An assessment of the President's management agenda : hearing before the Federal Financial Management, Government Information, and International Security [Subcommittee] of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, One Hundred Ninth Congress, first session, April 21, 2005.
An assessment of the President's management agenda: hearing before the Federal Financial Management, Government Information, and International Security [Subcommittee] of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, One Hundred Ninth Congress, first session, April 21, 2005.
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, and International Security
The challenges and opportunities facing the American people in the 21st Century are complex, interconnected and critical to the future of our nation and our democracy. Today the Federal Government provides unparalleled levels of support for a diverse range of missions, yet public trust in government institutions has hit historic lows. Against this backdrop, we face an urgent call to action to improve and modernize our Federal government. The President's Management Agenda (PMA), released by the Trump Administration in March of 2018, represents the starting point for aligning Federal government resources with the leading practices of the private sector, academia and the "good government community."On the one-year anniversary of the PMA, this volume published by the National Academy of Public Administration, Perspectives on the President's Management Agenda, is a promising contribution to the bipartisan spirit of support that will be central to translating government reform and modernization ideas into action. Contributors offer praise, mixed with suggested improvements and initiatives that may need more attention.
The belief that U.S. presidents' legislative policy formation has centralized over time, shifting inexorably out of the executive departments and into the White House, is shared by many who have studied the American presidency. Andrew Rudalevige argues that such a linear trend is neither at all certain nor necessary for policy promotion. In Managing the President's Program, he presents a far more complex and interesting picture of the use of presidential staff. Drawing on transaction cost theory, Rudalevige constructs a framework of "contingent centralization" to predict when presidents will use White House and/or departmental staff resources for policy formulation. He backs his assertions through an unprecedented quantitative analysis of a new data set of policy proposals covering almost fifty years of the postwar era from Truman to Clinton. Rudalevige finds that presidents are not bound by a relentless compulsion to centralize but follow a more subtle strategy of staff allocation that makes efficient use of limited bargaining resources. New items and, for example, those spanning agency jurisdictions, are most likely to be centralized; complex items follow a mixed process. The availability of expertise outside the White House diminishes centralization. However, while centralization is a management strategy appropriate for engaging the wider executive branch, it can imperil an item's fate in Congress. Thus, as this well-written book makes plain, presidential leadership hinges on hard choices as presidents seek to simultaneously manage the executive branch and attain legislative success.
