Title
Salvaged from the wreckage: Glimpses from a grand reorganization of the president, by the president, for the president
Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
9-2011
Publication Title
Public Administration Review
Publisher
American Society for Public Administration
First page number:
800
Last page number:
802
Abstract
There is palpable concern in the literature about the declining competence and capacity of the federal bureaucracy (Moynihan and Roberts 2010; Thompson 2006), and the notion that civil servants are mere deficit swellers is gaining ground. Such sentiments could inspire government reorganization, but at some point in history, that remedy seems to have lost much of its appeal. In Nixon’s Super-Secretaries: The Last Grand Presidential Reorganization Effort, Mordecai Lee revisits a kind of ground zero of all modern reorganization ambitions. It describes the viability of Richard M. Nixon’s experiment, whose fate sheds light on the dramatic presidential retreat over the last few decades from participation in statutebased administrative reform (Light 2006). Since the 1970s, presidents have shied away from proposing major structural reorganizations, and Congress has delegated reorganization authority in ever more limited and constrained ways. Beyond demonstrating this turning point, Lee’s book seeks to reignite discussion of an overlooked management model.
Keywords
Administrative agencies — Reorganization; Books – Reviews; Civil service
Disciplines
Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation | Policy History, Theory, and Methods | Political History | Public Administration
Language
English
Permissions
Use Find in Your Library, contact the author, or use interlibrary loan to garner a copy of the article. Publisher copyright policy allows author to archive post-print (author’s final manuscript). When post-print is available or publisher policy changes, the article will be deposited
Repository Citation
Joaquin, M. E.
(2011).
Salvaged from the wreckage: Glimpses from a grand reorganization of the president, by the president, for the president.
Public Administration Review
800-802.
American Society for Public Administration.
https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/sea_fac_articles/394
Comments
Review of: Mordecai Lee, Nixon’s Super-Secretaries: The Last Grand Presidential Reorganization Effort (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010). xv, 275 pp.