Rediscovering Principles of Public Administration: The Neglected Foundation of Public Law.

Over the past five decades, the field of public administration has gradually lost its theoretical distinctiveness. Today, public administration has largely abandoned or forgotten its roots in public law - in the Constitution, statutes, and case law - and has accepted, to varying degrees, the generic behavioral principles of management as taught in schools of business. In this intellectual climate, those who study government and those who are practitioners of governmental management were understandably caught off guard by the sheer audacity of the entrepreneurial management advocates, actively led by no less a personage than the Vice President of the United States. The entrepreneurial management model outlined first in Osborne and Gaebler's popular book, Reinventing Government,[1] and later in the Vice President's National Performance Review Report,[2] seemed to many practitioners and major professional organizations of public administration, not as a challenge to fundamental values, but simply as the next logical step in the grand synthesis of management science. The difficulty is that this grand synthesis does not comport with the daily experience of managing government agencies and programs. This discontinuity between the contemporary management theory synthesis and reality has been difficult for Public administrators to articulate since most have lost touch with the theoretical foundation of their field's intellectual tradition. That foundation is in public law, not in behavioral theories of management. [3] Ironically, the legal constraints and demands in the governmental work environment are evident enough. To a considerable extent they are evident in the business world as well. Nonetheless, the fact is that the private and governmental sectors are based on fundamentally different streams of legal doctrine: one traditionally rooted in judge-made common law, protecting rights and asserting duties in the relations of private individuals; the other founded on the body of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and articulated by a truly enormous body of statutory, regulatory, and case law to ensure continuance of a republican form of government and to protect the rights and freedoms of citizens at the hands of an all-powerful state. The intent of the authors is to revisit the protective purposes of the Constitution as designed by the framers and the basic tenets of our administrative state as adapted by their successors (legislators, presidents, jurists, and other government officials) to meet contemporary administrative realities. It is our understanding that the basic theory guiding governmental organization and management - structures, processes, and procedures - is to be found in public law, that it is valid today, and that it will remain so as long as the Republic endures. The principles that make up this theory can in many settings embrace useful precepts such as those of "management by objectives" (MBO) or "total quality management" (TQM) and they can accommodate and be enhanced by an almost infinite variety of technological innovations. But such techniques and advances are not - and cannot be - a substitute or replacement for the traditional, constitution-based method of doing the public's business. To accept such a substitution would be to trade away the constitutionally protected, known means of ensuring accountability for yet to be established measures of government performance. Protective Purposes of the Constitution As a matter of cultural preference, intensified by the experiences of colonial dependency, the Revolutionary War, and the operation of fledgling states during the Confederation period thereafter, the framers of the Constitution consciously designed a government better suited to frustrate the concentration of political power than to govern effectively. As James Madison expressed the common assumption that led to this result: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands . …