The United States: the political context of administrative reform

This chapter examines efforts on the part of American presidential administrations over the past 50 years to “reform” the U.S. federal administrative system. These efforts at reform are largely influenced by two factors: (1) the extent to which the reforms reflect struggles to alter the balance of power between the political executive and the career civil service, and (2) the extent to which the reforms can be thought of by the broader public as making government more efficient and more characteristic of an idealized private business model, including a reduction of the federal workforce and the government itself. To a lesser degree, proposed reforms during the administrations of Lyndon Johnson (1963-69) and Barack Obama (2009-17) sought to emphasize analytic thinking and synoptic assessments in ways that, for better or worse, were largely incompatible with the fragmented sources of political authority that characterize the American political system.