other governments administrative techniques intrinsically incompatible with the underlying philosophy of democratic government.”Footnote ⁴⁵ If Americans made the mistake of regarding “administration as concerned with ‘means’ and nothing more, we shall be dealing a serious blow not only to administration itself, but to the democratic principles which we are striving to put into effect,” he cautioned.Footnote ⁴⁶

Levitan was not the only public administration specialist who viewed European totalitarianism as evidence against the politics-administration dichotomy. Robert Dahl, an administratively minded political scientist at Yale University, similarly criticized this classic view. “The effort to create a science of administration has often led to the formulation of universal laws,” he wrote, citing Luther Gulick. But global events had shown this to be a flawed line of thinking, one that failed to acknowledge the “impossibility of excluding normative considerations from the problems of public administration.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The Nazi case put this into high relief: “[Bergen]-Belson and Dachau were ‘efficient’ by one scale of values,” Dahl pointed out. Non-normative administration was unsatisfying, even dangerous. “The student of public administration cannot avoid a concern with ends,” he argued.Footnote ⁴⁸

In response to these concerns about the undemocratic tendencies of neutral administration, and in light of the public’s broad dissatisfaction with the enlarged administrative state, scholars began to revise their understandings of proper administrative practice and questioned their long-time faith in a politics-administration dichotomy. For decades, scholars of administration had struggled to assert the politics-administration binary against the vestiges of patronage. But after the war, their efforts seemed misguided. Depersonalized, neutral, scientific administrative bodies—the kind public administration scholars had idealized and worked to create—were now deemed the source of widespread public critique and a threat to democracy. In the decade that followed, scholars of public administration would work to reimagine the field, arguing that administration should be political, democratic, and attentive to individual administrators and the communities they represented.

For the first time in the field’s history, public administration experts called for the return of politics to administration. In 1945, New Dealer-turned-public administration theorist Paul Appleby’s Big Democracy announced a new era when it called on administration to take an explicitly political orientation. “It is dangerous to be dogmatic about efficiency of administration in any field, private or public, big or little,” it argued, urging that students of public administration be attentive to questions like, “what objectives is the organization trying to accomplish? What means are available to obtain the desired end?”Footnote ⁴⁹ Appleby endorsed the belief that the United States has expressly political administration. He acknowledged that it was a direction contrary to standard thinking; “so many persons talk about government as something to be improved only by reducing or eliminating its political composition,” he observed. But he held that attention to political ends made administration more dynamic and democratic. “Democratic governments are far more political than authoritarian governments,” he advised.Footnote ⁵⁰ Two years later, Appleby restated his thesis in a Public Administration Review article calling on administrators to reject political neutrality and “support and contribute to the reality of a democratic society.”Footnote ⁵¹ In a reversal of prewar doctrine, Appleby argued that “public administration must be related to and pointed toward the political.”Footnote ⁵² “My plea today is for a broader, more humanitarian and more deeply democratic approach to public administration,” he wrote.Footnote ⁵³

In the prewar period, Appleby’s plea would have been singular amid Goodnow’s, White’s, and Willoughby’s calls for the separation of politics and administration. But with that binary collapsing and disapproval of existing administrative structures proliferating, Appleby was among a broader group of scholars calling for the reimagining—and politicizing— of administration. Prominent scholars including political scientist Herbert Simon dismissed the so-called “principles” of prewar public administration as no more than “proverbs,” alleging that their premise—that “means and ends” and “administration and policy” were distinct—was a fiction. “In actual situations a complete separation of means from ends is usually impossible,” Simon held, arguing that values were inescapable.Footnote ⁵⁴ A year later, another challenge to prewar administrative theory came from Dwight Waldo. His 1948 book, The Administrative State, historicized the public administration movement begun by Woodrow Wilson as a “chapter in the history of American political thought.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Its framework held that politics and administration, “deciding and executing,” were separate but compatible, and administrators had been “generally concerned with excluding ‘democracy’ from administration by making the latter unified and hierarchical, and with confining democracy to what seems to be its proper sphere, decision on policy.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Their faith in politically neutral administration, exemplified by their sustained support for the merit system, undergirded a general faith in government. “Almost without exception they look favorably upon government, [and] regard it as a desirable instrument for the accomplishment of individual and community purposes,” Waldo wrote of early scholars in the field, noting their “favor at proposals to extend the range of its operation or control.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In holding government to be capable of efficient, democratic administration, they welcomed its advance.

But this era, according to Waldo, was over. The “simple division of government into politics-and-administration is inadequate,” he argued.Footnote ⁵⁸ Administrative considerations were “hardly science,” as early scholars had held. They had failed to “discern the place that ideas play in creating and defining ‘facts,’” Waldo argued, asserting that “there is no such thing as ‘pure fact’ divorced from all concepts and theory.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Waldo further alleged that prewar scholars neglected humanity, neutrality’s opposite, in administrative considerations, exacerbating wartime concerns about bureaucratic rigidity. He asserted that the study of administration should be “concerned primarily with human beings,” and thus with “creativeness,” “free will,” “morality,” and “right and wrong.” Far from past scholars’ strict claims of administrative neutrality, Waldo argued that public administration was “at its heart normative.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In administrative theory, Wilson’s politics-administration dichotomy no longer stood—leaving the administrative structures it had supported vulnerable.

