Recently there has been a great deal of attention in government circles paid to program cutbacks, policy terminations, and, in some cases, the actual closing of official agencies. In some cases, the closing has involved a relatively small agency such as the Community Services Administration'; but in other cases, the closings of major organizations such as the departments of Energy and of Education have been under fire. The activities have occasioned a reconsideration of the earlier literature on policy termination.2 Such reconsideration has been going on not only in the United States but in England and Sweden as well.3 In the past, the policy termination literature has been concerned primarily with how to improve the efficiency of government programs and services.4 If, say, a job training program under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) was judged inadequate by some criteria, then analysts sometimes advised that it be cut off and another program created for job training; the acid test was the effective delivery of services. Writers on termination policy could talk about specific termination strategies, including how to make termination more palatable.5 But in large measure, these recommendations fell on deaf governmental ears. The occasional instances in which such recommendations were heeded-as when the B-1 strategic bomber program was temporarily cancelled by the Carter administration6-were too infrequent to do more than provide interesting case materials. Today, however, there is widespread agreement on the necessity of government cutbacks, retrenchments, and general reductions because of a declining resource base. The basic promise, here and abroad, is simply that there are insufficient funds to permit the continued growth of government services; nor is this condition thought to be transitory. The Swedish budget statement for 1980/ 81 states:
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Peter deLeon (1982) studied this question.