The Modern Period and Shifting Perspectives on the Roles of Government

We set the next 50 years—from the 1960s to the first decade of the twenty-first century— as the
modern period of public administration. While the size and scale of the federal government would
not change, state and local governments would expand their reach and capabilities significantly.
Federal budgets would basically double from $46.3 billion in 1960 to $92.5 billion in 1979—but
when these numbers are calculated as a percentage of the gross national product the ratio is far less
impressive (18.5 to 20.8 percent of GNP). Even the 20 percent increase in federal civilian
employment from 2.4 million to 2.9 million when seen as a relationship to the population, federal
employment in 1979 was basically at the 1950s level. Looking back at Table 1.3, federal
employment is now even under that gross number at 2.7 million civilian employees in 2014.

State and local government employment was on a much higher trajectory in this period
increasing from 4.2 to 13.1 million employees by 1979 and reaching almost 20 million before
leveling off after 2000. It needs to be pointed out that the largest share of US state and local
government employment growth comes from education. As a 2010 census report notes, education
is also government’s biggest bargain: “While employment for all levels and occupations in education
represent 56.8 percent of the total employment for state and local governments, the payroll for
education is only 51.9 percent of the total payroll” (US Census Bureau, 2010).

In a 1980 article, Frederick C. Mosher explains that these trends were “A consequence of
fundamental shifts in the purposes, phases, and methods of federal operations” (Mosher, 1980, p.
45). Mosher argued, the federal government’s pattern of involvement was shifting from overt to
covert. On the one hand, the federal government was decreasing the number and level of activities
it performed directly, while with the other hand it was stimulating major efforts by state and local
governments, non-profit organizations, and even private business through income supports,
contracts and grants, regulations, and loans and loan guarantees. The result, Mosher noted, was a
federal administrative posture that increasingly relied on indirect administrative coordination and
funds transfer. From a field of study perspective, the focus of public administration was still stuck on
the federal government, while the real action was inexorably shifting to other levels.

Even though the size and scale of government was basically set, public administration as a
practice within governments and a field of study underwent a series of major changes and shifts.
The first shift is already referred to above—properly labelled Intergovernmental Relations—with the
federal government’s strategic realignment of its roles and methods of operations vis-à-vis state and
local government counterparts. Emerging within this mix was a preference for the federal
government to provide entitlement payments directly to individuals which would only accelerate
with the graying of the American population. Social Security is the first example—by 1993, the
program had eclipsed defense spending as the largest federal program category. Close behind is
Medicare which should exceed defense spending by 2020. Given that the projected number of
Medicare enrollees will grow from current levels of about 50 million to 80 million by 2030, it will
become the largest category of federal spending.

The Modern Period also saw public administration recognize new dimensions of public policy and
broader management practice. Following the series of race riots in 1964 and recognition of major
inequalities in American society, public administration questioned its commitment to social equity
and its leadership responsibilities in improving race relations, eradicating poverty, and promoting
social justice. New emphases emerged in public policy analysis that assessed the fairness,
distribution, and recurrent discrimination in the distribution of public benefits and safety net
programs. Following the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, public administration rediscovered its
concern with ethics and embarked on a still evolving discussion of how to promote and ensure
ethical conduct among public administrators.

A third shift within the Modern Period involved government’s approach and application of
regulation. In the pre-modern era, federal and state governments responded to the rise of
monopolies and other types of businesses and groups that dominated or in many cases had control
of an industry or commerce sector. Government agencies were given oversight over a range of
business practices in banking, transportation, telecommunications, energy, and agriculture, among
others. But starting in the 1960s and accelerating, in the 1970s and 1980s, government entered a
deregulation phase where it reduced or even eliminated regulation of industry practices in order to
increase competiveness and spur economic performance in these industry sectors.

