While I was not an attendee at the first Minnowbrook conference 50 years ago, I was deeply involved in the issues that had motivated the meeting.  As I wrote about it for the 2nd Minnowbrook meeting, the first conference was often described as the realization that the academics who were looking at the demonstrations in the street from their academic perchs were feeling guilty about their absence from the action.  That was not my issue.  From 1961 on, I had been involved in the civil rights movement both in the street and as a staff member of the US Commission on Civil Rights.  By 1968, many things had changed and a malaise and depression followed the results of the 1968 election.  My personal response to that environment in Washington was to leave town by starting a PhD program in Social Policy Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. 

In many ways the mood of Washington today mirrors those feelings.  But I’m too old to start over.  Instead, I’m trying to figure out what the world of public management and policy has been doing that contributed to the state that we are in today.  What have we done (or failed to do) that has supported the erosion of the public sector that we have all been studying and, in the process, trying to advance suggestions for improvement? 

Increasingly I come back to one of the most basic issues in our field:  the difference between the public sector and the private sector.  What are the differences between the two and what can we expect from each of them?   This is a question that is found recurrently in the history of public management.  Attempts to sort out the similarities and differences between the two sectors are found in a wide range of journals and books.   The exchange takes many different forms as it responds to developments within the society that generate skepticism about one or the other of the two sectors.

While some have attempted to sort out clear roles for the two, others have found that there is a dynamic process that creates pendulum swings related to changes in the environment (technological, social and economic) that move public views from one sector to the other.   Albert Hirschman called this “shifting involvements” and wrote that they occur when the public is disappointed with one or the other sector. 

While this framework is appealing, it seems to me that we have focused on a range of approaches and issues that seems to have stuck us in a place where the unique attributes and values of the public sector have been lost.  I find that the triad of efficiency, effectiveness and equity (generating the need to trade off between them) has been replaced by a deference only to efficiency.  Over the past several decades we have lost much of the complicated identity of the public sector. 

I have identified five areas that I feel have suffered from this loss.  While as academics we cannot require decisionmakers to move the pendulum to include issues that reflect effectiveness and equity values as well as efficiency values, our work can point to the consequences of the overwhelming move to adopt policies and practices from the private sector. 
​

1. The impact of the increase in contracting out programs and services.  We should remind ourselves of the consequences of contracting out programs and services.  As Joseph Califano once said, “HHS doesn’t deliver services.  It delivers dollars and regulations.”  We know that this has led to the hollow state but we have lost sight of the substantive consequences of block grants and disappearance of the federal government in the design and evaluation of programs.  It is one thing to substitute private sector contracts for products available on the market but it is quite different to contract out the actual services paid for by federal government dollars.   We rarely point to this difference in our evaluation of programs and, instead, hold federal employees accountable for services that are beyond their control.
2.  Financial issues appear to drive everything.  Discussion of programs is almost always in budget terms.  Even though we don’t have a clear alternative to the profit motive we seem to have decided to ignore assessments that include both effectiveness and equity goals.
3. Performance definitions seem to be directly borrowed from the private sector and fail to reflect attributes of the public sector role.  There seems to be an assumption that individual bureaucrats have the ability to have an impact on program outcomes and that information about outputs and processes are not important measures of performance.  There is minimal attention to performance measures that reflect goals related to due process or transparency issues.  These are objectives that are often very difficult to quantify.
4. Increasingly studies and research efforts ignore the reality of politics, particularly the way that the unstable external environment has an impact on the quality of government work.  There is a tendency for researchers to move to a micro behavioral level which sometimes appears to be like an ostrich burying its head in the sand.  At the same time, a number of research efforts seem to demean the effectiveness of incremental strategies since they don’t appear to have significant impact on reaching the program goals.
   
5. There is a tendency for researchers to ignore the constitutional complexity of the US system.  This complexity includes shared powers between the three branches  of government as well as federalism issues.  This reinforces the tendency in the field to focus only on the powers within the executive branch and thus repeat strategies that have not been effective in the past (e.g. reorganization and other management reform efforts).

For more than 60 years advocates for improving the substance of public policy in the US have argued that this goal can be best accomplished through the use of information.   This argument emerged during the 1960s with adoption of the Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS). That initiative reflected a belief in the potential of analytic skills to devise a rational framework that could produce useful and agreed-upon data that would support policies that are most effective, most efficient and, even sometimes most equitable.          
 
It assumed that such information was available to decision makers, that it was possible for participants to agree on cause and effect relationships, and that almost all activities could be quantified and measured.  The set of assumptions underlying the PPBS system crossed political lines and had the support of both Republicans and Democrats. 

​The most recent example of this rationality-based strategy was found in the Report of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, a bipartisan group created by Congress in 2016 to develop a strategy for increasing the availability and use of data in order to build evidence about government programs that would be the basis of policy-making.   The Commission’s report, issued in September, called for “a future in which rigorous evidence is created efficiently, as a routine part of government operations, and used to construct effective public policy.” 

Indeed, it is more than a little ironic that such a Commission issued its report in the current political climate.  Attempts to apply the norms and values of science to the public sector has always been difficult.  But today, in a world of “fake news” charges and disputes about the accuracy and legitimacy of information, the barriers to success seem overwhelming.  
 
