Bring Back the Bureaucrats: Why More Federal Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!) Government (New Threats to Freedom Series)

John DiIulio

$15.95

Publication Date: September 15th, 2014

Publisher:

Templeton Press

ISBN:

9781599474670

Pages:

186

Description

In Bring Back the Bureaucrats, John J. DiIulio Jr., one of America’s most respected political scientists and an adviser to presidents in both parties, summons the facts and statistics to show us how America’s big government works and why reforms that include adding a million more people to the federal workforce by 2035 might help to slow government’s growth while improving its performance.

Starting from the underreported reality that the size of the federal workforce hasn’t increased since the early 1960s, even though the federal budget has skyrocketed. The number of federal programs has ballooned; Bring Back the Bureaucrats tells us what our elected leaders won’t: there are not enough federal workers to work for our democracy effectively.

DiIulio reveals that the government in America is Leviathan by Proxy, a grotesque form of debt-financed big government that guarantees terrible government. Washington relies on state and local governments, for-profit firms, and nonprofit organizations to implement federal policies and programs. Big-city mayors, defense industry contractors, nonprofit executives, and other national proxies lobby incessantly for more federal spending. This proxy system chokes on chores such as cleaning up toxic waste sites, caring for hospitalized veterans, collecting taxes, handling plutonium, and policing more than $100 billion annually in “improper payments.” The lack of competent, well-trained federal civil servants resulted in the failed federal response to Hurricane Katrina and the troubled launch of Obamacare’s “health exchanges.”

Bring Back the Bureaucrats is further distinguished by the presence of E. J. Dionne Jr. and Charles Murray, two of the most astute voices from the political left and right, respectively, who offer their candid responses to DiIulio at the end of the book.

About the Author

John J. DiIulio, Jr. is the Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania and has served as Founding Faculty Director of Penn's Robert A. Fox Leadership Program; Fox Leadership International (FLI); Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society (PRRUCS); and Partnership for Effective Public Administration and Leadership Ethics (PEPALE). He taught previously at Princeton University and Harvard University. An award-winning political science scholar and popular teacher, he has served as a senior fellow and directed research centers at several think tanks, including the Brookings Institution and the Manhattan Institute.

A member of several government reform commissions, he served as the founding director of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives under President George W. Bush. He helped reconstitute that office under President Barack Obama. Dr. DiIulio is the author, coauthor, or editor of more than a dozen books, including a leading textbook, American Government, Bring Back the Bureaucrats, and Godly Republic: A Centrist Blueprint for America's Faith-Based Future.

Praise for Bring Back the Bureaucrats: Why More Federal Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!) Government (New Threats to Freedom Series)

“John DiIulio’s freestyle mix of ideas from left and right performs this service beautifully. He focuses on questions that most elected officials are reluctant, even petrified, to talk much about.”
—E.J. Dionne

“John DiIulio has handed up the first half of the indictment. The federal Leviathan by Proxy is just as dysfunctional as he portrayed it.”
—Charles Murray

John DiIulio’s Bring Back the Bureaucrats is an eye-opening account of the hollowing out of the American government. DiIulio, an expert on public administration at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that the US has fewer full-time federal officials than it did in 1960, while the amount of money they dispense has increased fivefold. In their place is a legion of for-profit contractors and non-profit NGOs with highly mixed motives, about which we know very little. In the process, misguided American hostility to the government has produced a massive challenge for democratic accountability.
—Francis Fukuyama, Senior fellow at Stanford and author of Political Order and Political Decay

“Everyone should be upset with the problem DiIulio describes — both those who prioritize limited government and those who prioritize effective government. . . . The responses to ‘Leviathan by proxy’ will differ according to ideology. But any serious political movement on the right or left must now be a government reform movement.”
—Michael Gerson, The Washington Post

“DiIulio highlights the inadequacies and opacity of proxy government to make a counterintuitively conservative argument for adding a million new full-time civil servants to the federal ranks. . . . DiIulio’s analysis meshes well with a growing and pan-ideological scholarly literature on the modern American state that emphasizes its ‘hidden,’ ‘delegated,’ ‘submerged,’ ‘extended,’ and ‘divided’ qualities. Making government and its employees at once more visible and accountable is a reform agenda implicit in much of this work.”
—Sam Rosenfeld and Jake Rosenfeld, The American Prospect

“Reform is necessary, and DiIulio deserves credit for admitting that it may be impossible without more resources.”
—Patrick Brennan, National Review

“In Bring Back the Bureaucrats, John J. Dilulio Jr. concisely and passionately outlines the dangers of Big Government by stealth in the USA as bureaucratic tasks become increasingly outsourced to proxies including charities, business contractors and local government. . . . At just 142 pages, and with plenty of passion and colorful phrases, Bring Back the Bureaucrats could easily be read over a weekend by the average over-stretched bureaucrat. It is not an academic book but is full of clearly presented and pertinent facts that would provide a useful starting point for discussion for university students.”
—Ruth Garland, The London School of Economics and Political Science

“Recommended for public libraries, universities, and anyone interested in political science.”
—Dorothy J. Smith, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, The Christian Librarian