But deregulation or subtraction was only one side of the equation in the Modern period.
Governments also added new legislation and agencies to regulate labor and consumer practices,
and equal employment rights, to advance safety in the workplace, and collective bargaining
practices. Another new emphasis spurred by the establishment of environmental protection
agencies at the federal and state levels was regulating pollution and promoting environmental
safeguards. These have now been transformed by efforts to address the issues of climate change
and sustainability.

Finally, reform of government became a mantra for change during the modern period. Each new
presidential administration had its own government reform effort. Nixon had his Ash Council, Carter
his Civil Service reform effort, Reagan his Grace commission, and Clinton his reinventing
government effort. While it should be pointed out that each of these reform efforts had very
different aims and rationales, they all cast government as the “problem” and urge a fundamental
(and totally different) rethinking of how government, meaning public administration, should solve
the recurring fiscal, performance, and trust deficits that undermined public confidence in the ability
to solve the nation’s problems.

Not surprisingly, as each wave of reform underwhelmed, reform itself became a metaphor for
problem. While there has always been criticism of the accomplishments of actual reform efforts in
US public administration, new voices questioned the direction and vision of reform itself. Jocelyne
Bourgon, in a 2011 work entitled A New Synthesis of Public Administration, noted that “the
generally uncompleted nature of administrative reforms are most likely due to the difficulty of
designing and implementing an exhaustive, coherent program of bureaucratic overhaul.” She
argued that such efforts are misguided and that reform should instead be redirected. In order “to
meet the challenges of governance,” public administrations must reconsider the interactions
between their organizational, institutional, adaptive and innovative capacities” (Bourgon, 2011: p.
13).

Working in the Public Sector in the Twenty-First Century

While public service, or working for the public sector (whether as a government employee, a non-
profit or a private sector contractor, or in an academic or policy research organization) remains a
noble quest, it has changed significantly in the last two decades. For one thing, the number of
employment opportunities is different. One can see the start of this in Table 1.3 where fulltime
employment actually has decreased slightly after nearly 30 years of stable growth. Table 1.4
provides a comparative snapshot of where government employees work in terms of functions.

For the public administration student who is wondering about job and career prospects, there is
both good and not-so-good news. On this scale, bad news which doesn’t apply to government might
be what has happened to manufacturing jobs in the US since 2000. As Journalist Adam Davidson has
written “In the 10 years ending in 2009, factories shed workers so fast that they erased all the gains
of the previous 70 years, roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs—about 6 million in
total— disappeared” (Davidson, 2012, p. 58). He explains that as many people work in
manufacturing now as did over 50 years ago, while the US population has more than doubled in the
same interval. This development goes far beyond simple business cycle economics as this now one-
third downsized manufacturing workforce turns out greater production levels than their pre-
twenty-first-century counterparts.

The not-so-good news is that government employment levels are slowing down. At the federal
level there will be fewer defense contractors, fewer administrators, and major cuts in the number of
post office workers. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 14 percent reduction in the size of
the federal workforce by 2022. State and local governments will see some growth, but at 5 percent
that is pretty anemic. Incidentally, the industry sector that is projected to grow the most is health
care and social assistance —at 29 percent by 2022. One might think of these jobs as public service,
but the US health care model has over 60 percent of all jobs and expenditures in the private sector.

The good news is that government employees are older and even with the wonders of modern
medicine and the reluctance on many older government workers to depart the workforce, they will
ultimately have to retire. This is not a recent phenomenon. A 2006 report by the Center for State
and Local Government Excellence noted over 69 percent of the federal workforce was over 40, 60
percent of state employees and 64 percent of local government employees compared to 48 percent
of workers in the private sector. The numbers of true “seniors” are even more impressive—almost
40 percent of feds are over 50, 35 percent of state employees and 36 percent of local government
workers—making this the largest age category within the workforce—compared to just 23 percent
in the private sector. And these numbers are from a report based on the 2006 Census Data.

So fear not in terms of wondering whether there will be a job out there in the public sector in the
future. We may have too many lawyers and MBAs, but a new
TABLE 1.4
generation of public service workers is on the horizon. And if you have any doubt, you might
consider Steve Jobs’s 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University where he reminded the
graduating class:
Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for
the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and
be cleared away.

