Overhead Agencies and Permanent Government: The Office of Management and Budget in the Obama Administration
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Beryl A. Radin
Whenever a change of administration occurs in Washington, classic issues of public administration are brought out of the academic closet. The dichotomy between politics and administration moves from discussion in classrooms and textbooks to the pages of the Washington press. The role of the career bureaucracy is acknowledged as a way the new administration will translate its policy and political agenda to the machinery of government. During this stage, after election results are clear, the term “permanent government" is used with the assumption that everyone knows what it means. But the concept of “the permanent government” is an idea borrowed from the British system, one that cannot be automatically applied to the American case, where a system of shared powers plus the structure and culture of the US career bureaucracy are quite different from the British Westminster model. This article focuses on two management efforts within one of the great overhead agencies of American Government, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). These involve the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) and the staff itself within the OMB Management office that has responsibility for performance assessment. They provide evidence of an inherent tension between aspirations of the Obama administration and the orientation of existing staff. Discussion of these two management efforts provides a glimpse of a set of decision processes that is usually absent from discussion of “the permanent government." It indicates that “permanent government" is more than just career-political interactions, and it is evidence that career staff operate differently in different contexts. To understand this role, it is important to look inside the detailed processes of government to determine how these actually operate within the Executive Office of the President.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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- Overhead Agencies and Permanent Government: The Office of Management and Budget in the Obama Administration
- The Evolving American State: The Trust Challenge
- Politicians Do Pander: Mass Opinion, Polarization, and Law Making
- Review
- Review of The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform
- Review of No Middle Ground: How Informal Party Organizations Control Nominations and Polarize Legislatures
Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Why Can't Americans See the State?
- The Winds of Congressional Change
- `Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare:' A Prescription that Progressives Should Fill
- The Case of the Missing Spymaster
- Bankruptcies, Bailouts and the Banking Bureaucracy: The Bush Agenda and the Capacity for Crisis
- Modern Presidents and the Transformation of the Federal Personnel System
- The Politics Measurement Makes: Performance Management in the Obama Era
- Overhead Agencies and Permanent Government: The Office of Management and Budget in the Obama Administration
- The Evolving American State: The Trust Challenge
- Politicians Do Pander: Mass Opinion, Polarization, and Law Making
- Review
- Review of The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform
- Review of No Middle Ground: How Informal Party Organizations Control Nominations and Polarize Legislatures
