Most men and women who serve in public-service positions have a focused perspective on the mission of their agency, are genuinely committed to that mission, and are personally honest and industrious. This outlook leads most government managers and public-administration scholars to conclude that government performance could best be improved by reducing the restrictions on government managers. Maybe so, but analysts should reflect more seriously on the reasons why most proposals to reduce such regulations are rejected and why the scope and detail of these regulations continue to increase. The beginning of wisdom on these issues is to recognize that most regulations, like most other conditions perceived to be wasteful, are there because someone in authority wants them. Legislators and elected executives monitor agencies by several criteria, with preferences not just for an agency's primary output but also for how that output is produced.
Regulations are the basic means by which politicians implement their various preferences.
Government officials, for example, want to distribute employment, contracts, and grants by area, size of business, race, or some other politically meaningful criterion. Personnel rules reflect a preference to avoid the appearance of favoritism, ethics rules to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, transparency rules to avoid the appearance of ex parte deals. The best way to make a case against such stifling regulations, then, is to provide politicians and the public with information about regulatory costs in terms of increased spending or lower output. Unfortunately, this book, like all too much of the public-administration literature, provides little significant analysis or evidence on that key issue. Gerald Garvey and John DiIulio contribute a thoughtful article on the sources of public-service regulation without making an adequate case that such regulation hasbeen excessive.