Ever since the reelection of President Obama, bureaucrats have been behaving badly. Conservatives may have steeled themselves to expect bad performance from bureaucrats at all times; but even fans of federal authority should be concerned about recent bungling and abuses. The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) required millions of Americans to sign up for health-insurance policies, but last year’s rollout of the federal website failed disastrously and has been limping ever since. The Veterans Administration turned out to be falsifying records to conceal long waiting times and poor care at hospitals for military veterans. When it was revealed that the Internal Revenue Service…
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Jeremy Rabkin has written a fine essay about the continuing relevance of James Q. Wilson’s 1989 book Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It. I have been fortunate enough to benefit from Wilson’s analysis in my own writing on the Justice Department’s Office of the Solicitor General. His framework showed why the…
It’s Bureaucracy’s twenty-fifth birthday. To celebrate, let’s state some basic facts that correspond with James Q. Wilson’s thinking. Americans want a lot from their government. We want more than we’ve wanted before. It doesn’t ultimately matter where these desires come from (rising standards of living? the inner logic of democracy? interest groups? politicians?). What matters…
The 25th anniversary of James Q. Wilson’s Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It marks an appropriate occasion to reflect on the contributions of this work to our understanding of bureaucratic behavior and performance, and the extensive—and, at least in some areas, growing—presence of the administrative state in the lives of American…
All the participants in this discussion seem to agree that James Q. Wilson’s book, Bureaucracy, still offers valuable insights, a quarter century after its initial publication. At the same time, we all seem to agree that Wilson’s book didn’t prepare readers for the scale of dysfunction we now see in the federal bureaucracy. We have…