Public Administration Goals for the 21st Century: #2 Restore the Role of Administrative Expertise in Policy Implementation
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.
By Erik Devereux
February 25, 2021
Expertise (noun.): “Expert skill or knowledge in a particular field.”
This is the second of a series of monthly columns I will write for PA Times on the topic of setting public administration (PA) goals in the 21st century. (The first column on the need to make government data sacrosanct is online here.) I am grateful to PA Times for providing me this opportunity and I hope the readers find the goals I suggest worthy of discussion and action.
Public administration in the United States fully embraces the primacy of elected representatives in setting the goals for public policy. The political sphere in our democracy is the place to have debates over the ends to which tax revenue and other public resources are devoted. Those on the administration side may have strongly held views about such important questions as to whether or not government should seek to reduce or eliminate poverty; the norm in public administration is to respect the proper place of elections and elected leaders in determining the answers.
But over my lifetime, there has been a terrible erosion in the rightful role of administrative expertise in determining the means for achieving the goals that come out of the political process. This erosion escalated with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, which elevated the ideology that, “Government should be run like a business,” and accelerated the outsourcing of administrative functions to the private sector. The Reagan Administration ushered in the now oft heard refrain among many in Congress and elsewhere that any public policy goal worth pursuing should be done exclusively through market-based mechanisms. We continue to see constant micromanagement of public policy implementation by politicians who, quite frankly, are not experts on those details and make choices based on scoring political points more than on solving administrative problems.
I fully acknowledge some very powerful examples of how a privatization strategy can yield results that seem out of reach for the public sector. Consider the amazing accomplishments of Space X in developing space exploration technologies that quite obviously are running circles around NASA’s in-house efforts to get humans back to the Moon or possibly to Mars. Or consider the record-bracing pace with which competing pharmaceutical companies developed successful vaccines for COVID-19. My point is not that there is anything inherently wrong or right about privatization but that implementation decisions should be left to the administrative expertise that can choose a strategy based on that expertise. Let the political process decide what must be done. Let the expert administrators decide how to make that happen.
Public administration needs to re-assert the importance of creating and sustaining administrative expertise within government with responsibility for selecting the implementation strategy for the overarching policy goals. Within this effort, knowledge, evidence and demonstrable results must drive the implementation decisions, not ideology. As my former colleague Patrick Larkey pointed out in his book with George Downs, The Search for Government Efficiency: From Hubris to Helplessness, there are very few examples of head-to-head comparisons of public vs. private provision of identical public services. The existing research on such topics as municipal waste management offers ambiguous findings regarding such issues as efficiency. Claims about market mechanisms always being superior to other implementation strategies simply are not based on evidence.
Since 1980, governments at levels in the United States have been the targets of efforts to tear down their ability to develop and deploy expertise in their communities. We have drifted into a bizarre reality where in some places in the Western states it even has become acceptable to deem government experts as threats to public welfare. Unfortunately, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has brought into extreme relief the actual threats to public welfare from degrading the administrative capacities of governments. A recent report from the Lancet Commission is just one eye-opening account of the ensuing costs in terms of unnecessary loss of life related to the diminished capacity of the federal government to do its job. For another current example, consider how ineffectual state and local governments in Texas, Oklahoma and other areas impacted by the recent unusual winter weather have been in their disaster responses. Instead of springing to action, many political leaders in the Western United States responsible for their diminished administrative capacities have been reduced to pointing the finger of blame at everyone else but themselves.
As I stated in my prior column in this series, these goals for public administration in this century are about matters of life and death, not just better government. We are approaching 500,000 dead from COVID-19. The bitter cold in Texas and Oklahoma has taken many lives in supposedly one of the wealthiest nations on Earth.
This century is not a time in our history to waste scarce resources on ideologically motivated implementation strategies or to continue to allow politicians to make administrative choices that should be reserved to experts. Instead, United States governments at all levels need to make it a priority to recruit highly trained persons to serve in their administrations, pay those persons appropriately given their education and experience and allow them to play their rightful role in the policy process to which they are best suited and desperately needed.
Author: Erik Devereux is a consultant to nonprofits and higher education and teaches at Georgetown University. He has a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Political Science, 1985) and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin (Government, 1993). He is the author of Methods of Policy Analysis: Creating, Deploying, and Assessing Theories of Change (Amazon Kindle Direct). Email: [email protected]. Twitter: @eadevereux.
