Political Science Quarterly
Volume 115 No. 1 (Spring 2000)

 

The True Size of Government
By Paul C. Light. Washington, DC, Brookings Institution Press, 1999.
Reviewed by Richard M. Pious

 

This book is the start of a new research agenda for Paul Light, the Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow and founding director of the Center for Public Service at the Brookings Institution. Light has in the past focused both on performance and accountability issues in the federal civil service, and on innovative approaches to delivering services at the local level. In this book he combines these interests in a study of the delivery of public services at the end of the twentieth century. Light's argument is that the actual size of government includes not only the federal, state and local civil servants, but also enterprises under federal contracts and grants. These latter enterprises, for all their nattering about free markets, have a stake in expanding the size of the contract state and use their political clout (in the form of campaign contributions in congressional elections) to do so. The headcount of government workers includes not only federal employees, but also those at other levels who are subject to federal mandates. Viewed through this enlarged definitional lens, the size of government has increased, not decreased, even though the number of federal civil service and military service personnel and defense contract employees has declined significantly. Upper ranks of officialdom have "thickened" (to use Light's terminology from an earlier work) while lower ranks have been slashed in the 1990s; thus for the first time the number of middle-level employees exceeds the number of lower-level workers in the federal civil service. And at the top political levels of the administration, the thickening is even greater, with dozens of new management titles and layers added on to a top-heavy administration.

This book is a welcome antidote to the election year rhetoric of downsizing and reinventing government. While politicians claim credit for reducing the size of the federal workforce and doing more with less, these claims are as hollow as Al Gore's parentage of the internet or George W. Bush's reinvention of education in Texas. Light argues that government cannot shrink and at the same time maintain or increase its services. As the role of government in delivering or in monitoring the delivery of services has increased, so has the true size of government. Instead of mindless slash and burn tactics in the civil service, Light recommends some systematic thinking about the relationship between governmental mission and civil service. Meanwhile, he recommends an end of efforts at downsizing or at buyouts of senior officials.

Reforming and reshaping the federal civil service, rather than cutting it to the bone, would be Light's approach. He points out that the criteria for decentralizing or privatizing services varies from one agency to another. What is needed are a set of uniform criteria that can be used to make decisions about which core functions should remain within the federal bureaucracies and which should be farmed out to state and local government or the private sector. Here perhaps, Light slights the political considerations involved: it isn't simply that bureaucracies make these decisions in helter-skelter fashion; these decisions are made in response to congressional pressures, and it isn't likely that uniform criteria could stand in the way of these influences.

Along with these recommendations, Light offers sound advice on ways to improve the merit system, the accountability of the civil service, and its cost-effectiveness. This is a very useful book for public policy students and practitioners, and for anyone interested in serious efforts to reinvent government.

Richard M. Pious
Barnard College