In recent decades, government leaders have tried to make government run more like a business and less like a bureaucracy. The Bush administration adopted a management agenda that rewarded agencies for business practices borrowed from the corporate world. The leaders’ ideas about entrepreneurial government gave new meaning to the term public service.
Few policy experts agree, however, on whether the Bush administration has been successful at transforming the federal government into a businesslike enterprise. Major transformations do not occur in just one or two presidential terms, most organizational experts say. But some — including a number who have been the staunchest advocates of the President’s Management Agenda — say they now doubt whether initiatives such as performance-based pay and business consolidation will achieve the objectives that they had wanted.
Many see limitations to how far the administration can go with business-oriented initiatives focused on customer service, procurement reforms and job outsourcing.
When the Bush administration took office in January 2001, “I think a lot of people came in thinking a lot of things would translate, and then a lot of them changed their minds,” said Renee Courtland, a former senior political aide and policy analyst in the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. She is now a senior associate at Dutko Government Markets, a lobbying and marketing company.
The idea of transforming the federal government into Government Inc. didn’t begin with the Bush administration. The Clinton administration based its National Performance Review on similar ideas about improving government performance and efficiency. In a 1999 paper, a University of Nebraska professor, Richard Box, described the situation. “The public sector faces increasing demands to run government like a business, importing private-sector concepts such as entrepreneurism, privatization, treating the citizen like a ‘customer’ and management techniques derived from the production process,” Box wrote. “The idea that government should mimic the market is not new in American public administration, but the current situation is particularly intense.”
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