Jobs knew that future prospects for young job applicants are best summarized by the ancient
proverb—where there’s death, there is hope.

Box 1.4 Virtual Student Foreign Service

Work—it’s no longer a place, it’s more a state of mind. Many public administration students
enter public service or start their careers through internship programs. But not all public
administration programs are conveniently located next to government agencies. Few
government agencies see that dilemma more clearly than the US State department where the
majority of its operations are internationally based. Their solution—why not apply for the
Virtual Student Foreign Service as their digitally enhanced recruitment announcement below
notes:

The Virtual Student Foreign Service is part of a growing effort by the State Department to
harness technology and a commitment to global service among young people to facilitate new
forms of diplomatic engagement. Working from college and university campuses in the United
States and throughout the world, e-Interns (American students working virtually) are partnered
with our US diplomatic posts overseas and State Department, US Agency for International
Development (USAID), the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Broadcasting Board of
Governors (BBG) and the US Commercial Service domestic offices to conduct digital diplomacy
that reflects the realities of our networked world .

Program Details

VSFS e-Intern duties and responsibilities will vary according to the location and needs of the
VSFS projects identified at the sponsoring domestic or overseas diplomatic office. VSFS projects
may be research based, contributing to reports on issues such as human rights, economics or
the environment. They may also be more technology oriented, such as working on web pages,
or helping produce electronic journals. Selected students are expected to work virtually on an
average of 5–10 hours per week on VSFS e-Internship projects. Students apply in the summer
and if selected, begin the eInternship that fall lasting through spring. Most work and projects
are internet-based and some have language requirements.

Source: http://www.state.gov/vsfs/ (accessed January 1, 2016).

In 2015, over 350 students were selected as virtual interns in the VSFS program— working at
15 different federal agencies on over 300 different projects. It’s not hard to envision more
opportunities for students in public administration programs to be e-Interns in federal, state,
and local agencies without regard to geography. Indeed, competition between MPA programs
for recruiting students may be based in part on the number and quality of e-Internships they
provide.

A Case Study How a President Undeservedly Received

Credit for Founding a Discipline
In 1885 Woodrow Wilson, having not yet completed his doctoral program at Johns
Hopkins University, began his teaching career at the newly founded Bryn Mawr College for
Women. While reportedly a lecturer of genius, he resented having to teach women. As he told
an associate, such an activity “relaxes one’s mental muscle.” In 1887 he summed up his life by
saying, “Thirty-one years old and nothing done!” In retrospect, Wilson seems to have been like
many other ambitious academics seemingly stuck in a post that did not do justice to talent. And
he chose as the way out the now traditional road to high academic fame, fortune, and position:
he wrote and published and was saved!
American public administration as a field of study traditionally traces its origin to

