Improving Government Performance

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The Clinton administration's National Performance Review of the federal government (also called the Reinventing Government Initiative) is the eleventh effort this century to improve the executive branch and reform the federal service. Most previous efforts have faltered. How can present and future recommendations avoid the same fate?

This book provides practical and timely guidance to those trying to improve government performance. The focus of successful attempts, the authors argue, should be sustained evolution, not bursts of invention aimed at sweeping transformation. Specific proposals address ways to change government over the long term, ways to streamline bureaucracy, attract more resourceful and innovative workers, and make agencies more responsive to their customers, the citizens.

John J. Dilulio, Jr., Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of politics, religion, and civil society at University of Pennsylvania and a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings, was a former assistant to the President and has served as a consultant for the National Institute of Justice and the National Institute of Corrections. He has authored and coauthored numerous books, including What's God Got to Do with the American Experiment? (Brookings, 2000), Body Count: Moral Poverty... and How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Inside the Reinvention Machine: Appraising Governmental Reform (Brookings, 1995), Making Health Reform Work: The View from the States (Brookings, 1994), and No Escape: The Future of American Corrections (Basic Books, 1991). Gerald Garvey was a professor of politics at Princeton University. He focused on American politics, public policy, public administration and political theory, writing about these subjects in 11 books and numerous articles. Donald F. Kettl is the Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also director of the Fels Institute of Government and a professor of political science. Kettl is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including System under Stress: Homeland Security and American Politics (CQ Press, 2nd ed., in 2007) and The Global Public Management Revolution (Brookings, 2nd ed., in 2005).

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