Reorienting Postwar Administrative Practice

In the immediate aftermath of the war, it was clear that public administration had been transformed. Wartime had “a profound influence upon thinking about public administration,” one scholar observed, noting approvingly of the “healthy and reassuring tendency to see public administration as an essentially human and political process.”Footnote ⁶¹ Amid widespread scrutiny of the administrative state, postwar scholars had rejected the separation of politics and administration in favor of a political, discretionary, and expressly democratic model of administration. This reorientation led them to reassess the technicalities of administrative practice, turning away from the prewar emphasis on merit-based, hierarchical structures toward alternative administrative forms that they would work to enact via executive reforms in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Many postwar administrators abandoned the merit system, which had the ideal of prewar advocates of administrative neutrality. “Let’s Go Back to the Spoils System,” declared one 1945 Harper’s Magazine article, arguing that the rigidity that had once brought fairness and efficiency to the service was now an impediment to it. It advocated a return to the “old-fashioned spoils system,” reasoning that “any political party which believes intensely in its program presumably would choose the ablest men in its ranks to put that program into effect. Each administrator would be in sympathy with the project he is assigned to run, and he could expect loyal support from every subordinate.”Footnote ⁶² Even the Civil Service Reform League, a leader in the turn-of-the-century reform effort, turned against the merit system. Postwar League reports argued that “the inflexibility of the merit system” clashed with the need to equip “the public administrator with ample power and discretion to run the service.” “Many in the field of public administration have come the full circle,” one report noted. They had once advocated “a relatively inflexible merit system to protect against spoilsmen” and limit discretion.Footnote ⁶³ Now, they held that the spoilsmen had disappeared, and so had discretion—to a fault. As a result, the League had begun to “shift its program focus away from the negative aspects of opposing patronage to pressing for more positive concepts of modern personnel management.” Reformers were “now frequently in the paradoxical position of opposing measures and practices, which, in an earlier part of the century, were accepted as sound reform doctrine.”Footnote ⁶⁴

With the ideal of administrative neutrality deserted, some even suggested that civil servants should be chosen as representatives of different groups of the public. Donald Kingsley— a student of public administration who criticized its “neutral” prewar position as a “dangerous … confusion of means and ends”—proposed a concept he called “representative bureaucracy.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In a book by that title, he focused on the British civil service, and in particular on the exclusion of women and some class groups from it, to argue that “bureaucracies, to be democratic, must be representative of the groups they serve.”Footnote ⁶⁶ “The democratic State cannot afford to exclude any considerable body of its citizens from full participation in its affairs,” he wrote. Rejecting the prewar paradigm, he argued that “the essence of bureaucratic responsibility in the modern state is to be sought, not in the presumed and largely fictious impartiality of the officials, but in the strength of their commitment to the purposes that State is undertaking to serve.” “In a democracy competence is not enough. The public service must also be representative if the State is to liberate rather than to enslave,” he argued forcefully.Footnote ⁶⁷ Supporters of this movement, among them David Levitan, rejected Woodrow Wilson by name, highlighting the degree to which his support for “neutrality” failed to bring about a bureaucracy “truly representative of American society.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Postwar scholars not only questioned prewar prescriptions as to the selection of civil servants; they also revised their predecessors’ commitment to centralized administrative bodies. Before the war, public administrators beholden to the politics-administration dichotomy (including Brownlow and his team) held that hierarchical, centralized administrative structures, which gave the president control over neutral administrative organizations, were ideal. In the postwar period, scholars deemed decentralization the key to a “democratic government” on the premise that it would make administration more flexible and responsive to the people and to popular will. Already in vogue in management theory, decentralization was deemed responsive to individual administrators and the publics they served, giving them a more participatory role in the administrative process.

In pursuit of decentralized forms, postwar public administration experts valorized the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the New Deal program charged with the development of the Southeastern United States, which became the ideal model of localized, decentralized administration for scholars disillusioned with the Wilsonian paradigm.Footnote ⁶⁹ When David Lilienthal, the agency’s longtime head, published TVA: Democracy on the March in 1944, he depicted its decentralized structure as a model for democratic administration. “A task cannot be done democratically if the method chosen for doing it is bureaucratic,” he urged, holding that administration was “as inseparable from purpose and ends as our flesh is from our blood.”Footnote ⁷⁰ He argued that decentralization kept organizations democratic and provided “greater opportunity for a richer, more interesting, and more responsible life for the individual, and to increase his genuine freedom, his sense of his own importance.”Footnote ⁷¹ Lilienthal’s fellow administrators were listening. “In his writings on the T.V.A., he has developed a theory of democratic administration which is probably more widely known than any other theory that might be so labelled,” Waldo wrote of Lilienthal in 1952.Footnote ⁷² During the year 1955 alone, at least five books were published on the TVA.Footnote ⁷³

