A Government Ill Executed: The Decline of the Federal Service and How to Reverse It

By Paul Light

(Harvard University Press, 2008)

Judging only in part by the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, it is having a great deal of difficulty executing the nation’s laws faithfully, which was Alexander Hamilton’s definition of “the true test” of a good government. In his new book, Paul Light, Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, explores the symptoms, general causes, and ways to improve the effectiveness of the government.
    A Government Ill Executed: The Decline of the Federal Service and How to Reverse It employs Hamilton’s seven measures of a robust federal service, and shows how the government is lacking in each criterion. Light calls for new laws limiting the number of political appointees, reducing the layers of government management, cutting the size of government, reducing the heavy outsourcing of federal work, and re-energizing the federal career. Although there are many ways to fix the problems with government, only a comprehensive agenda, he writes, will bring the kind of reform needed to reverse the overall erosion of the capacity to faithfully execute all the laws.     
    Among many commentators on Light’s book, Bill Moyers said on PBS’s Bill Moyers Journal: “Not only the presidential candidates, but everyone running for Congress should read this book. If our political leaders do not confront this pattern of desperate concern, says this sober scholar [Light], ‘they are likely to preside over a string of meltdowns that will make the federal response to Hurricane Katrina look like a minor mistake.’”
    The book includes a foreword written by Paul A. Volcker, former chief of the Federal Reserve System. To hear recent commentary by Light on why young, talented workers are eschewing careers in the federal government (on National Public Radio), go to http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/06/30/government_jobs/