If we are to understand the limitations of the effort to rely on what is often called neutral evidence, it is useful to review past experiences. The constraints established in the US constitutional structure require players to look for multiple perspectives.  Many issues in our complex system involve players with different perspectives and impose limits on any one player’s ability to define the kinds of information deemed appropriate.   Recent attempts to impose private sector values (especially profit) on a public system have created conflicts not envisioned by the US system architects.
 
A classic New Yorker cartoon probably provides the clearest definition of the problem: a drawing of a file cabinet with drawers labeled “Our facts”, “Absolute facts”, “Their facts”, “Bare facts”, “Neutral Facts, “Unsubstantiated facts”, “Disputable facts,” and “Indisputable facts.”

Despite these conflicts, many advocates for reliance on neutral information believe that data sources exist, or could emerge, that would allow decision-makers to avoid the constraints that emerge from the Constitution and the US political process.  These advocates are convinced that they could draw on their academic training for a set of skills deemed appropriate for a data-driven process.  At the same time, social scientists (including economists, psychologists and sociologists) began to appear on the evaluation and policy analysis staffs of multiple federal agencies.  

Skeptics also appeared.  Alice Rivlin, the first head of the Congressional Budget Office, reminisced about the early days in Washington of  the evaluation field.  She noted:  “HEW in the late 60s was a wonderful place to be.  The Congress had recently passed a raft of new programs.  …  Both advocates and evaluators were naïve by today’s standards… It gradually dawned on all of us that progress was going to be more complicated.”      
 
Several well-known writers emerged during the late 1970s and early 1980s who provided a picture of that complexity. Lindblom and Cohen’s work, Useable Knowledge:  Social Science and Social Problem Solving, contrasted the approach to information that emerges from academic social science with “ordinary knowledge”, the information that emerges from common sense speculation.  They noted that too many policy analysts and researchers greatly underestimated the use and effectiveness of ordinary knowledge, laden as it was with intuition and more emotional responses and values.

Carol Weiss, a evaluation specialist, provided a somewhat different although related perspective.  She characterized information tasks as  the three “I”s – information, ideology and interests.” As early as 1983 she noted that “Observers who expect the subcategory of information that is social science research to have immediate and independent power in the process, and who bitterly complain about the intrusion of ‘politics’…  into the use of research, implicitly hold a distorted view of how decisions are made.”
     
An Italian academic,  Giandomenico Majone, in Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion in the Policy Process,  substituted the idea of argument and evidence for the approach used by applied social scientists. Majone viewed the analyst as one who plays the role of participant and mediator rather than objective scientist.  For him, evidence was much closer to the process applied in legal reasoning. Majone noted:  “Argumentation is the key process through which citizens and policymakers arrive at moral judgments and policy choices.” 

The combined message from these individuals, and others, led some academics and policy-makers to recognize the existence of what Majone called the “uncritical acceptance of the ‘scientific method’.”   It had turned into a mechanistic process.  The concept of “the public good” (developed by economist Paul Samuelson) seems to have vanished from the debate, suggesting that private sector values (profit and efficiency)  have drowned out collective concerns within our society.   Neither the recent Commission report nor much of the literature on evidence-based policy provides a reader with a useful sense of the insights and skepticism that had been developing.  Yet the advocates of what has come to be termed “the evidence movement” continue to believe in its potential. 

But this interest may not take us very far.  Some have attempted to focus on an important aspect of this increased interest, namely  expanding our understanding of what constitutes useful and useable evidence, not simply arguing that all information is appropriate.   Such a focus may be a useful way of acknowledging that we are a society that contains multiple values.  These diverse values challenge the ability of information, alone, to deal with the conflicts that emerge during policy discussion. 

​As a result, the concept of “evidence-based” decision-making cannot be disentangled from a series of value, structural, and political attributes that make such agreement difficult.   We continue to search for ways to identify a range of approaches that are effective, efficient and most equitable to a diverse citizenry.

I have a hard time remembering when I first met Paul Posner.  I know it was more than 30 years ago and was when he was at GAO working on federalism issues and I was teaching at the USC campus in Washington.  

Over the years we found that we had many areas of shared interest covering a range of topics.  We were both focused on public administration issues, public policy issues and – of course – federalism.  We had similar backgrounds and interests.  That led us to somewhat unusual places.  I doubt that few if any APSA members besides the two of us who visited Azerbaijan (at different times)  decided to visit an ancient community of Mountain Jews in Guba – a city in the Caucuses where the Jewish residents continued to use a language that was derived from Persian.  (Their migration northward from Persia  probably took place just after the destruction of the first temple.)  

Both of us were hard to characterize and we didn’t fit into clear categories.  We both wore several hats, moving between the world of practice and the academy.  Over the years we wrote together, planned conferences, especially within the NAPA and other professional organizational frameworks. We didn’t always agree but both of us appreciated the other’s perspective.  Paul’s review of one of my books, Federal Management Reform in a World of Contradictions, in PUBLIUS in 2013 is something that I really treasure.  He picked up on my use of the myth of Sisyphus and agreed with my warning that continuing to pursue traditional management reform efforts was dangerous.  He wrote that “Ill begotten reforms that are destined to bring about waves of disenchantment and disillusionment can only hurt the cause that the [reformers] believe in.”

