Every problem in government has been faced before. The fastest way to understand how to tackle today’s challenges—or how to avoid past mistakes—is to study how others have solved or framed them.
This annotated bibliography collects that knowledge: the books and documents that have helped me go down the rabbit hole of bureaucracy, ranging from manuals written a century ago to contemporary histories.
I’ve drawn on several kinds of sources. Some are theoretical works on budgeting, personnel, and other core functions. Others are historical documents—manuals, reports, and guides actually used by agencies in the past. And some are case studies and histories that cover particular agencies and programs.
Basically, if it helps explain what government does and how, I include it in this bibliography. These are works I’ve found especially valuable rather than a comprehensive review of the literature. If the documents are in the public domain or posted online by the author, I provide links.
I’ll be updating this bibliography periodically and hope to expand it significantly over time.
General histories and overviews
These sources are general histories and books which cover cross-cutting issues (and therefore do not fit in other sections).
Leonard White – Federalists; Jeffersonians; Jacksonians; Republicans
A magisterial history in four volumes. Leonard White tells the history of the United States from the viewpoint of the federal government—what was it doing at each point and why? He explores the nitty-gritty of how tariffs were administered, how laws were enforced, and what it all meant for American society more broadly. Probably the greatest work of public administration. Unquestionably needs to be reprinted. However, the final volume is rather forgettable.
Daniel Carpenter – The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy (2001)
This book discusses how the government got its act together during the Progressive Era and built up its competence. A truly excellent book that manages to drill down into the specifics while also looking at the bigger picture. He looks at what agency-level reform actually looked like in practice, and grounds the agencies’ success in the relationships they were building with allies in congress and civil society. One of the first two books on public administration that I ever read, in fact.
Subjects
This section is broken down into different subjects, which might be functions, like budgeting or personnel, and program areas such as municipal reform or agriculture.
Budgeting and Accounting
These sources cover budgeting and accounting: how the government plans to spend money and records how money has been spent. They include both the appropriations process in Congress and the internal budgeting process of agencies.
Edward Fitzpatrick – Budget Making in a Democracy (1918)
One of the earliest contributions to budgeting. Intriguingly (but unconvincingly) defends legislative supremacism against executive-centric budgeting. Extremely valuable summary of the various proposals for budgetary systems. Available free on Google Books.
Charles Dawes – The First Year of the Budget of the United States (1923)
An extraordinary book that is essentially the diary of Charles Dawes. The US adopted a budgeting system for the first time with the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. Dawes was the first budget director and wrote about what it was like to create a budget process from scratch. As an aside, Dawes might have been the only person ever to have felt that Harding was a highly competent and honest man. Available free on Google Books.
WF Willoughby – The National Budget System (1927)
An evaluation of the US’s then-new budget system. It mainly summarizes the budget process. Interesting discussions of several quite obscure topics: 1) odd budget gimmicks like permanent appropriations; 2) how the White House administered the budget in the 1920s; and 3) how appropriations for infrastructure evolved over time. Available free on Google Books.
JW Sundelson – Budgetary Methods in National and State Governments (1938)
A comparative study from the 1930s of how different countries did appropriations. Most other countries imitated the UK, except for France, whose budget process was a catastrophe. Quite comprehensive. Very difficult to find.
Lucius Wilmerding – The Spending Power (1941)
The definitive history of Congressional oversight of executive branch spending. A must-read, although his attack on GAO is less relevant today (as some, but not all, of the problems he complains about have been fixed). The 19th century history is especially valuable. Ought to be reprinted.
Elias Huzar – The Purse and the Sword (1950)
A history of military appropriations during World War II. It paints an interesting picture of how members of the military appropriations subcommittees actually viewed the impossible task of budget scrutiny during total war.
FC Mosher – Program Budgeting (1954)
An important contribution to the theory of budgeting. Mosher writes about a transitional era—previously, budgeting had focused on the inputs to be bought, such as salaries, equipment, etc. Increasingly, budgeting focused on the things to be produced, that is, the specific agency programs. He writes about how dry budgetary reforms changed agency incentives, and was an unheeded voice of caution. Ought to be reprinted.
Arthur Smithies – The Budgetary Process in the United States (1955)
A lengthy discussion of how budgeting and appropriations worked in the 1950s. Not key reading, but contains some important information, especially regarding the process for infrastructure appropriations.
Burkhead – Government Budgeting (1956)
The best book ever written on budgeting. He synthesized every viewpoint about budgeting: everything from the old fashioned approach that focused on typewriters and travel expenses, all the way to Keynesian stabilization policy. Particularly strong on discussing how different approaches to budgeting affect program implementation. Desperately needs to be reprinted.
