Revisiting Waldo's Administrative State

The prevailing notion that the best government is achieved through principles of management and business practices is hardly new-it echoes the early twentieth-century "gospel of efficiency" challenged by Dwight Waldo in 1948 in his pathbreaking book, The Administrative State. Asking, "Efficiency for what?", Waldo warned that public administrative efficiency must be backed by a framework of consciously held democratic values.