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Public Administration Goals for the 21st Century: #2 Restore the Role of Administrative Expertise in Policy Implementation
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.
By Erik Devereux
February 25, 2021
Expertise (noun.): “Expert skill or knowledge in a particular field.”
This is the second of a series of monthly columns I will write for PA Times on the topic of setting public administration (PA) goals in the 21st century. (The first column on the need to make government data sacrosanct is online here.) I am grateful to PA Times for providing me this opportunity and I hope the readers find the goals I suggest worthy of discussion and action.
Public administration in the United States fully embraces the primacy of elected representatives in setting the goals for public policy. The political sphere in our democracy is the place to have debates over the ends to which tax revenue and other public resources are devoted. Those on the administration side may have strongly held views about such important questions as to whether or not government should seek to reduce or eliminate poverty; the norm in public administration is to respect the proper place of elections and elected leaders in determining the answers.
But over my lifetime, there has been a terrible erosion in the rightful role of administrative expertise in determining the means for achieving the goals that come out of the political process. This erosion escalated with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, which elevated the ideology that, “Government should be run like a business,” and accelerated the outsourcing of administrative functions to the private sector. The Reagan Administration ushered in the now oft heard refrain among many in Congress and elsewhere that any public policy goal worth pursuing should be done exclusively through market-based mechanisms. We continue to see constant micromanagement of public policy implementation by politicians who, quite frankly, are not experts on those details and make choices based on scoring political points more than on solving administrative problems.
I fully acknowledge some very powerful examples of how a privatization strategy can yield results that seem out of reach for the public sector. Consider the amazing accomplishments of Space X in developing space exploration technologies that quite obviously are running circles around NASA’s in-house efforts to get humans back to the Moon or possibly to Mars. Or consider the record-bracing pace with which competing pharmaceutical companies developed successful vaccines for COVID-19. My point is not that there is anything inherently wrong or right about privatization but that implementation decisions should be left to the administrative expertise that can choose a strategy based on that expertise. Let the political process decide what must be done. Let the expert administrators decide how to make that happen.
Public administration needs to re-assert the importance of creating and sustaining administrative expertise within government with responsibility for selecting the implementation strategy for the overarching policy goals. Within this effort, knowledge, evidence and demonstrable results must drive the implementation decisions, not ideology. As my former colleague Patrick Larkey pointed out in his book with George Downs, The Search for Government Efficiency: From Hubris to Helplessness, there are very few examples of head-to-head comparisons of public vs. private provision of identical public services. The existing research on such topics as municipal waste management offers ambiguous findings regarding such issues as efficiency. Claims about market mechanisms always being superior to other implementation strategies simply are not based on evidence.
Since 1980, governments at levels in the United States have been the targets of efforts to tear down their ability to develop and deploy expertise in their communities. We have drifted into a bizarre reality where in some places in the Western states it even has become acceptable to deem government experts as threats to public welfare. Unfortunately, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has brought into extreme relief the actual threats to public welfare from degrading the administrative capacities of governments. A recent report from the Lancet Commission is just one eye-opening account of the ensuing costs in terms of unnecessary loss of life related to the diminished capacity of the federal government to do its job. For another current example, consider how ineffectual state and local governments in Texas, Oklahoma and other areas impacted by the recent unusual winter weather have been in their disaster responses. Instead of springing to action, many political leaders in the Western United States responsible for their diminished administrative capacities have been reduced to pointing the finger of blame at everyone else but themselves.
As I stated in my prior column in this series, these goals for public administration in this century are about matters of life and death, not just better government. We are approaching 500,000 dead from COVID-19. The bitter cold in Texas and Oklahoma has taken many lives in supposedly one of the wealthiest nations on Earth.
This century is not a time in our history to waste scarce resources on ideologically motivated implementation strategies or to continue to allow politicians to make administrative choices that should be reserved to experts. Instead, United States governments at all levels need to make it a priority to recruit highly trained persons to serve in their administrations, pay those persons appropriately given their education and experience and allow them to play their rightful role in the policy process to which they are best suited and desperately needed.
Author: Erik Devereux is a consultant to nonprofits and higher education and teaches at Georgetown University. He has a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Political Science, 1985) and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin (Government, 1993). He is the author of Methods of Policy Analysis: Creating, Deploying, and Assessing Theories of Change (Amazon Kindle Direct). Email: [email protected]. Twitter: @eadevereux.
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