I appreciated Paul’s ability to understand and operate effectively in both the world of the academic and that of the practitioner. I think that was always something that he sought.  He continued to include this duality to the days before he died.

Paul never abandoned the sensitivities that he developed as a practitioner. He was able to bring those sensitivities to his writing, his teaching, and his role as a leader in the fields that are represented by this panel.  He didn’t threaten the people who did not agree with him. He never lost the perspective that flowed from his years in a congressional agency – GAO.  He was able to remind his colleagues of the reality of our shared powers governmental structure. He made sure that we considered the realities of federalism. Unlike many of his colleagues in our fields, he often focused on the congressional role and its powers, moving beyond the traditional executive branch perspective. For an organization like NAPA, that perspective was likely to be ignored and it was Paul who often raised those important issues.  I will never forget Paul’s comments at a conference on performance measurement when he reminded the audience that a one size fits all approach that was coming out of OMB wasn’t the only approach that could be considered.  

Its difficult to know what constitutes a good colleague.  But I believe it extends beyond publications and teaching syllabi. I think its important to look beyond Paul’s own research work to include the contributions he made as a citizen and professional. Paul’s perspective went beyond traditional measures of collegiality that are normally found inside academia.  As the editor of the Georgetown University Press book series on Public Management and Change I could always rely on his assessments and suggestions for authors in his reviews. In fact, I cannot think of any time that he turned down my requests;  the books in our series reflect his input. Sometimes it took a little nudging to get his review but it was worth it.  

I’d like to conclude my presentation today by discussing the concern that Paul and I shared about pracademics --  the term used to describe the synergy between the worlds of the academy and that of practitioners. Paul wrote an article in Public Budgeting and Finance in the Spring of 2009, laying out a call for the development of what he called a “healthy relationship that is vital to the success of both practitioners and academics.” He wrote the piece as a part of a tribute to the life of Dick Zody, another Virginian but from Blacksburg who was described by Paul.  This piece – while a tribute to Zody – tells us what he believed was important. It's incredibly relevant to our current attempt to assess Paul’s contributions. 

“One of Dick Zody's greatest strengths was his anchoring in both academic and public service worlds. The fact that Dick was able to stretch over many different communities is no surprise, of course, to those of us who knew him. Boundless energy, infectious enthusiasm, passion for both people and ideas—this characterized someone whose life and career would not be contained or bound by one path, institution or discipline. Many aspire to careers like this, but few actually accomplish it. Multi-tasking is the watchword for many today, but let us remember what Dick exemplified—not just doing many things, but doing them well. Dick's career exemplifies the integration of academic teaching and research with the communities of practice that public administration has aspired to achieve since its founding as a field. As Dick Zody's path reminds us, there is no substitute for creative, proactive leadership to start a renewed dialogue that will lead to productive institutional change.”  This piece is a model for us today.

When I had the opportunity to address some of these issues in the Gaus lecture that I gave 5 years later, I echoed some of the same issues that had been important to Paul.  But my sense was that the years that had elapsed contributed to forces that made it even more difficult to find ways to continue to encourage faculty to find ways to blend the two roles of academic and practitioner.

Despite the fact that the history of our fields allowed people – indeed encouraged them – to wear both hats, it was clear that there were more obstacles to these opportunities than had existed in the past.

I noted that limited opportunities now exist for faculty members in public management, public policy, and related fields to move between the academy and the world of practitioners.  As a result, I created the Pracademic Fellowship Program administered by the APSA Centennial Center for Political Science and Public Affairs, that seeks to create opportunities for a generation of mid career faculty members to recreate the historical experience of joining theory and practice.
 The fellowship provides APSA member academics with practical, hands-on experience built around the reality of the decision-making world. It seeks to give participants a close view of decisionmaking that may not emerge from a traditional research orientation.  The recipients can take this experience back to their institutions and classrooms to help build bridges between the academic and practitioner worlds.

An informal advisory committee was created around the program and Paul became a very important member of the small group.  A year ago a panel was organized at the Philadelphia APSA conference to provide a discussion of the program, focusing on the experience of two individuals who had spent a semester in different parts of EPA as part of a pilot effort. And Paul was a participant in that panel.  In his comments he noted both the importance of programs like the pracademic fellowship but, at the same time, the difficulties that constrained their influence.  His absence on the advisory committee will be obvious as the program hopes to expand this year.  

As others on this panel have noted, Paul’s spirit and influence are very much alive. I will miss my friend.

​More than 25 years ago I decided I wanted to apply for a Fulbright grant to India. There were a number of reasons for this decision that encompassed a range of realities.  I am an American with very limited language facility.  I had found that my earlier time in Australia allowed me to avoid my language limitations but still learn from a different culture.  About the same time, I was a devotee of the British television series Jewel in the Crown and was intrigued by India’s transition from a colonial situation to independence.  I enriched my knowledge by delving into the rich fictional literature about India available in English and took a course at the Smithsonian Institute on Indian Art and Architecture to learn about highlights of Indian history and to identify sites that I wanted to visit.

Increasingly I began to see parallels between India and the US.  My earlier research had focused on American federalism and the constant search for ways that a national government could deal with a system of states with very different expectations, cultures, and populations.  About the same time that I applied for the Fulbright I was able to meet with a group of individual Indians who were leaders of democratically operated grassroots social change movements in India, supporting the empowerment of dalits, tribal people, women and religious minorities.  

