Are Government Organizations Immortal?

by Herbert Kaufman

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0815748396
• ISBN13: 9780815748397
• Release Date: January 1976
• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Length: 79 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.

Customer Reviews

YES, THEY ARE.

Critics of the federal government--especially conservative critics--are fond of saying that government agencies are almost never abolished. "No matter how ineffective they are, they just go on forever," is the oft-heard complaint. In 1974, Herbert Kaufman tried to find out whether government agencies do go on forever. The result, ARE GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS IMMORTAL?, has to be the most interesting volume ever to come out of the Brookings Institution and the best 79-page book ever published. Briefly, Kaufman compared the number of federal "organizations" (a larger group than bonafide "agencies") in existence in 1923 with the federal organizations of 1973. This was more difficult than it sounds, as Kaufman had to account for agency-mergers, name-changes, and changes in mission, but eventually he came up with some reasonable rules for what constituted the "same" agency over the span of half a century. He also supplemented his two agency censuses with data from various government reports to determine agency founding dates. All in all, the only real flaws in the study were that Kaufman eliminated the "independent commissions" as well as everything in the Department of Defense. He also failed to incorporate the agencies that were both created and abolished in the years _between_ 1923 and 1973, which may have skewed the results somewhat.What Kaufman found was that federal agencies are indeed "immortal" for the most part, and that the number of agencies keeps on increasing like so many layers of sedimentary rock. The agency head-count went from 11 in 1789 to 123 in 1923 to 394 in 1973. Between 1923 and 1973, only 27 agencies were abolished. This gives government agencies an 85 percent survival rate over 50 years. Equally important, Kaufman found that the longer an agency was in existence, the better chance it had to survive. In other words, the federal offices created under Washington, Adams, and Jefferson had a better chance of still being around than the ones created under Eisenhower and Kennedy.If there is any surprise here, it is in what Kaufman calls the "death-rate." F.D.R. and Truman presided over an expanding federal government, but during their administrations 12 agencies were abolished--a very high figure for a 20-year period. And no agencies disappeared between 1957 and 1973, making these years quite unusual. At the end of the book, Kaufman discusses how the agency death-rate might be increased. Among other proposals, he deals with "sunset legislation," at that time a fad idea for getting rid of institutions that had outlived their usefulness or never been any good to begin with. Under the simplest version of sunsetting, first proposed by William O. Douglas, every government agency would have an expiration date; at that time, if Congress didn't specifically vote to keep the agency alive, it would be abolished. But Kaufman was if anything more skeptical of the sunset idea than he ought to have been. Since this book was publ