Recombining government: These are the questions bureaucratic reformers can't avoid
Every generation since Wilson has debated how bureaucracy can be effective and accountable. Neither DOGE nor Abundance have settled those questions.
In an 1887 essay on “The Study of Administration,” Woodrow Wilson celebrated that the subject was finally getting its due. Administration, concerned with the implementation of policy rather than its creation, had long been overlooked. Generations of political thinkers had asked, “Who shall make law, and what shall that law be?” Only recently, Wilson noted, had scholars begun to grapple with a second, equally vital question: “how law should be administered with enlightenment, with equity, with speed, and without friction.”
Wilson, who began his career as one of the nation’s first scholars of public administration, would marvel at our current moment, when questions of administrative governance have moved to the forefront of political discourse. Across the ideological spectrum — from DOGE’s attempts to eliminate bureaucracy to Abundance’s push to strengthen it — debates over how public administration can be made more fair, effective, and democratic have become central.
In these debates about the future of the administrative state, Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s National Performance Review — the initiative popularly known as “Reinventing Government” — has become a touchstone. Whether viewed as a promising model or a cautionary tale, Reinventing Government is frequently cited as a case study in the challenges and possibilities of executive-led administrative reform.
But the lessons we draw from Reinventing Government will be incomplete if we fail to recognize how it was shaped by more than a century of debate and reform of American administration. Because in the hundred-plus years between Wilson’s “The Study of Administration” and Clinton and Gore’s “Reinventing Government,” Americans never really stopped arguing over how to make administration both effective and democratic.
The long view reveals that public administration in the United States has been shaped by competing ideas about how to discern a public mandate and hold officials accountable to it. Evolving answers to this question gave rise to different formulas for navigating the three major tensions that shape every bureaucracy: between central control and flexibility, political responsiveness and neutrality, and managerial efficiency and democratic input. In the prewar era, administration was legitimated on the premise that it was a politically neutral vehicle for the execution of a unified political will emanating from the top. After World War II, however, this belief in administrative neutrality collapsed. New theories and practices of administration instead emphasized decentralization and responsiveness to diverse political and market forces.
Today’s reform efforts are reconfigurations of these existing paradigms: on the left, Abundance-aligned thinkers call for an empowered bureaucracy free of both top-down and bottom-up constraints on administrators’ ability to act in the “public interest.” On the right, Trump allies seek to recast the bureaucracy as a partisan instrument for advancing the president’s agenda. Neither effort adequately resolves the tensions that have bedeviled administrative reformers since Wilson, leaving the future of American bureaucracy — and democracy — uncertain.
The president and his technocrats
Modern public administration developed at the turn of the 20th century, when Americans explored new theories of government suited to an expanding administrative state. As Wilson had observed in his 1887 essay, the study of politics had long neglected administration. With the post-Civil War state assuming new responsibilities in response to rapid industrialization, and beginning to shrug off the discredited patronage system, Americans sought new principles to guide how a growing cadre of civil servants would operate within democratic government.
Early scholars of administration like Wilson offered answers, declaring administration a nonpartisan science separate from, but accountable to, political will. “Administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics,” Wilson argued, likening it to a science or a “field of business.” Wilson therefore welcomed the advance of a “a technically schooled civil service” which, “drilled … into perfected organization, with appropriate hierarchy,” would impartially execute the law, realizing the will of American democracy. It was a prescription consistent with his view of the president as a figure who would lead an enlightened public to grant him mandates, which the bureaucracy would then implement without meddling from petty interests.
In the decades that followed, Wilson’s politics-administration binary became standard in the emerging discipline, which legitimated the expanding administrative state on the premise that it would faithfully execute top-down political ends. Frank Goodnow’s 1900 Politics and Administration: A Study in Government affirmed the distinction between the two domains, emphasizing that administration would be “subjected to the control of politics.” Other works in the burgeoning field stressed the role of the president in ensuring administrative accountability. In 1926, Leonard D. White’s Introduction to the Study of Public Administration recommended centralized administrative hierarchies; these would enable the chief executive to guide the activities of administrators, whose purview was limited to “the most efficient utilization of the resources.” Thirty years on from Wilson’s essay, his thesis had become orthodoxy: Administration was a technical function carried out by trained experts under the direction of elected leaders, foremost the president. Limited exceptions for independent agencies (justified, in part, by their perceived neutrality and quasi-legislative functions) did not alter the Progressives’ commitment to presidential direction over the lion’s share of the administrative state.
