In recent decades, both Congress and the President have increasingly used hybrid organizations for the implementation of public policy functions traditionally assigned to executive departments and agencies. Instead, their preference has often been to assign administrative responsibilities to newly created independent agencies or to hybrid organizations possessing legal characteristics of both the governmental and private sectors. Hybrid organizations attract both support and criticism. There are today, associated with the federal government alone, hundreds of hybrid entities that have collectively been called the "quasi government." The relationship of this burgeoning quasi government to elected and appointed officials is a subject of growing concern, as it touches the very heart of democratic governance: to whom are these hybrids accountable, and how is the public interest being protected over and against the interest of private parties? The scope and consequences of these hybrid organizations have not been extensively studied. Basic definitional issues resist resolution. Even the language to be used in discussing the quasi government is in dispute. Should government management be discussed in the language of law, economic theory, or the business school? The traditional tools for holding executive agencies accountable, such as the budget and general management laws, are inapplicable in most instances, often leaving these hybrids with the freedom to pursue their own institutional interests, which may or may not conform to the public interest as defined by the nation's elected leadership. The current popularity of the quasi government option can be traced to at least five major factors at work in the political realm: (1) the desire to avoid creating another federal "bureaucracy"; (2) the current controls on the federal budget process that encourage agencies to develop new sources of revenues; (3) the desire by advocates of agencies and programs to be exempt from central management laws, especially statutory ceilings on personnel and compensation; (4) the contemporary appeal of generic, economic-focused values as the basis for a "new public management"; and (5) the belief that management flexibility requires entity-specific laws and regulations, even at the cost of less accountability to representative institutions. This report introduces the reader to the quasi government, suggests categories of entities within this sector, and examines their legal characteristics, behavior, and possible policy consequences. The report will be revised and updated as new information and analyses become available. The quasi government, virtually by its name alone and the intentional blurring of the governmental and private sectors, is not easily defined. In general, the term is used in two ways: to refer to entities that have some legal relation or association, however tenuous, to the federal government; or to the terrain that putatively exists between the governmental and private sectors. For the most part, this report will use the term quasi government in the former context, referring to entities with some legal relationship to the federal government. The one common characteristic to this melange of entities in the quasi government is that they are not agencies of the United States as that term is defined in Title 5 of the U.S. Code . If a quasi governmental entity is not an agency of government, what is it? For this report's purposes, it is a hybrid organization that has been assigned by law, or by general practice, some of the legal characteristics of both the governmental and private sectors. While different categories of quasi governmental organizations can be described and found useful as an analytic tool, such categories are artificial, with porous lines of distinction and differentiation, and tend to be imposed upon the disparate entities after the fact. Two rough models suggest themselves as ways of looking at these entities. First, there is the linear spectrum model where the existence of a quasi government between the governmental and private sectors is designated and categories of organizations (e.g., government-sponsored enterprises) and their relationship to the executive branch (and Congress) are described on a descending scale from closest to the most distant. Second, there is the categoric organization model involving, in this instance, the suggestion of four categories: pure government organization; quasi governmental organization ("quago"); quasi nongovernmental organization ("quango"); and pure private. A quago is essentially a government organization that is assigned some, or many, of the attributes normally associated with the private sector. A quango, on the other hand, is essentially a private organization that is assigned some, or many, of the attributes normally associated with the governmental sector. Under this schema, the Legal Services Corporation, for example, would be a quago, while the Red Cross would be a quango. Whatever the value of the quago/quango designations, especially in the comparative international literature on corporate organizations, it shall not be used here. This report follows the linear spectrum approach in describing the elements within the quasi government. It is possible to begin with what are referred to in the U.S. Government Manual as "Quasi Official Agencies," those entities, arguably, closest to the executive branch, and move on to the other end of the spectrum, "congressionally chartered nonprofit organizations," those entities, arguably, the furthest from the executive branch. It was the intent of the framers of the Constitution that the authority and organization of the executive branch be as