This group of Indian activists was brought to Washington, DC by the Ford Foundation and these individuals worked with an American group called the Advocacy Institute to expose them to the advocacy efforts within the US.  This organization had devised strategies and approaches that made sense in the US and provided a setting that was useful to people from another large country with dramatic differences within its population and the need for economic development.  As our conversations developed I began to understand both the similarities and differences between the two systems, both of which were dealing with political, economic and social changes over time and seemed to be constantly in flux.   While the Indian experience with independence and colonial institutions was much more recent than that in the US, both countries searched for ways to make it possible for democratic principles come alive.  

By the time I had to sit down and write my application for the Fulbright I had become aware of two elements in the Indian Constitution that provided me with new ways of thinking about federalism in both countries.  First, I was struck by the way that the Indian constitution had divided the power of the states and the central government into three lists:  the union list, the state list, and the concurrent list. That categorization provided a framework that acknowledged differences between very different policy roles within different jurisdictional structures and seemed to be the only model for issues that required the involvement of both sets of institutions.   

By contrast, the US system, following a Civil War, danced around the division of powers through an argument that referred to issues that involved interstate commerce and did not attempt to classify specific lists of activities that were appropriate for the central government, the states, or both.   It was not until Deil Wright developed what he called the “overlapping model of intergovernmental relations” in the late 1970s that something in the US approached the concept of the concurrent list.   

The second element that became clear to me as I prepared for a visit to India involved attention to the role of the bureaucracy in the Indian constitution. The Indian Administrative Service was one of the very few administrative systems that I had encountered that was established in a constitution as an instrument of federalism, with IAS officers serving as an intermediary between the states and the national government. By contrast, the US Constitution did not really deal with the role of the bureaucracy at any level.   In that sense the US system was similar to that of most political systems where each level of government was equipped with its own set of administrative instrumentalities and mechanisms.   Countries such as Australia and the US have separate and distinct levels of public administration that tend to emphasize the differences between the levels of government rather than to accentuate areas of interdependencies.  My research efforts involving implementation of national policies in different states in the US had shown me that these differences were extremely important.

But back to India. The process of negotiating a Fulbright position in India is never simple.  But in this instance the months involved in my negotiation provided me with an opportunity to build on my growing interest in both issues -- concurrent powers and the IAS.  When I arrived in Delhi at the end of May, I was not only greeted by pre monsoon heat but also an agreement with the Indian Institute of Public Administration in Delhi.   I would spend my three months as a senior Fulbright scholar based there, meeting senior IAS officers both in the classroom and informally, visiting other training institutes throughout the country, and taking advantage of the expertise of colleagues on the faculty and others in Delhi and across the country.  I hadn’t realized it at the time but it turned out that I was the first American to be posted at the IIPA under a Fulbright.  My colleagues at the Institute said that the faculty was always skeptical about accepting previous applicants, believing that they were likely to be somehow attached to the CIA. For whatever reason, I was viewed as different.   Probably my concerns about issues in the US (especially civil rights issues) played a part in this.

I spent the three months combining IIPA based activities with visits to training institutes across the country arranged by IIPA staff, the Fulbright Office, and the U. S. Information Service.  I was able to speak to IAS officers in Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Trivandrum, and several other places.  I spent a week at the training academy in Mussoorie – perhaps the institution anywhere in the world that has invested more in training bureaucrats than anyone else has done.  I was able to see both the strengths and the weaknesses of those training efforts.  When it was possible I also met with individuals from advocacy organizations in those places.   In subsequent trips to India, I visited other parts of the country and returned to earlier places.  By the turn of the 21st century, I was immersed in questions about India.   I was more likely to know what I didn’t understand than to pronounce any expertise.

The years that elapsed between my Fulbright in 1990 and my last trip in 2007 gave me a picture of a constantly changing India.  Two main changes were extremely important to my understanding of issues related to federalism.  The first was the emergence of the private sector.  Its presence was noted in areas which had been characterized by strong (almost monopolistic) government action. Global attention had turned to the contribution of the Indian technology private sector. New actors from the private sector were likely to both demand and assist in a role in decisionmaking.   These players further complexified the demands on all of the three lists defined in the Constitution but clearly made the concurrent list particularly difficult to manage.

The second change emerged from the development of state specific political parties across the states. The appearance of these political parties in the 1980s challenged the ability of the Congress Party to win elections in a number of states.   As a result, it became increasingly common for elections to be won by coalitions of political parties.  These coalitions often included a range of national parties and state-specific parties and gave state political leaders the ability to make demands on issues and areas which had not been possible in the past.   It was possible – at least theoretically -- for the Chief Ministers to indirectly use the skills of their IAS cadres to push for specific policy directions even when they were posted in Delhi.  These individuals seem to serve  an interconnecting role as they share a common background but find themselves representing different governments. Federalism, thus, had to be defined to include these new players as a part of the context of decisionmaking either directly as players or as individuals who changed the way that they defined their power position and roles.  