In the postwar moment, other former New Dealers similarly proposed decentralization as the key to effective, democratic administration.” Marshall Dimick had been reared in classical public administration (as a student at Johns Hopkins in the 1920s, his professors included W.W. Willoughby and Frank Goodnow) before serving in various roles in the Roosevelt administration and eventually as the head of the Department of Government at New York University.Footnote ⁷⁴ Wartime transformed his perspective. His postwar works alleged that existing demonstrative structures, in their commitment to centralization and neutrality, were overly rigid; Dimock sought to rehabilitate them via decentralization. “Orthodox bureaucracy carries impersonality to the point of inhumanity, rules to the point where individuality and initiative are neutralized, and automatic processes to the point where motivation is excluded,” he wrote.Footnote ⁷⁵ This made prewar, centralized, depersonalized administration untenable. “Decentralization in order to break the back of bureaucracy and permit the individual to lead a more normal life is perhaps the greatest need of our modern age,” he argued.Footnote ⁷⁶

In postwar reorganizations of the executive branch, public administration specialists worked to realize this new vision for administration, rejecting the field’s classical emphasis on merit and centralization and embracing decentralization and administrative responsiveness as priorities. In 1947, President Harry Truman appointed Herbert Hoover to head a Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of Government, a follow-up to the Brownlow Commission’s efforts a decade earlier. What became known as the “Hoover Commission” was a conservative-led effort to rein in the administrative state; business leaders occupied key positions and emphasized the need to curtail the expansive executive branch created under the New Deal.Footnote ⁷⁷ The logics of postwar administrative theory facilitated their efforts. Twenty-nine scholars of public administration, many of them participants in its recent anti-Wilsonian turn, occupied “strategic places” in the reform.Footnote ⁷⁸

Some components of the Committee’s resulting report conformed to classical administration theory’s endorsement of unified, hierarchical forms and shared the Brownlow Committee’s emphasis on executive oversight.Footnote ⁷⁹ Others clearly reflected the new directions in public administration. Managerial principles, including decentralization, were emphasized.Footnote ⁸⁰ The Committee rejected the Civil Service Commission’s centralized management of personnel matters, which it regarded as “slow, impersonal and cumbersome,” and critiqued its use of rigid employment rules meant to ensure neutrality. Instead, it recommended reforms that would free departments to handle their own personnel matters.Footnote ⁸¹ As one observer noted, a “fundamental theme underlying a number of the specific recommendations is that many federal activities need to be administratively decentralized.”Footnote ⁸² Another observed that the Commission did “not stress the separation of politics from administration” as past generations of reform had, interpreting it as a testament to the “diversity of values in public administration at mid-century.”Footnote ⁸³

In the 1950s, continued efforts at reform further enacted public administration’s postwar emphasis on politicized, decentralized administration. In 1953, President Eisenhower—who revisited the Hoover Commission’s recommendations upon taking office—issued an executive order creating a new designation, Schedule C, to exempt some civil servants from the merit system, thus allowing for more policy-making positions within the federal bureaucracy.Footnote ⁸⁴ Observers understood it as a battle in the ongoing contest between “the spoils system vs. Civil Service,” one in which new ideas of administrative responsiveness triumphed over traditional commitments to merit-based neutrality.Footnote ⁸⁵ When a second Hoover Commission met in 1954–1955, it explicitly called for the further politicization of administration. It argued that the group of “non-career executives who represent … the political party in power and the measures to which it is committed” was “too small and spread too thin.”Footnote ⁸⁶ At odds with the prewar emphasis on neutrality, the Commission called for an “orderly coexistence between patronage and merit,” urging that “the need for more and better-qualified political appointees” was “just as great” as that of ensuring a “highly competent group of nonpolitical career administrators.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Noting these developments, one observer declared that the Commission was helping to “lay ghost to the proposition that principles of organization are applicable without regard to policy and value judgments.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In 1955, against allegations of patronage, the Eisenhower administration used Schedule C to expand the number of political, non-career employees in government.Footnote ⁸⁹

Top brass in the Eisenhower administration embraced the same logics, advising that even career civil servants exercise a commitment to political considerations. Commenting on the “perpetual problem of reconciling politics and administration,” one senior official argued that the civil service needed to be “a positive instrument for aid in formulation and execution of government policy.” Eisenhower’s head of the Civil Service Commission, Roger Jones, concurred: “I believe we are coming to recognize … that prevention of a renaissance of the spoils system does not require political neutrality on program and policy by any career executive,” he argued.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the inaugural issue of the Civil Service Journal, he urged civil servants to embrace the political elements of their roles. He instructed each civil servant to study party platforms, and if “he finds that he cannot in all honesty give his support to the new administration and cannot help carry out faithfully its policies,” to “seek other employment.” “Career executives who believe that representative democracy is the right form of government for this country cannot, in good conscience, do anything other than help political executives carry out party policy as enunciated by the President and his principal officers,” he argued.Footnote ⁹¹ In an explicit rejection of Wilsonian neutrality, postwar scholars and practitioners had remade administration in favor of political responsiveness.