Fenno – The Spending Power (1966)
The definitive explanation of what regular order for appropriations looked like back in the “good old days,” or roughly the 1940s–60s. He interviewed politicians and he documents (across 700 pages!) the entire appropriations process. It is especially strong on the incentives and motives of key players. Ought to be reprinted.
AE Buck – Public Budgeting (1929)
An excellent book, albeit very old-school. This comprehensive book focuses on budgeting in states and cities, and covers essentially everything there was to know in 1929. He even discusses the pros and cons of different sizes of paper for printing budgets, and offers advice on proofreading! Freely available on Internet Archive and on Hathitrust. (The former is more easily available, the latter is a higher quality scan.)
Society for the Advancement of Management – Federal Fiscal Series 1–7 (1945)
A series of seven case studies on how federal agencies budgeted internally for projects (i.e., not covering the congressional side of things). It discusses agencies ranging from the Coast Guard to the TVA. If you read and manage to understand this bureaucratic sorcery, you will probably know more about budgeting than some actual budget officers. Available free on Hathitrust.
Taxes and fiscal systems
These sources cover the way that revenue is raised and spent. They focus on the mechanics of how this is done. (By contrast, budgeting is the conceptual plan for what money should be spent on.)
Robert Love – Federal Financing (1931)
The history of the federal government’s process for issuing and selling debt. Surprisingly interesting—it was wildly politicized and rather incompetent well into the mid 1900s. The author has an interesting table of every loan incurred or debt issued by the federal government, from independence up through the date of publication. Some enterprising grad student should digitize his dataset and extend it.
Daniel Selko – The Federal Financial System (1940)
A comprehensive look at the government’s fiscal system circa the 1930s: how it collected taxes, made payments, and so forth. The factual content is extremely good. However, his reform proposals are uniformly bad and should not be read uncritically.
Personnel
These sources cover government HR practices: how employees are hired, trained, and fired. It includes such topics as the intellectual history of civil service, different approaches to HR, and case studies of agency recruitment.
Paul van Riper – History of the United States Civil Service (1958)
This book is distinctly of the ‘old school,’ digging deep into the EOs and public laws in order to tell the story of how the civil service arose and was institutionalized. He combats many myths with hard data. For example, the growth of the civil service was much slower and with many more setbacks than most people would imagine. Probably the best book about the US’ civil service (but now very dated). Much of the information cannot be found anywhere else. Should be reprinted.
WT Hammack – Training and Promotion in the Federal Prison Service (1941)
The Federal Prison Service was founded in the 1930s to bring order to the US’ woefully mismanaged prisons. Its founding director ran into a small problem—there were no qualified prison guards to hire, and (given the depression) they had no budget whatsoever. This book tells how the agency kept a hiring pipeline rolling and invested in its employees on a shoestring budget. Among the best case studies in government history. It also made me realize just how difficult it was to run a prison in the past. Available free on Google Books.
Gladys Kammerer – Impact of War on Federal Personnel Administration 1939–1945 (1951)
A deep dive into how WWII shaped the federal government’s personnel practices. The war led the government both to invest in its managers and to take very damaging shortcuts. Both halves are quite interesting, the documentation of successful investment and the case study of how bureaucracies respond to crises. Available free on Hathitrust.
RS Avery – Experiment in Management: Personnel Decentralization in the Tennessee Valley Authority (1954); Harry Case – Personnel Policy in a Public Agency: the TVA Experience (1955)
Two books about the TVA’s personnel practices from its golden age of world-leading engineering. Avery’s book focuses on TVA’s relationship with its unions. It was a strikingly unusual setup, probably the most European approach I have heard of in America. Case’s book covers the TVA more broadly. Both offer lessons in disciplined recruitment of technical talent. (But even by the time these books were written the TVA had baked in dysfunctions that later plagued it—see Hargrove’s book below.)
Administrative law
These sources cover the process by which government agencies can regulate individuals and corporations, and how agencies can take action against those who break laws and regulations. It also covers how these actions can be challenged, both in internal agency disputes and via judicial proceedings. The older sources on administrative law are much better than more recent work.
George Brown – Judicial Review in Customs Taxation (1918)
A brief and readable article that is one of the best works on administrative law. It advocates for more robust judicial review of agency action, firmly defending continental skepticism of state power against traditional anglo-American doctrines of sovereign immunity. Page 9 has perhaps the most amusing claim about administrative law ever made. Available free on Google Books.
Ernst Freund – Administrative Powers over Persons and Property (1928)
This work is 600 pages of comparative administrative law and is accordingly not so much a book as a tome. But what a tome it is. He starts from first principles by classifying the forms of administrative action in order to develop administrative law doctrinally He writes as a right-liberal whose heart certainly lies with strong political oversight of agencies, legislative supremacism asserted via narrowly drafted laws, aggressive judicial review, and minimal restraint on the private economy.
