I have previously written about how the federal government once trained managers to focus on implementation.
- In my post Eisenhower’s Bureaucrats, I explained the approach to managerial training that the federal government developed, which they called work simplification.
- In my post The Snyder Cuts, I explained how Treasury Secretary Snyder put work simplification to practice at IRS: he modernized IRS’s IT while cracking down on corruption.
This raises a rather obvious question: if this approach was so good, why did the US abandon it?
As with all social trends, there were many reasons. So here I will note only one: competing theories about the purpose of government management.