New Public Administration

These new directions were the beginning of a transformation in public administration thought and practice that would reach its fullest expression in the decades to come. When President John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, he appointed John W. Macy—a self-described “long-time admirer of David Lilienthal”—as the Commissioner of the Civil Service. Macy represented an emergent generation of liberals concerned with “grassroots” democracy and was a vocal supporter of an activist federal bureaucracy unhampered by commitments to neutrality; his “blueprint” for the civil service directly challenged “sacrosanct features of the traditional personnel system” and emphasized that “the career service is not a large, amorphous mass of drones to be pushed in one direction or another.”Footnote ⁹² Macy captured the public’s attention when he implemented new, widely remarked upon management practices within the civil service.Footnote ⁹³ Contra the prewar logic that administrators were neutral and interchangeable, Macy’s program intended to empower individuals in a way that increased the effectiveness of the organization as a whole. New recruitment policies focused on identifying specific candidates, especially those from underrepresented groups, to achieve an effective and representative service, and salary reforms sought to introduce more flexibility to pay schedules, allowing the government to better reward individual performance.Footnote ⁹⁴ Novel training programs encouraged civil servants to assume higher responsibilities, including those in policy making.Footnote ⁹⁵ “No organization should be allowed to become so fixed and no set of policies so prescribed that the individual cannot exercise free choice in pursuing his own development in public service,” Macy argued in a treatise on “the human side of government” published at the end of his tenure.Footnote ⁹⁶

As the 1960s advanced, demands for administrative reform heightened as civil rights and New Left-inspired demands for bottom-up, participatory democracy intensified the feeling—mounting since the Second World War—that administration needed to be more representative, decentralized, and democratic. The civil rights movement and high-profile urban unrest highlighted bureaucracy’s tendency to treat clients, especially those at society’s margins, with disregard, thus implicating administration in the perpetuation of racial injustice and social inequality. Moreover, the anti-war movement identified bureaucratic injustice on a global scale, highlighting the role of administrators in the unpopular war in Vietnam. Widespread critiques of administration condemned its failure to respond to the grassroots and deemed it the antithesis of popular democracy. Developments in administrative law reflected this mounting emphasis on participation. Theories of interest group pluralism, which held that administration remained sensitive to citizens via interest groups representing their preferences, fell out of favor, replaced by efforts to increase citizens’ direct participation in administrative processes.Footnote ⁹⁷ Courts broadened their conceptions of legal standing to enable more citizen lawsuits and applied a “hard look doctrine” to agency decisions that appeared at odds with the “public interest.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Likewise, new legislation including the 1966 Freedom of Information Act made agency records more transparent by subjecting them to disclosure.Footnote ⁹⁹ A rising public interest movement led by Ralph Nader and other lawyers inspired by the civil rights movement used the law to critique the undertakings of government agencies, particularly around environmental issues.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Public administration specialists undertook their own efforts to transform administration in light of growing concerns about citizen participation. In the late 1960s, a group called “Federal Employees for a Democratic Society” (modeled after the New Left’s Students for a Democratic Society) called for “a radical governmental reform movement” with emphasis on “client needs, new organizational forms, [and] employee participation in policy decisions and review.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ The same year, a group of activist civil servants published their own “Port Huron”-style statement in Public Administration Review. They asserted their dissatisfaction with “establishment myths” that “politics and government should never mix” and that “implementation of policy is non-political, while policy formulation is political,” alleging that Wilsonian “neutrality” excluded minority groups from full participation in government.Footnote ¹⁰² “We believe that we must begin working toward the creation of a genuine ‘participatory democracy’ both within our federal agencies and within our society at large,” they declared.Footnote ¹⁰³

Dwight Waldo, again on the cutting edge of the discipline, perceived that the decade’s political developments would require the further transformation of administrative practice. In a 1968 speech on “Public Administration in a Time of Revolutions,” he acknowledged the recent advances that administrators had made in trying to “make public organization internally fulfill the objectives of a democratic society.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ But he argued that further transformation was necessary as the field struggled to respond to the ongoing “revolution on behalf of the individual and individualism” and the “crisis in race relations.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ He and others were coming to realize that the field had “advanced very little in making public bureaucracies acceptable and efficient in working with many of the clientele,” who experienced administration as demeaning and dehumanizing.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Scholars responding to the speech joined Waldo in calling for further administrative reform in response to “racial rioting,” “draft card burning and mass sit-ins,” and “hippy-ism.” Others raised the war in Vietnam as a pressing consideration for administrators. One noted that the Nuremberg trials held civil servants “responsible for carrying out orders given by their hierarchic superiors in a Nazi-dominated government.” “If the United States were to lose in Vietnam, would there not also be prosecutors demanding justice for the women and children of Ben Tre?” he asked.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ With the politics-administration binary collapsed, public administration could not disregard these concerns.