Similar changes were taking place within the US during this same period.  Increased use of contracting out functions at all levels of government made it difficult to think of a clear differentiation between public and private roles. Reliance on legal and structural definitions of federalism was modified and often replaced by the concept of intergovernmental relationships. That term was used to support a view that not only included private sector groups but focused on processes that stemmed from a set of overlaps among national, state and local units simultaneously.  In many cases, increased globalization meant that the relationships spanned national boundaries.  Both governments and private sector actors began to recognize the involvement of organized actors outside the government; these non government organizations became gradually recognized as agents and partners of governments.  These overlaps constrained the levels of autonomy and discretion in any single public or private player. In addition, they stimulated complex multiunit interactions which are non hierarchical in nature.  It became more difficult to fit the traditional role of “bureaucrats” into these behaviors since their traditional role as deliverer of services was dramatically modified.  Yet while some called this development “the hollow state”, governments still continued to exert essential functions in the process (such as raising money, negotiating contracts, establishing program standards). Bureaucracies might have changed but they still have a residue of power.  

In 2015 Bob Agranoff and I published an article in Publius:  The Journal of  Federalism that reminded scholars of Deil Wright’s overlapping model of contemporary relationships (Robert Agranoff and Beryl A. Radin, 2015, “Deil Wright’s Overlapping Model of Intergovernmental Relations:  The Basis for Contemporary Intergovernmental Relationships,” , PUBLIUS:  THE JOURNAL OF FEDERALISM.).  The six elements that he described within this model seemed to fit the changing situation in both India and the US.   They were:

• Limited and dispersed power
• Modest and uncertain areas of autonomy
• High degree of potential or actual interdependence
• Simultaneous competition and cooperation
• Bargain-exchange relationships
• Negotiation as a strategy for reaching agreement

​At the same time that these complex changes were occurring in the US, economic conditions and skepticism about the effectiveness of the public sector were also increasing.   Thus two developments are currently present that do not easily lend themselves to clear strategies: the first is the concept of networks and the second is the use of performance assessment processes to devise accountability mechanisms.   The concept of networks is now a widely used term in many different contexts, ranging from informal networks of associates to formal structures.  The proliferation of these governing networks reflects not only the expansion of intergovernmental programs to reach across jurisdictions but also  captures important activities of the actors who are present in contemporary settings.  The network activity in the US has varied in many different directions.   Networks have been identified in two diametrically opposite ways.  They have been praised for their ability to serve as a venue for collaborative or cooperative decisionmaking processes. But it is not always clear what people mean by “cooperative federalism” in the US.  The term has been used by advocates of both national, state, and local governments as well as NGOs to justify their involvement in efforts to solve common problems.  But it also has been used as a critique of the status quo by those who believe that policies are dominated by the national government.
   
But at the same time some have emphasized the potential of collaborative processes, networks have also been characterized as the source for many different forms of conflict that emerge from overlapping authority.  One could actually see the roots of the collaboration/conflict dichotomy in the original Indian concurrent list approach.  It was never clear to me what kind of relationships the authors of the Constitution thought would emerge from that third list – collaborative or conflictual? 

If this source of uncertainty is not confusing enough, the US emphasis on performance assessment to devise accountability mechanisms further complicates the contemporary situation. A range of efforts have been put in place to hold third parties accountable for the use of federal dollars and, at the same time, seek to provide those third parties discretion in the way they use those federal monies.  

The complexities of the current era have clearly compounded the difficulties of implementing the overlapping model.  Both India and the US have moved beyond the original cast of actors, broadened some of the venues of decisionmaking, brought on more networks and potential for collaboration, increased opportunities for political and substantive policy conflict, and also increased performance concern with third party involvement.   

While differences between the two systems are clear, examining both sets of players and pressures can prove to be useful to students in both settings.   Both countries are constantly changing and provide a hospitable setting for a range of researchable questions. I’m particularly interested in various forms of comparative analysis that might emerge.  Comparative analysis approaches can be used to examine the differences between the two countries.  But comparative approaches can also be used to devise studies that focus on differences between the strategies employed by states within a single country.  For example, I think there is potential in an analysis of collaborative vs. conflictual strategies used in different states in India.  I hope that these remarks might stimulate people in this audience to search for these and other researchable questions.

After a dozen years, the book series, PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND CHANGE, is coming to an end.   While the existing books will continue to be on the  Georgetown University Press list, no new books will be published.  There will be 33 books in the series – many of which have won awards and become widely cited volumes.   When I created the series I had hopes that it would represent important issues and approaches in public management.  I was not disappointed.  Some of the authors in the series celebrated this contribution during the Public Management  Research Conference in Washington in June, 2017.  

Here are two photos from the celebration:

​As a result of the 2016 election, many Americans are examining the very core of the American democracy and attempting to determine the vulnerability of the U.S. institutional structure to radical change. For many citizens, the deconstruction of constitutional democracy that has emerged from the Trump administration suggests a real attack on this structure. It is difficult to make such an assessment without recognizing that the responsibility for this set of developments may have emerged from different quarters from those who orchestrate Trump's agenda. Indeed, there may be a large group of citizens who have argued for changes that have made our democracy more vulnerable.

One of the contradictions built into the American system involves the relationship between the values of the public sector and those of the private sector. This relationship was an important part of the concept of American exceptionalism. The founders of the American democracy were always skeptical of concentrated power in government (such as that which emerged in monarchies, religious orders, or other non-democratic systems).

