Americans are critical of their government and their leaders and often do not make a clear distinction between the two. There is a perception in the land that government does not work as intended and that something has to be done to make government more responsive to the people. Such criticism seems to cover the political spectrum, as can be seen in the last several presidential campaigns when both Republicans and Democrats have run against Washington and against having been part of government if they can. When the Clinton administration reached Washington, one of its early efforts was overseen by Vice President Gore and was known as the National Performance Review or "Reinventing Government." This was the eleventh effort this century intended to reshape the federal government and to improve the executive branch. Professors DiIulio, Garvey, and Kettl offer their assessment of the issues involved in their book Improving Government Performance, and they call specifically for a program of evolutionary change rather than for sudden shifts in structure and function as a way of improving the government and enhancing its performance and responsiveness.
The authors note first that the two metaphors of reform from the beginning have been invention and evolution. The metaphor of invention derived from the Founding Fathers and their preoccupation with Newtonian mechanism:
They thought it possible to create a self-checking governmental apparatus, a "machine that would go of itself." Thomas Jefferson urged that the structures of government be abolished and reinvented every twentieth Independence Day.
The metaphor of evolution has the same pedigree given that the Constitution developed by the Founding Fathers was left open and adaptable in order to accommodate unforeseen developments. The authors find that a current concept of contemporary social science, that of bounded rationality, supports the evolutionary model for instituti...