Reckoning with these demands for reform, Waldo, then the chair at the Maxwell School of Public Administration at Syracuse University, gathered scholars at Minnowbrook (a conference center in the Adirondack mountains) to assess the future of the field. The original agenda providing for discussions of precirculated papers was scrapped in favor of small-group discussions of recent political events, including the protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and their meaning for public administration.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ “Almost every group arrived at the conclusion that there outright needed to be greater emphasis upon normative concerns in Public Administration,” recalled one organizer, declaring the conference’s principal themes to be “relevance, anti-positivism, personal morality, innovation, concern for clients” and “antibureaucratic philosophy.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Attendees also considered what organizational forms would suit this new value orientation. The centralized hierarchies of the prewar era were least among them, and discussions of decentralized, “adaptable,” and “consociated” models dominated.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Observers deemed the event the origin of a “New Public Administration,” marking the field’s decisive break from its Wilsonian origins. “The conference was not billed as ‘the new public administration,’ but for many that quickly became its unofficial theme,” one article in Public Administration Review observed. Others wondered if despite its emphasis on revolution and change, “new public administration” was actually a return to the old. H. George Frederickson, a conference organizer, noted that throughout its history in the United States, public administration had cycled between aspiring toward representativeness, then toward “politically neutral competence”—and back again. “Representativeness was preeminent in the Jacksonian era,” he noted—a period characterized by patronage. “The eventual reaction was the reform movement emphasizing neutral competence with executive leadership,” which had dominated in the prewar era. Now, the pendulum was swinging back again. “Now we are witnessing a revolt against these values accompanied by a search for new modes of representativeness,” he wrote.Footnote ¹¹¹

Herbert Kaufman, a political scientist at Yale University, deemed the return of the representativeness paradigm alarming. He regretted the decline of the field’s past commitments to “politically neutral competence” and “executive leadership” and mourned the New Deal era, when “much of the literature of professional and academic public administration had a confident, approving, consensual tone” and administrators were “regarded by many as heroes in the struggles for a better social order.” Kaufman feared “reviving a new spoils system” and warned that “decentralization will soon be followed by disparities in practice among the numerous small units” that would “engender demands for central intervention to restore equality and balance and concerted action.” He predicted that the costs of “New Public Administration” would be so high that the field would come full circle—again—and “disappointed partisans of the current movement on behalf of representativeness will acquiesce to the efforts of a new generation of idealists to elevate the quality, the consistency, the impartiality, the morale, and the devotion to duty of bureaucrats by strengthening and broadening central control and supervision.” “As strange as it may seem to this generation of reformers, innovators of tomorrow will defend many of the very institutions … under attack today,” he argued.Footnote ¹¹²

Other critics were concerned that “New Public Administration” weakened, rather than transformed, public administration. Writing about the Minnowbrook Conference, Dwight Waldo noted that it had seemed to undercut the field’s longtime tools without offering adequate replacements; he wondered if with it the “power to govern” had been “neglected and imperiled.”Footnote ¹¹³ A few scholars expressed the same concern. “The academic field of public administration continues undefined and unappreciated in an era when demands for its contributions should be rapidly escalating to unprecedented heights,” one noted. The “traditional approach” had become regarded as “too task oriented and prescriptive,” but very little had replaced it.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The field seemed to lack its prewar confidence: in itself, and in government more generally. A 1969 essay titled “Administration Blowin’ in the Wind” made it plain: “while older theories of administration have been largely discredited, no new theories have commanded sufficient support to offer usable guidelines that can be widely accepted.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

