Reinventing Government This

In the late 1970s, it became fashionable among members of a large group of people to declare that government had become too big since the 1930s and that it was high time to reduce the size and scope of government. This movement led, in part to the "tax revolt" of that decade, in which the populations of certain states forced their governments to reduce taxes, especially property taxes. "Small government" suddenly became a catch phrase, describing the kind of governments Americans wanted to "return to" after almost one hundred years of absence. Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 upon a campaign platform that promised to reduce the size of the government and, thereby, government waste. Federal funding of many welfare programs was slashed, but this was taken up by state and local governments. By the end of the 1980s, these state and local governments were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and their citizens refused to submit any more resource

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ust be responsive to the people, lest government employees form their own version of authoritarian leadership. As government grew in the late Nineteenth Century, elected officials were allowed to appoint their own people to government positions. Government in the United States was run by political patronage; the result was corruption and chaos. In response, reformers slowly constructed the system of bureaucracy which still exists. Career bureaucrats did not respond to the political whims of elected officials or the special interests which backed them. Regulations ensured that things were done in an orderly fashion, according to established guidelines. The incidence of corruption decreased and society operated in an orderly manner (Osborne & Gaebler, 1993, pp. 12-15). The increasing complexity of modern industrial life, however, dictated an increasingly complex bureaucracy. Rules multiplied and seemingly reproduced. The ever larger bureaucracy became less responsive to the needs of individuals, and eventually to the needs of individual government agencies. The efforts to reduce waste through more rules resulted in increased waste (Barzelay, 1992, pp. 13-19). This situation has led to the attacks on government by recen
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Approximate Word count = 1674
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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