Over the same period, these logics were haltingly incorporated into the development of the Progressive-era federal government. From the 1880s onward, the expansion of the merit system — formalized by the Pendleton Act of 1883 — gradually replaced the patronage; by World War I, a majority of federal jobs had been reclassified as merit positions. When the administrative state expanded further during the New Deal, classical public administration doctrine governed its development. In 1937, FDR appointed Louis Brownlow — a protégé of Wilson — to lead a reform of the executive branch. His team of public administration experts sought to establish the president as the “center of energy, direction, and administrative management” over an impartial civil service, recommending that the merit system be extended and the executive branch centralized to better ensure presidential oversight.
When the reforms took effect in 1939, public administration scholars hailed them as the fulfillment of their longstanding vision of a neutral, expert-led bureaucracy accountable to the president, a political authority who would channel the will of the public. It would be a short-lived triumph.
Disillusionment and the New Public Administration
During World War II, as the administrative state drew increasing criticism from Americans frustrated by wartime bureaucracy, public administration scholars began to question the structures they had once championed.
Under the shadow of totalitarian regimes, the politics-administration binary that had underpinned prewar administrative theory collapsed. For many public administration experts, the Nazi state exemplified the perils of impartial administrative bodies that imagined themselves as merely executing orders. Neutral administration, once seen as an instrument of democracy, now appeared dangerously susceptible to authoritarian manipulation. Wartime scholars argued that treating politics and administration as separate — as had become standard the field — was a “dangerous fallacy” that could enable the use of “administrative techniques intrinsically incompatible with the underlying philosophy of democratic government.”
In response to these concerns, public administration experts revised their doctrines. Scholars argued that the “complete separation of means from ends is usually impossible” and that administration needed to be “related to and pointed toward the political.” In 1948, Dwight Waldo’s pathbreaking The Administrative State cemented the new paradigm when it declared the “simple division of government into politics-and-administration … inadequate” and asserted that public administration was “at its heart normative.”
Public administration scholars, New Left activists, and public choice analysts took Wilson’s theory full-circle.
In contrast to prewar scholars, who called for the creation of centralized hierarchies that would assert political control over impartial administration, postwar scholars emphasized the merits of decentralized forms that enabled individual administrators to exercise discretion. Reform efforts throughout the 1940s and 1950s reflected these new directions. The major reorganization effort of the late 1940s — a follow to up the Brownlow Commission a decade earlier — recommended that many agency functions be decentralized. Other reforms sought to reassert a relationship between politics and administration by exempting some federal employees from the merit system, thus creating more political roles within the civil service.
In the 1960s, demands for reform heightened as new political movements mobilized around persistent dissatisfaction with the administrative state. Theories of interest group pluralism — which held that administration remained sensitive to citizens via interest groups representing their preferences — fell out of favor, giving rise to a public interest movement that sought to augment citizens’ direct participation in the administrative process through lawsuits and legislation like the 1966 Freedom of Information Act. At the same time, New Left–inspired demands for participatory, bottom-up democracy amplified the postwar doubts about Wilsonian ideals of administrative neutrality. In response, a new generation of public administration scholars not only rejected the traditional politics–administration dichotomy, but took the next step with theories that envisioned administrators as active agents, empowered to engage with and respond to the publics they served.
On the right, proponents of public choice theory rejected Wilson by name, arguing that the neutrality and centralization he endorsed made administration rigid and undemocratic, unable to “respond to diverse preferences among citizens.” Instead, they argued that administrative bodies should operate like private sector firms, competing to meet the needs of citizens as “consumers of public goods.” Competition and market logics — not hierarchy and impartiality — would enable democratic administration, they argued, advocating the contracting out of government functions.
By the close of the 1960s, the field had undergone so much revision that scholars were declaring the advent of a “New Public Administration.” Observers noted that it amounted to a full-circle shift in administrative doctrine. Wilson and his prewar cohort had asserted “politically neutral competence with executive leadership” as a necessary corrective to Jacksonian patronage. Now, public administrators were in search of mechanisms that would ensure bureaucracy remained responsive to bottom-up democratic demands.