The increasing prominence of partisan opposition to the administrative state, exemplified by the rise of a Sunbelt conservatism that had achieved national prominence with the presidential election of Richard Nixon in 1968, amplified critics’ concerns about the administration’s vulnerability.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Classical administration’s fracturing enabled the ascendance of competing theories of administration, including those whose foremost priority was to diminish it. Public choice theory—which applied ideas of the self-interested individual to politics to argue that government administrators, far from the prewar notion of neutrality, were acting to maximize their own self-interest—became the preferred framework of a growing conservative legal, political, and academic movement that had cohered around its opposition to the expanding administrative state.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Public choice theorists argued that the public sector was too large, the product of overinvestment by administrators acting in their own interests (including the expansion of their own purviews) at the expense of organizational goals.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Advocates of public choice theory embraced the fracturing of public administration as a discipline in the late 1960s as an opportunity to promote public choice as the field’s future. Vincent Ostrom, the former president of the Public Choice Society, put it plainly. In the “war years,” scholars had realized that the prewar paradigm of Wilson and Brownlow was “not a theory of democratic administration.” It was a “challenge from which the study of public administration has never recovered.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Public choice, according to Ostrom, was the solution to concerns that prewar administration’s commitment to neutrality had made it rigid and undemocratic. In treating public enterprise “essentially like a public firm” that would be “accountable to its relevant community of interests,” he argued that public choice was derived from classical democratic political theory.Footnote ¹²⁰ Contra the centralization of the Wilsonian paradigm that “reduce[d] the capability of a larger administrative system to respond to diverse preferences among citizens,” the logics of public choice made it so that administrators’ “service is to individual persons as users or consumers of public goods.”Footnote ¹²¹ Amid New Public Administration’s efforts to make administration “democratic” and responsive to the publics it served, public choice theorists promoted market logics, rather than administrative values, as the solution. As their vision gained currency, they prepared to remake administrative practice in its image.

New Public Administration in Practice

In the eighty years since Woodrow Wilson’s call for attention to administration, scholars of public administration had seen their field grow and transform: moving from “classical administration” to “democratic administration” to “new public administration,” and cycling between reforms in pursuit of neutral competence and political responsiveness. As the field became unmoored from its prewar foundations, public administration had been challenged by efforts to “democratize” administration by marketizing it, making administrators not neutral executors of a public will, but responsive to individual citizen consumers. Initiated amid mounting public dissatisfaction with government, reform efforts in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s reflected the state of the field. During the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, public administration experts led executive reforms that applied the changing logics of their field—and especially its emergent emphases on responsiveness and market logics—to subsequent reorganizations of the civil service.

When the Carter administration took office in 1977, civil service reform was a key priority. Throughout the decade, administrative mismanagement had become a high-profile issue, implicated in Watergate, stagflation, failure in the Vietnam War, and flagging American confidence in government. Amid economic downturn, and hot debates about the rising cost of welfare programs, Americans scrutinized the costs of government expenditures and demanded action. Public administration experts led the much-called-for reform effort, translating recent developments in administrative theory into practice. Alan K. Campbell, a former dean of the Maxwell School, home of Waldo and the Minnowbrook Conference, was selected as Chairman of the Civil Service Commission and head of the efforts. His appointment reflected the realization of the new directions in the field since the Second World War. Speaking on public administration in the early seventies, he described it as a field in transition: “in this remolding, professionalism, credentialism, hierarchy, authority, are all being challenged. In their place are doctrines of participation, client control, decentralization, neighborhood governance, and value consciousness,” he observed.Footnote ¹²²

The reform he oversaw, made law with the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, the first major reorganization since Pendleton, was based in these new principles and cemented the field’s turn away from neutrality and toward responsiveness. The Act’s opening lines gestured toward representativeness, pledging to create a “work force reflective of the Nation’s diversity.” It abolished the Civil Service Commission and created the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), a move that deemphasized merit functions in favor of management. Decentralization was a primary goal, and the new office delegated to individual agencies the personnel management role that had historically been the province of the central agency. New proposals for merit pay introduced flexibility to reward individual performance, and the creation of a “Senior Executive Service” sought responsiveness through management by designating this group of senior managers “accountable for program success, goal-setting and achievement.”Footnote ¹²³

Scholars described the reform as representing a shift from a traditional “protectional doctrine” that held that “neutral competence could only be maintained by a civil service system that protected employees from undue political influence” to a newer “flexibility doctrine,” which sought “to create incentives for performance and responsiveness to political leaders” and drew on “private-sector models of management” to do so.Footnote ¹²⁴ “The Carter administration is arguing that the pendulum has long since swung too far in a protective reaction against the spoils system, abandoning the responsiveness and accountability of political control,” one Washington Post journalist wrote of the reform.Footnote ¹²⁵ In the years that followed, assessments of the reform’s effectiveness were mixed; scholars found that efforts to diversify the service had largely failed, and that efforts at management-driven responsiveness were inconclusive, seeming to have inspired fears of dismissal or retribution without adequately incentivizing job performance.Footnote ¹²⁶ The most salient of the reform’s consequences was diminished morale among federal employees, who lamented that it had undermined their job security and further damaged the civil service’s reputation among the public by reinforcing ideas about government incompetence.Footnote ¹²⁷

By 1980, public dissatisfaction with the federal government had intensified, inspiring taxpayer revolts and propelling Ronald Reagan and his explicitly antistatist program to the White House. During his tenure, efforts to assert political accountability over administration intensified. Donald Devine—a 1967 alumnus of the Maxwell School appointed as the head of OPM—embodied the period’s rejection of administrative neutrality. Devine was a vocal critic of the field’s longtime emphasis on the “neutral use of modern scientific-administrative values,” which he argued demonstrated a “radical misunderstanding of the role of the government in the context of American political culture … traceable to another President Woodrow Wilson.”Footnote ¹²⁸ “There is no value-free public administration,” he declared, citing Vincent Ostrom.Footnote ¹²⁹ “Public Choice Finds Allies in Top Places,” announced the Washington Post, noting the number of public choice theorists in the Reagan administration.Footnote ¹³⁰