much as possible unified under the President, and that Congress be the source to which accountability was rendered. This theoretical proposition was put into practice when the first Congress convened in 1789. One of the first orders of business was the establishment of executive departments. Three "organic" statutes were enacted creating three "great" departments; Treasury, State, and War. The heads of these departments were directly responsible to the President and were his agents (and thus the agency chiefs were removable by him), but ultimately accountable for policy purposes to Congress. All the particular functions of the newly created executive branch, save that of delivering the mail, were entrusted to these departments. With respect to fundamental authorities and lines of accountability, however, the executive branch has never been a pristine unity. From the decision in the first Congress to give the comptroller in the Department of the Treasury a substantial degree of legal autonomy within the department, down to the more recent "independent counsels" functioning in an uneasy relationship with the executive branch, not all officers have been directly accountable to the President. These exceptions notwithstanding, the prevailing organizational norm has historically been toward an executive accountable to the President. Reinforcing the hierarchical concept of the accountable executive has been the view that authority ought to be assigned by delegation from the President or department heads to subordinate officers, rather than being assigned directly by Congress to a nondepartment head. The first substantial breaks with this concept did not occur until the creation of the Civil Service Commission in 1883 and the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. Subsequently, more independent regulatory commissions would be added. In the 20 th century, an increasing number of "independent" agencies were established, the term "independent" meaning that an agency was not established within a department (e.g., Tennessee Valley Authority; National Aeronautic and Space Administration). Nonetheless, the independent agencies generally remained full government agencies operating under all the general management laws, except where exempted. The view that all government activities should be accountable in some manner to politically responsible officials received its most forceful iteration in the 20 th century in the Hoover Commission report of 1949: [The] organization and administration of the Government ... must establish a clear line of control from the President to these department and agency heads and from them to their subordinates with correlative responsibility from these officials to the President, cutting through the barriers which in many cases made bureaus and agencies partially independent of the Chief Executive. Through the 1950s the organization and management of the executive branch generally followed some basic rules. If an entity was established by Congress to accomplish a public purpose, the probability was that it was an agency of the United States operating under the general management laws enforced by the President. These values, originating with the founding fathers, as reinterpreted by the Progressives, featured the centrality of public law, departmental integration and political accountability. The President was viewed as the chief manager of the administrative system. The governmental and private sectors cooperated, but were kept legally distinct in the interests of protecting citizens' rights against a potentially arbitrary government. These values began to be challenged in the 1960s as evidenced in the establishment of the Communications Satellite Corporation (ComSat) in 1962. Congress, in this instance, created a private, for-profit corporation indicating a more flexible attitude towards organizational innovation. Additional organizations appeared that were intentionally mixed in their legal characteristics. The term "quasi governmental" began to appear in legislation, and unusual structures would be constructed to promote "flexibility," even when flexibility sometimes resulted in less accountability. This was one of the arguments made for creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967 (81 Stat. 365; 47 U.S.C. 396). Other factors began to further erode the accountable executive model, such as greater dependence upon third parties, usually private contractors, for the performance of governmental functions. The number of full-time civil servants in the federal government as a percentage of the workforce began what was to become a substantial decline, a decline accelerated in recent years. In the late 1980s, the concept of legally distinctive governmental and private sectors began to be seriously questioned. In its place a "new public management" concept emerged that argued that the governmental and private sectors were essentially alike and subject to the same, economic based, behavioral norms and practices. Internationally, the New Public Management (NPM) movement, coupled with the movement toward privatization of governmental agencies and programs, became the reigning orthodoxy. Many elements of NPM were to be found in Vice President Albert J. Gore's National Performance Review (NPR), which sought to "reinvent" some executive branch units and create corporate style, entrepreneurial structures. The purported, and often realized, strength of entrepreneurial management lies in the flexibility it provides managers to improve the performance of their agencies. Performance in the entrepreneurial context, is usually measured in "output" or "results" terms, rather than in conformance to process regulations.