Re-Re-Reinventing Government. Again

By Brendan Greeley

Obama, like his predecessors, can’t resist trying to remake Washington

In the spring of 1936, Franklin Roosevelt put two dozen fresh-from-school PhDs in a room in Washington, with orders to find ways to bring a rapidly growing federal government to heel. The idea was to make the bureaucracy run more efficiently—which is to say, to make it answer more directly to the President. Roosevelt wasn’t worried about runaway government spending but about losing control. “We have got to get over the notion that the purpose of reorganization is economy,” the President told Louis Brownlow, the man in charge of the PhDs. “The reason for reorganization is good management.”

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