Devine characterized his tenure at OPM as an effort to achieve a government “organized and administered according to political principles.”Footnote ¹³¹ Reforms included new performance standards and bonus-for-performance systems borrowed from the private sector. “Freed of most of the burdens of arbitral neutrality,” Devine also introduced new personnel systems that emphasized political leadership in agencies. His efforts “drew the core political managers in the agencies into the creation and execution of a coordinated plan to provide the leadership necessary to carry out the president’s and the cabinet’s policy agenda.”Footnote ¹³² In a crusade against the merit system, he also reduced the number of career personnel in government, requiring that “virtually every domestic agency cut its staff by 5 percent or more”—a move that the Washington Post described as a “guerilla war against the federal bureaucracy.”Footnote ¹³³ The Reagan administration also saw the creation of a “Committee on Privatization” and the formation of a business-run commission to eliminate government waste. A similar program, known as “Reform ’88” sought to further instill “businesslike procedures” in government.Footnote ¹³⁴

Devine and his allies understood their program as reversing the Wilsonian paradigm and the Progressive and New Deal state it had given rise to. He regarded Woodrow Wilson, in his role as the father of classical public administration, as “truly the American father of the modern liberal state”—and the enemy of “Reagan conservatives” who had “been inspired by Professor Vincent Ostrom’s critique.” In rejecting it, they “created a new—or rather went back to an old theory of government based upon the federalist consensus of the founders,” one that gave it a significantly reduced role in American life.Footnote ¹³⁵ “No one looks to national government for the efficient provision of genuine welfare any longer,” he wrote, celebrating his achievements as the head of OPM. “The future will look to the private sector or local government.”Footnote ¹³⁶

Devine’s administrative reforms marked a clear departure from prewar administrative thinking and a rejection of confidence in government it had sustained. In the wake of the Reagan-era reforms, public administration experts noted that they were facing “a new political reality,” which required that “any emerging administrative doctrine must rest politically on a … bottom-up, market-oriented progressivism that has successfully challenged the tradition of top-down positive government.”Footnote ¹³⁷ “Politically, the ideology underlying administrative doctrine since the New Deal has been let government do it,” one scholar observed in 1989. Americans had expressed “faith in expert administrators” and a “confidence that with the tools of technical rationality, science, and bureaucratic organization the world was becoming a steadily better place in which to live.” But “since its heyday at the turn of the century, the country has lost some of its faith in the type of progressivism that promoted strong government as the necessary tool for advancement into a better life for the country,” he observed.Footnote ¹³⁸ “Challenged are the premises that there is a public interest,” he wrote, concluding that the field faced “the question of whether the concept of a public administration can survive.”Footnote ¹³⁹

Another scholar shared the feeling that these developments marked the possible “End of Public Administration.” “Public administration, that promising profession, foundered in the ‘post-progressive era’—1920 to present,” he argued, noting that many debates—over neutrality and partisanship and centralization and decentralization—had divided the field.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ “As the nineteenth century ended and the twentieth began, it appeared that public administration was well on its way toward developing as a public-oriented profession that would legitimate the civil service,” he wrote. But now, as the century neared its end, the “‘end of Public Administration’ is a distinct possibility.” “The counterweight to The New Public Administration is Privatization,” he observed. There was a growing sense that “public ends may be accomplished through private means.” The expanding “marginal state”—an expanding web of contracted workers—was a “product of skepticism about public administration.”Footnote ¹⁴¹

