The Changing Responsibilities and Tactics of the Federal Government

In decades gone by, most of what the federal government was responsible for and expended money for it did by itself through its own personnel and facilities. Consequently, much of the doctrine and the lore of federal management, like that of private enterprise, was based on the premise that its efficiency rested on the effective supervision and direction of its own operations. This was predominantly, though not exclusively, the case; federal administration has always worked with and operated through other governmental and nongovernmental institutions to some extent. The thesis of this article is that the changes since the beginnings of the New Deal and since World War II have been of such magnitude as to alter fundamentally the nature of federal respnsibilities and modes of operating, calling for a quite different approach to the role of federal management in American society. The emphasis here is not upon freshly recognized (though old) social and economic problems and new public programs to respond to them-such as equal opportunity, health care, inflation, environment, energy, and others. It is upon the exploding responsibilities of the national government in virtually all functional fields and its carrying out of those responsibilities through, and interdependently with, nonfederal institutions and individuals.