We know that our complex shared power system was designed to keep any part of the shared power structure from destroying the autonomy of another part. Another important part of that design was an acknowledgment that there is a difference between the values tied to the public role and those tied to the private sector. Public sector values emphasize social justice, fairness, equity, and the quality of public services. Private sector values emerge from a desire to run government like a business, focusing on efficiency and the profit motive. In addition, the public sector operates more openly with unclear boundaries about its participants’ authority.

The appropriate balance between public and private has always been under dispute. Economist Albert Hirschman provided a creative approach to this issue by defining the balance not as a clear sorting out of the roles of the two sectors but as a dynamic process. Calling this process “Shifting Involvements,” he focused on the changes in technological, social, or economic conditions that cause a shift in the balance between public and private. He describes this process as “disappointment”—one that occurs because citizens find that their expectations have not been met and thus they swing from one sector to the other. This dynamic is often caused by external events (such as economic crises, wars, revolutions) and seems to explain the changes that have occurred within the United States. And it explains the contradictions that always seem to be present in the American society.

For more than 25 years, the swing in the United States has been toward a predominance of values that emerge from the private sector. Today—in contrast to the dynamics of the 1930s—economic conditions and fiscal scarcity have pushed efficiency values to the top of the list, overpowering both equity and effectiveness values. The problems created by the Wall Street crash did not generate increased reliance on the public sector. It is assumed—although not always understood—that the experience of the private sector is directly transferable to the public domain.

This pattern is expressed directly in interesting ways. Public sector employees use the term “company” to describe their public sector organizations. Analysts assume that quantitative data that mirrors the concept of profit margins is the way to determine whether public sector policies are effective. And perhaps most importantly, they assume that contracting out formerly public sector–provided services will adequately address public sector roles. Private sector contractors expect that their views about proprietary information carry over to their government contracts. At times, even nonprofit organizations have a hard time competing with for-profit contractors.

We are now in the midst of what is perhaps the strongest belief that the private sector can be the way to deconstruct the public sector. It is time to confront this set of assumptions. Public administration scholars and practitioners owe the public some hard truths about the unfortunate realities of its predilection for excessive reliance on the private sector.

First published in Public Admin Review, Volume 77, Issue 3, May/June 2017, Page 325.

I am very pleased to participate in this celebration of the publication of the book, Policy Analysis in Israel, that is a part of the international series published by Policy Press.   I’ve already used several of the volumes in my work and have found them to be incredibly useful.  Its important for us all to thank Iris Geva May and Michael Howlett for their leadership in conceptualizing the series and giving us the opportunity to have a picture of the breadth and depth of the field of policy analysis.  Without works like this one, we would all be limited to our separate and unique views of the field.  Like the Sufi story of the blind men and the elephant, each of us is limited by our own experience.  Thus when the individual blind men describe an elephant one describes a trunk, another a tail, still another a foot.  Yet each of them has no idea that their view is only one part of the total elephant.

My remarks today represent my attempt to look beyond one experience with our field and suggest some patterns that may transcend political borders. As some of you may know, I have seen my role as a chronicler and documenter of the field of policy analysis.  As someone originally trained as a historian, I have tried to watch the changes that have occurred in this field both in the academy and in the field of practice.  Both editions of my book  Beyond Machiavelli represent my attempt to describe different eras within the field, first largely inside the US and then in the 21st century when the field clearly moved to recognize global experience.   I am always on the lookout for changes in what we all call policy analysis yet those two words are used to encompass very different behaviors.

The second theme that underlies my remarks is more personal and focused on the Israeli context and my relationship to this country.  I am a first generation American Jew who was brought up in South Dakota -- an unusual place for someone with my family’s background.   My family was attentive to the creation of the state of Israel and my first trip to Israel took place nearly 50 years ago, before the Six Day War.  My subsequent trips allowed me to observe the changes that have occurred in this country.  My last trip took place in 2013 when I spent a week at Tel Aviv University where Gila was the chair of the policy program; I was there as a visiting faculty member.    I do not pretend to be an expert in Israeli policy analysis but I have some familiarity with some of the issues discussed in the book.  I found a number of themes in the volume we are celebrating that seem to support an interesting pattern.

I realized that there was a different approach to policy research when Uncontrollable Spending for Social Services Grants was published in l975.   As someone who was just a few years younger than Martha Derthick, reading her work allowed me to discover a person who looked at federal policy in a new way.  I too was trying to deal with the role of the federal government and find an approach that respected federalism, the world of practice, and communicated findings to a broad audience.
 
In the years that followed, it was clear to me that we were often on the same wave length.  While we didn’t always agree on policy approaches, Martha’s work became the cornerstone for me.  I’d like to emphasize the themes in her work that especially resonated with me.

First, Martha did not demean the world of Washington.  She did not belittle those who had caught Potomac fever.  She was able to understand the reality of those who operated inside the federal bureaucracy, the Congress, and the world of interest groups.  Her work reflected her ability to listen to informants in a way that respected their reality.  She was not uncritical but clearly heard their concerns and depicted their issues.  Her perch at Brookings gave her a wonderful vantage point for this effort.  At the same time she understood that not everything comes from Washington.  