I think every topic of administrative law is discussed in here at some point, and he anticipates nearly every interesting later debate. Unfortunately, however, Freund was an immigrant from Germany and his writing exemplifies ponderous German academic writing. The historical sections are insightful but not nearly as good as the theoretical sections. Available free on Internet Archive.
FF Blachly & ME Oatman – Administrative Legislation and Adjudication (1934); Federal Regulatory Action and Control (1940)
If Freund anticipates nearly every interesting debate, Blachly and Oatman anticipate the rest. Blachly and Oatman were liberal New Dealers who favored agency independence and sweeping regulation; they ultimately broke with FDR over his support for placing independent agencies under greater political direction.
The two attempt to classify and categorize the different forms of agency action as they existed in the 1930s. They ground their taxonomy in the purpose of what the agency is attempting to accomplish. Like Freund, their taxonomy is comprehensive and illuminating. Also like Freund, it is so complex as to be barely comprehensible for first-time readers. Unlike Freund, their discussion of opposing viewpoints is laughably unfair. Still, a wealth of material that has scarcely been tapped.
Administrative Legislation and Adjudication: available free on Hathitrust
Federal Regulatory Action and Control: available free on Hathitrust
Robert Cushman The Independent Regulatory Commissions (1940)
Cushman was FDR’s advisor on regulatory reform; this extraordinarily readable and informative book began as a short study that he wrote for an FDR admin commission. He traces out the history of what agency independence meant to agencies and Congress, and how this understanding evolved over time. He argues that independence was never a meaningful concept. He also discusses how to reform agency adjudication, an issue still in the news today.
There’s a great deal of amusing score settling with his opponents from the 1930s—history is written by the losers. The history of the various agencies is outstanding. However, there is a long and boring section on English administrative law that can be skipped. Ought to be reprinted.
Ashley Sellers – Administrative Procedure, a Suggested Classification (1940); Administrative Procedure and Practice in the Department of Agriculture (1940)
Sellers was the counsel for the Department of Agriculture and wrote several studies about how USDA conducted rulemaking and adjudication. These studies were some of the studies written to inform the debate over the APA. Sellers’ studies are better the others because they were authored by a single person (whereas most other APA material was written by committee).
Sellers reviews the various regulatory laws that USDA enforced and writes about the nitty-gritty of how they were administered. He wrote a general summary—Administrative Procedure, a Suggested Classification—and also more detailed studies of individual laws.
Administrative Procedure, a Suggested Classification: available free on WUSTL Law Review.
Administrative Procedure and Practice in USDA: part 1, part 2, part 3 are freely available on Google books. (This list is not quite comprehensive. I have not located all of the individual studies in Sellers’ series.)
Contracting and Acquisition
These sources cover how the government purchases goods. This can range from routine IT purchases to infrastructure and major defense acquisitions.
James Nagle – A History of Government Contracting (2012)
Exactly what it says on the tin. The history of contracting tells a surprising amount about the history of government generally. The book shows that we’ve already had several cycles of insourcing and contracting as government competence has waxed and waned. Similarly, contracting has often been a broadly political issue, especially during wartime. A quite good history, although I wish he were a bit more opinionated. Available free online.
Steven Kelman – Procurement and Public Management: The Fear of Discretion and the Quality of Government Performance (1990)
An early and influential book on what we now call state capacity. The author Steve Kelman argues that the fear of collusion with contractors makes agencies so dysfunctional that the policies ironically empower contractors. Somewhat outdated, but for a good reason: Kelman later became Bill Clinton’s procurement man and fixed several of the problems he identified. Remains a great statement of the principles underlying procurement reform.
Eric Lofgren – A History of Thought in Defense Acquisition (2017)
A brilliant and capacious book on defense acquisition, an area that is a beast even by the standards of government acquisition. Lofgren ties acquisition to the broader questions of agency design and institutional culture, particularly by attacking the mechanistic ideas of mid 20th century corporate thinking. Much of his discussion is the current state of the art. Available free online.
Gerald White – Billions for Defense: Government Finance by the Defense Plant Corporation During World War II (1980)
A study of a niche aspect of World War II: the way that new plants for defense production were financed by the government. The government unsuccessfully attempted to stimulate investment with tax breaks and the like until turning to a more robust approach: directly loaning funds for building plants. This was carried out by a government sponsored enterprise, the Defense Plant Corporation. Worthwhile reading for the debate on industrial policy today.
