<p>Little has been written that would tell anyone how the spending departments, Treasury officials and Cabinet members actually interact with each other and with the world outside to produce the mammoth pattern of public spending. Admirable historical work has given us some knowledge about the control of public monies during former centuries, but evidence on current practices is almost non-existent. The struggle for money continues today and remains as politically informative as ever. This book is about that struggle.</p>

The Private Government of Public Money: Community and Policy Inside British Politics

Hugh Heclo

Aaron, Wildavsky

Administrative Law

University of California Press

How do political appointees try to gain control of the Washington bureaucracy? How do high-ranking career bureaucrats try to ensure administrative continuity? The answers are sought in this analysis of the relations between appointees and bureaucrats that uses the participants' own words to describe the imperatives they face and the strategies they adopt.Shifting attention away form the well-publicized actions of the President, High Heclo reveals the little-known everyday problems of executive leadership faced by hundreds of appointees throughout the executive branch. But he also makes clear why bureaucrats must deal cautiously with political appointees and with a civil service system that offers few protections for broad-based careers of professional public service.The author contends that even as political leadership has become increasingly bureaucratized, the bureaucracy has become more politicized. Political executives—usually ill-prepared to deal effectively with the bureaucracy—often fail to recognize that the real power of the bureaucracy is not its capacity for disobedience or sabotage but its power to withhold services. Statecraft for political executives consists of getting the changes they want without losing the bureaucratic services they need.Heclo argues further that political executives, government careerists, and the public as well are poorly served by present arrangements for top-level government personnel. In his view, the deficiencies in executive politics will grow worse in the future. Thus he proposes changes that would institute more competent management of presidential appointments, reorganize the administration of the civil service personnel system, and create a new Federal Service of public managers.

A government of strangers: Executive politics in Washington

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Brookings Institution

<p>Before buying into anyone's vision of where public policy should go, we must think seriously about where we are now. This includes our economic and social structure, our government as a prominent feature of that landscape, and the way we currently make political decisions. The authors' views of where we are now lead them to propose a rethinking of our commitments as a society, our public responsibilities, and our processes for making policy choices--a rethinking that can help make government more responsive to changing expectations and changing needs.</p>

The Government We Deserve: Responsive Democracy and Changing Expectations

Eugene C. Steuerle

Edward M. Gramlich

Demetra Smith Nightingale

Social Sciences

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

David Brooks discusses On Thinking Institutionally in a recent column. Read it here! David Brooks ColumnA brilliant look at institutions as popular as professional sports and as austere as the Supreme Court, all through the lens of what it means to “think institutionally.”The twenty-first-century mind deeply distrusts the authority of institutions. It has taken several centuries for advocates of “critical” thinking to convince Western culture that to be rational, liberated, authentic, and modern means to be anti-institutional. In this mold-breaking book, Hugh Heclo moves beyond the abstract academic realm of thinking “about” institutions to the more personal significance and larger social meaning of what it is to “think institutionally.” His account ranges from “respect for the game” of baseball to Greek philosophy, from twenty-first-century corporate and political scandals to Christian theology and the concept of “office” and “professionalism.” Think what you will about one institution or another, but after Heclo, no reader will be left in doubt about why it matters to think and act institutionally.What do these things have in common?

On Thinking Institutionally (On Politics)

Paradigm Publishers

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Books by Hugh Heclo