Second, Martha was able to move the study of federalism away from narrow legal and structural approaches to an approach that defined the field as intergovernmental relations.  Along with others (such as Deil Wright) her work gave us a model for understanding the complexity of the US shared powers system.  By focusing on policy impacts of federalism, she showed us how important it is to analyze intergovernmental relations with sensitivity to the differences between policy areas.  

Third, as the daughter of a journalist, Martha had an unusual ability to communicate her analysis in an accessible way.  Her books and articles are very readable.  One has the sense that she was trying to broaden her audience and speak not only to other scholars but also to the individuals who were her  practitioner informants.  She never tried to obfuscate her findings in narrow academic language.  At the same time, her work clearly reflected her familiarity with essential theories and a broad base of literature.

I cannot conclude my remarks without acknowledging that Martha was one of the very few women in the policy and federalism field.  While she was not usually thought of as a feminist, she was someone who was accessible to other women.  I knew that she was someone I could talk to – whether about social services policies or our individual research on the Social Security Administration or other current work.  We shared sources when our work intersected.  I still love looking at her citations in the Social Security book where she cited items from Beryl Radin’s archives.    We would often catch up at APSA at federalism sessions.    

My last contact with her occurred when I received the Gaus award and sent her a copy of my remarks.  I had noted that she was one of the two women who had received that award before me.  She called me and thanked me for that acknowledgement.  She is missed.

The death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore has made many of us search for the reasons that led to that horrible conclusion. Many explanations have been advanced that are important and seek to help citizens understand what led to that event.  The issues that have been raised are not new:  here was a population that was forgotten and suffered in terms of jobs, housing and educational opportunities.  The result is a lost generation that has been denied opportunities in the US.  These are structural problems that even the best efforts by community groups cannot tackle on their own.
   
But there are also less obvious explanations for this tragedy.  It is very ironic that efforts to make government more effective have sometimes led to increased problems for this population.   The press coverage since Gray’s death has pointed to administrative policies and processes put in place by former Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley that some feel contributed to the explosion we have witnessed on the streets of Baltimore.  But O’Malley’s efforts are not unique.  What O’Malley brought to Baltimore actually mirrored efforts in NYC that became the model for public administrators across the country who have tried to respond to citizen concern about the effectiveness of public programs.  While much of the attention today is on the criminal justice system, similar problems have emerged from other sectors.

O’Malley’s effort – called Citistat – was built on an effort in New York City entitled COMPSTAT (short for complaint statistics).   This was a management technique based on private sector concepts that was designed to lead to crime reduction and efficient use of resources.  The process emphasized accountability of staff to the top officials in the organization and was used to map crime and identify problems in the criminal justice system.  

Staff from local precincts met with top officials weekly and discussed ways to reduce crime.   Each local precinct was required to develop a statistical summary of the week’s crime complaints and experiences.  They were also required to submit a weekly report describing significant cases, crime patterns and other relevant police activities.
While this process gave the participants the impression that they were improving the delivery of services to the community, there were hidden traps within that process.   A number of these attributes are found in other attempts to develop performance assessment efforts.  

First, there was a tendency in that process to think about the city as a centralized unit and to develop expectations that applied citywide.  This is sometimes called a “one size fits all” approach.   This process minimized attention to the special needs of different populations and the way those populations perceived the police and, conversely, how the police perceived them.

Second, the reliance on quantitative data minimized attention to qualitative assessments of the service, particularly issues related to the quality of treatment.  When the New York City police department initially emphasized stop-and frisk, it produced 50,000 stops a year.  The department decided that these stops were a good metric for productivity and the annual number ultimately exceeded half a million stops.  Many police officers acknowledged that this policy produced many unjustified stops.

Third, most of the measures that were used in the process were based on attempts to maximize efficiency in the delivery of service.  Increased efficiency was often expected to lead to budget reductions.  There was little attention to the effectiveness of programs or equity aspects of the service delivery.  Some have described this as worshipping the gods of efficiency and ignoring issues of equity.

Fourth, the process that was put in place created pressure on individual police officers to meet the centralized expectations.  Salary decisions were sometimes linked to these assessments. At least one assessment of the NYC experience found that a number of retired police officials complained that pressure from department brass prompted widespread statistical manipulation of CompStat data, specifically by downgrading reports of serious crimes to less serious offenses.

Management strategies such as Compstat clearly have positive motivations behind them.  However, the unanticipated consequences of these efforts cannot be ignored.   The belief that managing only what you can count can be misleading.  The Baltimore tragedy suggests that we need different techniques that acknowledge the complexity of many programs.  We must acknowledge that what may work in one setting is not helpful in another.  

This is not an easy problem to solve.  It is clear that relying only on quantitative measures has real limitations.  The challenge is to find a way to strike a balance between quantitative measures and qualitative assessments.  This brings us back to one of the basic issues in the public administration field:  acknowledging that management is both an art as well as a science.

In July, President Obama told his Cabinet that management of the federal government would take top priority during the remainder of his administration. The pattern is familiar—presidents run for office not to manage the government but to champion and create new policy. The first part of their presidency is preoccupied with marshaling support for broad policy agendas that served as the rallying cry for the political coalitions that got them nominated and elected. Having achieved electoral victories, they then proceed to get mugged by reality—bedeviled by a host of unanticipated management problems that never registered on the political radar screen.

