New Public Management Comes to America

The United States has had an ambiguous relationship to the New Public Management (NPM) as a global public sector reform movement. Many of the themes, concepts, and tools of governance associated with NPM's managerial ideology-"business-like management," competitive tendering, incentives, agencification, devolution, performance measurement and management, subsidiarity- have long been staples of U.S. federal, state and local public management. Most of the elements of NPM have been road-tested in America. Yet public management reform in the U.S. in the NPM era that was underway in the 1980s has been decidedly heterodox, a manifestation of what Paul Light (1997) has termed the variously-themed "tides of reform" that ebb and flow through American public administration. Beginning in 2001, with the administration of George W. Bush, a new tide of reform has surged in, displacing the Clinton administration's emphasis on "reinventing government." The Bush reforms have attracted surprisingly little attention compared to the swarms of public management experts who examined the Clinton initiatives from their outset. Whereas Lyndon Johnson sought to use systematic analysis to strengthen executive control over policy and budget priorities, Richard Nixon sought to create a centralized "administrative presidency," Jimmy Carter attempted to enhance executive control over the assignment and remuneration of senior civil servants, Ronald Reagan proclaimed a "war on waste" and inefficiency and Bill Clinton promised to "let managers manage" toward a government that "works better and costs less," George W. Bush has undertaken virtually all of these things to at least some degree-and more. Despite their apparent breadth, however, Bush reforms have reflected more of the essential spirit of New Public Management than those of any other recent American president.