Markets as the model
Administrative reform efforts in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s reflected this shift. Carter’s 1978 civil service reform, driven by advocates of New Public Administration, abolished the Civil Service Commission, marking a partial retreat from the longstanding belief that impartiality needed to be preserved through hierarchical merit systems. In its place, the reform established the Office of Personnel Management and introduced pay-for-performance systems, borrowing from private-sector models in an effort to create incentives for responsiveness and results.
The Reagan administration continued the postwar shift away from prewar ideals and injected a stronger ideological coloring with its attacks on “big government.” Donald Devine was appointed to lead the newly created Office of Personnel Management; an outspoken critic of Wilsonian theory, he rejected past generations’ efforts to neutralize administration, arguing that a civil service ostensibly insulated from politics had produced a bureaucracy unaccountable to democratic control. Under his leadership, OPM pursued reforms that attacked this structure by slashing the career civil service and expanding the influence of political appointees. “There is no value-free public administration,” Devine declared, calling instead for a system “organized and administered according to political principles.”
Choice and competition came at the expense of a unified sense of “the public.”
The administrative state no longer presumed a singular public will, but instead sought to accommodate a multiplicity of interests through competition and marketized service delivery. As one scholar observed in the wake of the Reagan-era reforms: “Any emerging administrative doctrine must rest politically on a … bottom-up, market-oriented progressivism that has successfully challenged the tradition of top-down positive government.”
It was under this paradigm that Clinton and Gore’s “Reinventing Government” initiative took shape. Drawing on a 1992 bestseller by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, the reform sought to reorient administration around the principles that had displaced prewar doctrine. In the book, Osbourne and Gaebler argued that the administrative forms pursued by “Young Progressives” like Woodrow Wilson had become “slow, inefficient, and impersonal.” Instead, they sought to make administration “lean, decentralized, and innovative” by employing “competition, consumer choice, and other nonbureaucratic mechanisms to get things done as creatively and effectively as possible.”
Osborne, who became a senior adviser to the administration, helped translate these ideas into the National Performance Review, which directed agencies to treat citizens as “customers,” decentralize authority to frontline workers, reduce regulations, and use competition and incentives to drive performance. In addition, the administration authorized voluntary departures from the civil service, reducing it by 400,000. Assessments of the program emphasized that — in direct contradiction to the Wilsonian paradigm — the reform elevated “values of individual choice, the provision of incentives, the use of competition, and the market as a model for government.” It seemed to have done so at the expense of a unified sense of the “public,’” with one critic remarking that the concept been reduced to “the sum of atomistic individuals” or the “aggregate of private interests.”
The president’s partisans v. the nebulous “public interest”
Over the 20th century, competing theories of administration shaped the American administrative state. The prewar model, anchored in a rigid politics-administration dichotomy, envisioned a centralized, merit-based bureaucracy as a neutral executor of a unified, top-down political will. In the postwar era, growing doubts about the feasibility and desirability of neutrality led to a new paradigm. This vision recognized administration’s inherently normative character, favored decentralization, and embraced the demands of bottom-up political engagement. This perspective eventually evolved into a market-oriented approach prioritizing choice and competition over centralized control and collective purpose.
In contemporary reform efforts, we see new configurations of these priorities. As Andrea Katz and Noah Rosenblum have shown, allies of Donald Trump have revived and adapted a Progressive-era theory of the “unitary executive” in which “all nonjudicial and nonlegislative government actors must report to the President in an unbroken chain of command.”
This appeal to Progressive-era theories of executive leadership is striking, especially given that the Trump administration largely rejects the broader Wilsonian vision of a professional, merit-based civil service insulated from partisan influence. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — authored in part by Donald Devine, the ardent Wilson critic who led Reagan’s reform efforts — called on the president to “dismantle the administrative state” by shrinking the career bureaucracy and expanding presidential control through political appointments. In office, Trump is realizing much of this vision. Mass layoffs carried out by the “Department of Government Efficiency” have reduced the size of the career service. Meanwhile, via executive orders now under court challenge, Trump has established classifications to expand the number of political appointments in federal agencies. It’s a combination that suggests, contra Wilson’s vision, a return to patronage politics and a government comprised of partisan loyalists.
On the left, Abundance-aligned thinkers have begun their own quest for new theories and practices of administration. While strongly rejecting the Trump administration’s approach, they share its sense that administration is overdue for reform. As they tell it, a dysfunctional bureaucracy is to blame for the yawning gap between policy goals and actual outcomes.