Presidents who bask in the policy limelight are surprised and puzzled when their support erodes. While the line between campaigning and governing has blurred, most citizens grasp the difference when there is a failure to provide the most basic services they expect from federal agencies.

President Obama achieved policy victories in his first two years that, for the most part, public opinion ignores. The passage of national health reform after a nearly 100-year battle will stand as a lasting achievement for the ages. Financial regulatory reforms in the Dodd-Frank legislation may not have solved financial bubbles forever, but the regulation of financial institutions is on firmer footing than before. The Recovery Act, passed in the first month of Obama’s presidency, provided $800 billion in stimulus through spending and tax cuts that economists give credit for staunching the loss of jobs and helping save the economy from the ravages of a depression.

Yet the Obama administration has been victimized by a litany of management failures. More than 50 percent of Americans now say they question the management competence of the president. They point to the Veterans Affairs Department’s cover-up of failures to see patients in a timely manner, the IRS’ use of questionable criteria to ban certain groups from tax exempt status, the failures of the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service to impose regulatory limits on oil companies (contributing to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill), the widespread cheating on tests mandated under No Child Left Behind, and the botched rollout of health insurance exchanges across the country.

These kinds of problems are not unique to this administration. George W. Bush—the MBA president—followed a similar pattern. His early policy victories included tax cuts in 2001, No Child Left Behind, Medicare prescription drug coverage, and the war against terror following the Sept. 11 attacks. In the wake of these policy initiatives, however, his administration became waylaid by all manner of management problems.

Multiple factors seem to explain this dilemma:

• Federal programs increasingly draw ever higher levels of public expectations and media attention to federal bureaucracies and their programs. The victories expanding the federal role in addressing numerous problems come back to haunt the presidents engineering these policy expansions as well as their successors.
• Flawed theories behind many programs cripple them at birth, consigning them to a future of implementation flaws and disappointments. Cheating on school tests under No Child Left Behind, for instance, illustrates what can happen when well-intentioned performance measures become the basis for meting out pay and sanctions for public agencies. While performance pay may work in the private sector, it usually fails in the public sector because many significant goals cannot be measured well.                                   
• Policy victories become hollow during implementation as scarce resources and the attention of top officials moves to other crises and away from systematic pursuit of successful management. The VA crisis is a case in point. The attention devoted to pursuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq lacked the systematic follow-through needed to provide the agency with sufficient resources to care for the wave of seriously injured veterans needing care.
• Simple efficiency requirements (such as time limits on decision-making) seem convincing at first glance, but they often lead to unanticipated negative consequences. Causes of the Deepwater oil spill were linked to requirements that MMS respond to oil company requests in a short period of time when federal employees know they don’t have enough time to conduct analyses for these requests.
• Presidents gain more credit for policy victories than for management successes. The tax cuts and war on terror garnered significant success for Bush, while Obama gained credit at least from the left for health reform and bringing the economy back from the threshold of depression in 2012. Such credit, however, generally does not accrue for administering tax laws appropriately, providing timely and quality care to veterans and others, or even delivering Social Security checks on time.
• Confusion over what management success means in the public sector. Much of what has been viewed as management is directly borrowed from the private sector, even though public goals are more conflicted and implementation chains involve many diverse players from state and local, nonprofit and private contractors. The goals of each agency and program often conflict. IRS must collect all revenue owed without burdening taxpayers or tax exempt groups in the process. The health insurance exchanges must guarantee access to all who are eligible without driving costs up or providers out. The balance between these conflicting goals and priorities shifts over time; when it does we often call these “management failures.” But often they are a result of second-guessing by a nation that has changed its collective view about what is important.

We wish there were a fix for these issues, but many of them are woven into the fabric of our governance system and its incentives.

Ironically in recent years, the growing presidential management portfolio has been accompanied by a corresponding growth in attention to management capacity.  The White House Office of Management and Budget has fortified the “M” by recruiting a deputy director specifically for management. Financial, performance, information systems and human capital management have been bolstered by reform legislation and the appointment of chiefs responsible for those management functions at each federal agency. So, the president has some help from dedicated civil servants and appointees—he is not managing alone. But only the president can marshal the forces to achieve policy goals in a fragmented political system where power is diffused and shared among numerous federal, state, local and private organizations. 

Deep-seated management challenges require an engaged White House to instill the urgency and institute the reforms needed to head off future Hurricane Katrina and VA scandals. Despite the crippling blow that such problems can deal to their administration, presidents are reluctant to make this investment of personal time and energy.

One modest change would be for media, punditry, academics and even White House staff to develop a perspective on public administration that acknowledges the complexity and contradictions within the American political system. Actually delivering on bold policy promises will require leaders and managers to take the unique challenges of delivering complex programs through a multilayered federal system seriously.

Let’s relieve ourselves of the myth that public management is like a machine—put your money in and get your services at the push of a button. Implementing complex programs is more aptly described as a new stage of politics and policymaking where the losers in the legislative fights often feel empowered by instant replay. Whether it be advancing infrastructure or collecting taxes, public management calls for more realistic expectations, effective partnerships with other sectors, and political investment by our elected officials.

Paul L. Posner is director of the Public Administration program at George Mason University and Beryl A. Radin is a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.

http://www.govexec.com/management/2014/12/can-presidents-be-managers/100382/