Industrial Mobilization for War, History of the War Production Board and Predecessor Agencies (1947); The Army and Economic Mobilization (1957); Study of Experience in Industrial Mobilization in World War II (1945)
These are the main documents about the US’ industrial policy during World War II, namely retrospective studies written soon after the event. All of these are massive and not for the faint of heart. However, the amount of information on industrial mobilization contained in them is unparalleled.
Industrial Mobilization for War: Available free on Hathitrust
The Army and Economic Mobilization: Available free on GovInfo (and elsewhere)
A Study of Experience in Industrial Mobilization in World War II: vol 1 and vol 2 freely available on Hathitrust
Management
These sources cover ways in which agencies attempted to become better managed, particularly through training their managers in process improvement.
US Department of Agriculture – A Guide to Better Management (1944)
A series of case studies on improving government process, compiled by the US Department of Agriculture during World War II in order to train its employees. The case studies include everything from major reorganizations, to improving internal documentation, to streamlining payments to contractors. The document is especially valuable in that it frequently includes the actual memos that managers and employees wrote when they identified and fixed problems—rarely is bureaucracy made so human. Not for everyone, but it is the best at what it does. Available free on Google Books.
US Department of the Army – Manpower Utilization: Report on Work Simplification (1944)
A document on work simplification, a method for improving bureaucratic process, written during World War II to train Army officials. The Army pioneered this approach before it was later rolled out to the entire federal government by the Bureau of the Budget (now OMB). This document shows the origins of the program and includes several techniques not covered in other documents. In particular, it discusses ways of improving the layout of factories and storage facilities. Available free on Google Books.
US Bureau of the Budget – An Agency Management Program (1944); Public Administration Service – Work simplification as exemplified by the work simplification program of the U. S. Bureau of the Budget (1949)
During World War II, the civilian government was nearly crippled by the exodus of trained employees to the national defense program. In response, the Bureau of the Budget (now OMB) launched a training program for managers to help them improve their agency’s procedures, thereby dealing with the lack of experienced personnel. Both of these documents are the actual documents used during the war.
The document An Agency Management Program was a self-assessment checklist circulated around the government. It’s brief, entertaining reading. How would government agencies stack up today? Perhaps not as well as could be desired.
Meanwhile, the work simplification document is the meat of it—a compilation of training material written and used during World War II. It also has charming illustrations. Not only a great source of inspiration for process improvement, but a great piece of Americana.
An Agency Management Program: Available free on Google Books
Work simplification: Available free on Hathitrust
State and local government
These sources cover subnational government, i.e., state, county, and city government. In particular, these sources discuss the ways in which local government is organized and the means whereby its competence is built or destroyed.
Peverill Squire – The Evolution of American Legislatures (2012)
Squire’s excellent book discusses the history of American legislatures, particularly state legislatures and their professionalization over time. Legislatures that began as part-time meetings of prosperous farmers have become sophisticated organizations with institutionalized support.
Jon Teaford – The Rise of the States (2002)
This great book covers the history of state government and how its responsibilities and competence changed over time. Contrary to popular impression, until the mid-1900s states were unimportant relative to the federal government and to cities. Teaford traces out how states tackled new responsibilities over time and gradually professionalized.
If you read Squire and Teaford, you’ll have an outstanding knowledge of state government.
New York Bureau of Municipal Research – The Constitution and Government of the State of New York (1915)
An extraordinarily influential study written for the New York constitutional convention of 1915. This was the main call to arms for the conservative reformers, focusing on the need to strengthen the chain of command of the executive branch. The study begins with a statement of the principles of executive/legislative relations and the principles of good executive management, then proceeds to offer suggestions for reforming every agency and program of the New York state government. This slept-on document set the agenda for reformers for several decades. Available free on Hathitrust.
Chester Maxey – Readings in Municipal Government (1924)
Local government reform was one of the key issues during the early 20th century. As it was a heated debate, there was much more creative thinking than today. This volume collects key early readings about municipal reform—different methods of organizing cities (and the case for each), the debate over municipal civil service, and much more. A fair amount of it is outdated, but many of the problems it highlights are evergreen issues. Available free on Google Books.
History of agencies
These sources are histories of specific agencies, particularly histories that explore how institutional factors lead to success or failure.
Erwin Hargrove – Prisoners of Myth: The Leadership of the Tennessee Valley Authority (1994)
This outstanding history of the TVA asks an intriguing question: how did an agency go from being world leading to a mismanaged catastrophe over several decades? Hargrove posits that the freewheeling culture of the 1930s and 40s laid the groundwork for later failure as the TVA tackled new problems it was ill suited for. The book implicitly makes the case that rigorous management is a crucial ingredient of bureaucratic success—vision and flexibility minus oversight led to the agency becoming woefully dysfunctional.
What else?
If you know of other essential works, or if you’ve used any of these in your own work, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.