Policy Making and Service Delivery on the Margins of Government: The Case of Contractors

Abstract

odern government defies definition. It grows, but it also declines. It does more while doing less. It confounds those who would understand it, while adding to the benefits offered the people. Its own officials will not-or cannot-report the true size of the budget or workforce. Because they cannot say exactly what it is, policy makers have problems in controlling it while observers have problems in describing it. Academic specialists in public administration and political science suffer from confusion about the thing that is central to their careers. Officials do more while they do less by assigning activities to bodies that are not, strictly speaking, part of the government. Just how this happens depends on conditions within each country. The national government of the United States has, in certain respects, actually shrunk in size during the period 1955-1976. Its number of employees declined from 146 per 10,000 population to 134 to 10,000 population. Yet, no one should claim that the national government did less in 1976 than in 1955. It shrunk by hiving off new activities and some old established programs. Washington transferred some activities to state and local governments. It assigned others to special authorities, and to private firms and foundations operating as contractors for government agencies. This essay deals with contractors that operate on the margins of American governments. Yet, central features of this analysis apply to other kinds of bodies that operate on the margins of this and other modern governments. The inclination to use business firms or other private bodies as contractors is distinctly an American style of conducting public activities on the margins of government. By tradition the United States is a country of free enterprise. It is fitting to use business corporations to design, implement and monitor many of the programs that have turned the United States into one of the most generous of welfare states.