an 1887 Political Science Quarterly article by this frustrated young academic. In “The Study of
Administration,” Wilson attempted nothing less than to refocus the newly emerging field of
political science. Rather than be concerned with the “lasting maxims of political wisdom,” he
argued that political science should concentrate on the more generally neglected details of how
governments are administered. This was necessary because “it is getting harder to run a
constitution than to frame one.”
Wilson wanted the study of public administration to focus not only on the problems of
personnel management, as many other reformers of the time had advocated, but also on
organization and management in general. The reform movement of the time had an agenda
that did not go beyond the abolition of the spoils system and the installation of a merit system.
Wilson regarded civil service reform “as but a prelude to a fuller administrative reform.” He
sought to push the concerns of public administration into investigations of the “organization
and methods of our government offices” with a view toward determining “first, what
government can properly and successfully do, and secondly, how it can do these proper things
with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost either of money or energy”
(Wilson, 1887 in Classics of Public Administration, 2012, p. 16). He was concerned with overall
organizational efficiency and economy—that is, productivity in its most simplistic formulation.
What could be more current—then or now?
In his essay, Wilson also proclaimed the existence of a major distinction between politics and
administration. This was a common and necessary political tactic of the reform movement
because arguments that public appointments should be based on fitness and merit, rather than
partisanship, necessarily had to assert that “politics” was out of place in public service. As
Wilson said, “Although politics sets the tasks for administration, it should not be suffered to
manipulate its offices.” In reinforcing what became known as the “politics–administration
dichotomy,” Wilson was really referring to “partisan” politics. While this subtlety was lost on
many, Wilson’s main themes—that public administration should be premised on a science of
management and separate from traditional politics—fell on fertile intellectual ground. The
ideas of this then obscure professor eventually became the dogma of academic public
administration.
And what happened to the young Bryn Mawr professor who plaintively wrote in 1888, “I
have for a long time been hungry for a class of men”? Shortly thereafter, he took up an
appointment at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. From there he went to Princeton, made
good, and became president of that university. In later life he found a job in Washington.
But if Wilson had not found that job in Washington, had not become president, his now
seminal article would have continued to enjoy the obscurity its verbosity warrants. The article’s
significant influence came only after World War II—more than half a century after it was
published. Administrative historian Paul van Riper found that none of the early public
administration scholars, Wilson’s

contemporaries, cited the article in their otherwise heavily referenced works. “In reality, any
connection between Wilson’s essay and the later development of the discipline is pure fantasy!
An examination of major political and social science works of the period between 1890 and
World War I shows no citation whatever of the essay” (Van Riper, 1983, p. 477). So how did it
get rediscovered and become required reading for generations of students? According to a
historical analysis by Daniel W. Martin, “The simple answer . . . is the glowing reprint of Wilson’s
article in the December 1941 Political Science Quarterly. It was a masterwork of public
relations, complete with a photostatic copy of Wilson’s tentative letter of submission” (Martin,
1988). Thereafter, Wilson’s essay, cited only modestly in the interwar period, grew to its
current influence.

For Discussion: Do you think that public administration can, or should, ever be totally separate
from politics? Looking back at previous administrations (Bush or Obama) do you think either
would be considered “Wilsonian” in its similar concern with efficiency and economy?
Summary
Public administration can be defined from political, legal, managerial, and occupational
perspectives. However defined, its vast scope encompasses whatever governments do. Public
administration cannot exist outside of its political context. It is this context that makes it public—
that makes it different from private or business administration. Public administration is what a state
does. It is created by and bound by the law and is an instrument of the law. It is inherently the
execution of public laws. Every application of a general law is necessarily an act of administration.
Its legal basis allows public administration to exist, but without its management aspect, not much of
the public’s business would get done.

Public administration as an academic field is the study of the art and science of management
applied to the public sector. But it traditionally goes far beyond the concerns of management and
incorporates as its subject matter all of the political, social, cultural, and legal environments that
affect the running of public institutions. It is inherently cross-disciplinary, encompassing so much of
other fields— from political science and sociology to business administration and law. American
public administration as a field of study is traditionally traced to Woodrow Wilson’s 1887 article
“The Study of Administration.” The discipline of public administration, after developing as part of
political science, emerged as an independent field in the second half of the twentieth century.

Other scholars (notably Frederick Mosher) saw the development of public administration in the
context of the transformation of the profession of public administration. The idea that public service
should reflect other ideals (besides being bureaucrats) is important to understanding new roles and
responsibilities for government in what is now being called a new era of governance in globalization.

As a profession, public administration offers significant opportunities for idealism in the pursuit
of public service—and even heroism, as we saw on September 11. Concerns about an increasingly
effective or more expansive public service ebb and flow with the changing political philosophies of
differing administrations. But the provision of public services—whether by career public servants or
by contracted private sector or non-profit organization employees—remains the very essence of
public administration. In addition to ensuring that public services are provided with accountability
and efficiency, public administration is confronting new realities of realigning public enterprises and
services in response to needs for renewable energy sources, resource conservation, green
technologies, and designs for sustainability.