Volume 7, Issue 4

This essay examines public-sector employment in order to grasp the distinctive character of the American state. Looked at comparatively, the American state is anything but small or weak. Rather, befitting a federal system, public authority in the United States is exercised largely through state and local government. What is distinctive about the American state is the concentration of public-sector employment in three areas: education, defense, and public safety. This pattern reflects a historical legacy of American state-building whereby the federal government frequently employed less visible, indirect forms of policy intervention while state and local government developed robust authority, particularly in matters that pertained to public and private morals. The result has been a set of institutions that hides or conceals public authority in various ways. Ultimately, the inability of Americans to see this state reinforces the very skepticism toward governmental authority that such a state-building strategy was meant to avoid.

This article argues a central change in the composition of the American state has taken place in Congress. Since the volatile 1960s, Congress has undergone two periods of reform—one in the 1970s and another in the 1990s—that resulted in profound changes to the institution. Congress also underwent significant changes as a result of developments in external institutions and in the electorate.

The state has consistently been displaced by individual initiative and market mechanisms in personal and collective memory and, more often than not, scholarly interpretations as well. Progressives, however, would do well to embrace rather than deride this pattern. More importantly, they should design legislation that capitalizes upon the long-standing preference of Americans for government that is hidden in plain sight. This article explores that history. It identifies the ways in which Americans learned to govern less visibly during the nineteenth century and the ways in which these patterns were reinforced during the twentieth. In the process, it also addresses the prevailing assumption that Americans did not govern at all for much of their history. Indeed, it is that mythical "stateless" past that those who have already secured their state-subsidized benefits deployed in order to deny prospective public support to others.

The security intelligence establishment of the United States in the modern era came about in response to international threats: the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the rising status as the Soviet Union as a superpower driven by an ideology in conflict with American capitalism and democracy. What follows is an examination of these origins, along with a more contemporary look at the state of U.S. intelligence, which again changed dramatically (at least on the surface) in light of further international jolts: the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the fear of Iraqi unconventional weaponry in 2002-2003. From the early to the most recent efforts to improve U.S. security intelligence, reformers have tried to overcome the pronounced centrifugal forces that have plagued the integration and coherent management of the nation’s secret agencies. This article explores why these reforms have consistently failed.

True crises, such as the recent failure of the financial markets, test the capacity of the permanent bureaucracy. Leadership, responsiveness, and creativity, as well as stability and practicality, were put to the test in the intense summer and fall months of 2008. Major financial institutions failed or sat on the brink of failure, liquidity froze, the credit market vanished, foreclosure rates soared, and the government struggled to prevent further economic collapse. Just as critically, the capacities of regulatory foresight and independence, along with long-standing regulatory procedures, had in effect been tested in the decade leading up to the crisis. What was the impact of the Bush Administration's management of the financial regulatory bureaucracy over his eight-year presidency? What was its impact in the midst of the crisis at the close of his last term? This paper examines the longer-term capacity of foresight—the expertise and independence to see a crisis on the horizon and to speak truth to power in the midst of economic boom time—and the short-term capacities of responsive competence in the form of policy and administrative answers to the immediate challenges of the crisis itself.

In this paper I review the causes and consequences of key changes in the federal personnel system in the modern presidency. I first describe the contours of this system at the end of the Truman Administration and the problem the system created for presidents. I then detail three changes to this system that emerged in response to the insularity of the civil service at mid-century. I conclude by reviewing how changes in the personnel system influence presidential efforts to control and manage the administrative state. I note how the short-term incentives of presidents to get control can lead to long-term difficulties in controlling that state.

President Obama assumed leadership of the state in an era of governance by performance management. While sometimes dismissed as a technocratic tool, performance management has profound implications for how the state is governed, impacting the distribution of administrative power, the capacity to exert control and accountability, and the means by which citizens experience their government. This article examines the transition of performance systems between the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, a transition marked by a mixture of continuity and change. Both presidents identified performance as the central organizing theme for their management initiatives. The enthusiastic adoption of performance techniques by any government results in a variety of responses, ranging through passive, political, perverse, and purposeful. Understanding why and when such responses occur, and their implications for politics and governance, should be a central aspect of the study of the permanent government.

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.

This essay looks at the low levels of trust in government within the American public. Through this lens, the essay examines how trust both limits and distorts modern policy making, how it has created new modes of policy implementation, and how these issues shape the nature of the American state.

The capabilities of the American state sometimes depend on the ability of policy-makers to act autonomously, on the basis of their own preferences and beliefs, in ways that serve broad societal and state interests but lack support from powerful constituencies. In a highly acclaimed book on the politics of health care reform in the Clinton administration, Jacobs and Shapiro (2000) argue that "politicians don't pander." Rather, they do indeed act on their own ideological and policy views, using polls mainly to guide rhetorical strategy, not to make policy decisions. I challenge their interpretation and bring to bear other considerations to argue for an increased influence of mass opinion, and to present a high-pandering, limited-autonomy account of the contemporary politics of law-making. In concluding, I comment briefly on this account's consistency with recent events and on the issues it poses for future research.