Introduction

This book is premised on the assumption that the decayed administrative capacity witnessed recently in American government has its roots within the reforms that shaped the administrative state over a hundred years. In exploring this idea, we discover that capacity must be conceptualized beyond budget and staffing to provide a fuller grasp of its ebb and flow. History indicates that administrative capacity is not an administrative problem; it is a political one mediated by the president and Congress. Leaders, driven by the political system’s incentives, often addressed national problems by passing reforms that prioritized bureaucratic control, rather than capacity for the long term. Such reforms propelled the unitary executive, whose command of the bureaucracy coincided with capacity’s gradual decline. In the aftermath of the biggest dislocation in modern American government history, understanding these dynamics is necessary to rebuild and get to resilient capacity.