Those dissatisfied with the recent directions in public administration, especially its usurpation by market-based thinking, were in for dark days as efforts at reform continued into the 1990s. A 1992 bestseller, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector, presented the recent transformations in public administration thought as a call for yet more transformation. Its authors, journalist David Osbourne and Ted Gaebler, a veteran of local government, argued that the administrative forms pursued by “Young Progressives” like Woodrow Wilson in their efforts to eliminate patronage were outdated and had become “slow, inefficient, and impersonal.”Footnote ¹⁴² The pair were not anti-government—“we believe deeply in government,” they made clear from the outset—but they were adamant that “industrial-era governments, with their large, centralized bureaucracies and standardized, ‘one-size-fits-all’ services,” were “not up to the challenges of a rapidly changing information society and knowledge based economy.”Footnote ¹⁴³ The book surveyed innovative practices in business and government to promote “lean, decentralized, and innovative” organizations that employed “competition, consumer choice, and other nonbureaucratic mechanisms to get things done as creatively and effectively as possible.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ According to the authors, these organizations were ideal because they “give their employees a sense of meaning and control,” “prefer market mechanisms to bureaucratic mechanisms,” “empower citizens by pushing control out of the bureaucracy, into the community,” and “decentralize authority, embracing participatory management.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ They are our future,” the authors held.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Their program, which reflected the logics of postwar administrative theory, was promptly enacted. For Bill Clinton and Al Gore, who represented a generation of “New Democrats” for whom a return to the statist liberalism of the New Deal period was untenable, Reinventing Government offered a blueprint for how to achieve a “leaner” state better attuned to the logics of the postindustrial economy.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In 1993, Osbourne became a senior advisor to the Clinton administration, recruited by Vice President Al Gore to reform the federal bureaucracy. The project, dubbed the National Performance Review, vowed to create “effective, efficient, and responsive government” that “put the customer first” and “empower[ed] employees to get results” by using “market dynamics such as competition and customer choice to create incentives for success” and “decentralizing authority [to] empower those who work on the front lines to make more of their own decisions and solve more of their own problems.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ When the project’s recommendations were put into effect, federal agencies were required to identify their “customer” bases, post standards of service, and offer opportunities for customer feedback and redress.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The federal procurement process was decentralized, freeing managers to buy what they needed more quickly. The same year, an administration-backed “buyout bill” incentivized select employees to leave the government. A follow up initiative in 1995 encouraged agencies to critically review the Code of Federal Regulations, a process that led to the elimination of over 100,000 regulations. In total, the National Performance Review claimed to have reduced the size of government 12 percent in six years, with civilian federal government jobs “a smaller share of all jobs than at any time since the eve of World War II.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Since that time, public administration had been transformed and had remade the administrative state along with it. Observers noted the degree to which Clinton’s effort at “reinventing government” marked the culmination of postwar developments in public administration. Since the Hoover Commission, decentralization had been a priority; one commentator described Clinton’s reforms as taking that ethos to an extreme, “virtually dismantling the traditional centrally managed system of hiring and linking decentralization explicitly with deregulation.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ Another saw in it the “pioneering intellectual work of public choice theoreticians,” manifested in its proclivity toward “private ownership, contracting out, and competition in public service provision.”Footnote ¹⁵² Others identified the reform’s unlikely origins in the New Public Administration of the late 1960s. “The careful student of reinvention will note several interesting parallels between the new public administration and reinventing government,” Minnowbrook Conference organizer H. George Frederickson observed, noting that both “emphasize responsiveness, but in different ways and in different words.” “Worker and citizen participation in decision making” had become the “empowerment of customers” and the “empowerment of public employees” and “citizen choice” had become “customer driven government.” Both called for “decentralization, flatter hierarchies, funding projects, contracting out, and systems of coproduction or public-private partnerships,” suggesting that “issues of structure and organizational design appear to have changed little in 25 years.”Footnote ¹⁵³

Despite these similarities, the New Public Administration of the 1960s and its application by the Clinton administration decades later represented different political philosophies. Whereas New Public Administration was premised on an “elevated conception of citizenship, a vision of the informed, active citizen participating ‘beyond the ballot box,’” its more recent iteration’s “use of the customer metaphor … borrows heavily from utilitarian logic, the public choice model, and the modern application of market economics to government,” Frederickson argued. “The public official is to develop choices for empowered choice makers rather than build a community,” he observed. In this model, “the values of individual satisfaction are judged to be more important than the values of achieving collective democratic consensus.” It was a difference that was both “political and philosophical.” New Public Administration had been concerned with “humanistic and democratic administration” and “with matters of justice and fairness broadly under the label of social equity.” The same could not be said of “reinventing government,” which elevated “values of individual choice, the provision of incentives, the use of competition, and the market as a model for government.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴

“It could be said it took twenty-five years for the application of new public administration organization and management concepts to be broadly accepted in government,” Frederickson observed of the movement he helped to create. But when they were, it was “not in the language of new public administration but in the language of reinventing government.” “The reform era died,” he wrote, and the result had been “downsizing the professional civil service and increasing private and nonprofit government contracts.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Statistics backed up his point; the Clinton era had seen the size of the federal civil service drop by 300,000 employees between 1993 and 1998, a reduction of 15.4 percent that brought the level of federal employees to the lowest level since the Kennedy Administration. Just 52 percent of remaining employees were covered by the merit system, down from 86 percent in the 1950s.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The “public,” he concluded, had literally fallen out of “public administration”—often replaced with terms like “governmental administration” or “government management.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ “There is no public, only the sum of atomistic individuals. And there is no public interest, except in summing up the aggregate of private interests,” he wrote.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Recent reforms like the National Performance Review “presume to reconcile the old politics-administration dichotomy,” he observed. But they were “deprived of the richness and vitality of concepts of the public and what it means to take public responsibilities,” he argued in a 1997 book, The Spirit of Public Administration.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ As the century neared its end, public administration’s efforts to enact “democratic administration” seemed to have given way to the retrenchment of both the “public” and “administration” in American life.