Their diagnosis is that — whether from a prewar impulse to limit bureaucrats’ policymaking power or a postwar one to ensure their democratic accountability — we’ve put too many limitations on what the civil service can achieve, creating a crisis in 21st century administration. As Jennifer Pahlka tells it in her 2023 Recoding America, requirements that “administrators simply follow orders from above and not exercise their own judgment” are not only “a delusion,” but an impediment to collaboration and problem-solving. However, the bottom-up, participatory ethos that challenged Wilsonian theory has proved equally problematic. Efforts to “democratize” administration by making it accountable to the public were meant to prevent an “arbitrary authority who might act imperiously,” Pahlka observes, but they’ve resulted in “procedure-heavy, cumbersome, and lengthy decision-making processes.” Efforts at contracting out have been equally unsatisfying, hampering the government’s abilities to develop its own capacities.
The solution for Pahlka is to empower administrators, giving them more control not only in “the art of getting things done,” but in “deciding what to do in the first place.” We need to “trust people in government to make smart tradeoffs in the service of meeting people’s needs,” she argues, holding that “they must be able to decide what to do,” impeded neither by overly rigid top-down directives nor by bottom-up procedural hurdles that stall action.
Other Abundance-aligned thinkers place even greater emphasis on postwar efforts to prioritize “citizen voice,” which they argue have made government ineffective. As Marc Dunkelman describes it, Abundance seeks a middle ground between “Hamiltonian” faith in centralized power and “Jeffersonian” aversion to it — the latter of which has dominated since the 1960s and has inserted “so many checks into the system that government has been rendered incompetent.” Steve Teles explains: “The counterintuitive insight that unites Abundance is that to achieve big goals, bureaucracy requires fewer procedural constraints.” Abundance demands the opposite: “bureaucratic autonomy.”
The Abundance movement’s call for bureaucratic autonomy and renewed commitment to the “public interest” echoes Progressive ideals but lacks the institutional clarity that underpinned the Wilsonian framework.
Their calls reflect a nostalgia for Progressives’ affirmative understanding of bureaucrats as champions of a now-eroded sense of a “public interest.” “Progressive and New Deal state-builders embraced a results-oriented, non-legalistic approach to administrative power,” Nicholas Bagley writes. Abundance wants that back, along with its appeals to a “public interest” that went extinct in the postwar era. It’s a term invoked throughout the Abundance literature. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson lament that administration has become “so consumed trying to balance its manifold interests that it can no longer perceive what is in the public’s interest.” Dunkelman argues that the concept should be the current “movement’s north star.”
How this “public interest” should be deciphered is less clear. Abundance thinkers argue that bureaucrats need to be held “accountable to outcomes” — but they don’t specify who would determine them. In the Progressive era, the president — as head of the administrative branch — was charged with enacting the public’s will. But Abundance-aligned thinkers are unlikely endorse the “unitary executive” theory now favored by Trump. Instead, they reject both the postwar emphasis on bottom-up accountability and the prewar model of top-down presidential control, leaving open what mechanisms will ensure accountability within the empowered administrative state they envision. Thus, the Abundance movement’s call for bureaucratic autonomy and renewed commitment to the “public interest” echoes Progressive ideals but lacks the institutional clarity that underpinned the Wilsonian framework. By dismissing both proceduralism and centralized executive authority, Abundance advocates propose revitalizing the administrative state — yet leave ambiguous to whom, and how, it should ultimately be answerable.
The upshot is that contemporary efforts at reform have scrambled the matrix of 20th century administrative theory — breaking apart the ties between a neutral civil service and executive control on the one hand, and between a more normative spirit of administration and bottom-up responsiveness on the other. Once-dominant binaries —politics versus administration, centralization versus decentralization, neutrality versus responsiveness — have fractured, leaving behind a field animated by unresolved tensions. Today’s reformers seek a government that is effective yet democratic, decisive yet deliberative, and accountable yet autonomous. But the underlying theory of how to reconcile these competing demands remains unsettled.
Thus, the century-long evolution of administrative thought circles back to a familiar dilemma: how to construct a government capable of bold action without sacrificing democratic legitimacy. Whether contemporary reformers can resolve this tension remains the central question for the future of the American administrative state.
Casey Eilbert is a postdoctoral fellow at the SNF Agora Center at Johns Hopkins University, where she’s writing an intellectual history of bureaucracy in the modern United States. She received her PhD from the History Department at Princeton University in 2024.