A Very Tangled Web–Public and Private Redux

with Deanna Malatesta


A Cautionary Tale

Terre Haute is a mid-sized town on the western border of Indiana. In 2007, it held municipal elections, and voted in a new mayor, Duke Bennett. Bennett had defeated the former mayor, Kevin Burke. Shortly after the election, Burke sued to have Bennett declared ineligible to serve, citing the provisions of Indiana’s Little Hatch Act prohibiting government employees from engaging in certain political activities. The trial court issued a somewhat convoluted ruling in which it affirmed the applicability of the statutes involved, but found that the election essentially had “cured” the problem, as Bennett by that time had taken office, and no longer held the position that had rendered him ineligible. Burke appealed.

The Indiana Court of Appeals reinstated the suit, ruling that Burke had been ineligible to run and was therefore not entitled to assume office. The appeals court did not stop there, however; it also ruled that Burke could not be declared the winner of the election either, since voters had not been informed that Bennett was ineligible. Bennett has appealed, and at this writing, the dispute is pending in the Indiana Supreme Court.

The case raises significant issues of federalism and even more significant (and troubling) evidence that the line separating public and private is rapidly becoming indecipherable, lost in a tangle of outsourcing, contracting, public-private partnerships and the like.

The  facts as the Court of Appeals described them were as follows: In 2005, Bennett had begun employment as Director of Operations at Hamilton Center, a local nonprofit established primarily for the purpose of providing behavioral health services. In 2007, the Center opened a Head Start program, for which it received a grant from Health and Human Services. (In 2007, the amount of the grant was $861,631.) Of that amount, $125,789 was for the Head Start program’s proportionate share of overhead, which included security, maintenance, liability insurance and similar generally accepted overhead costs. Bennett was responsible for providing and managing some of those overhead services, not simply for the Head Start program, but for all of the various programs conducted at Hamilton Center locations. The Court found that $2,041—or 1.84% of Bennett’s salary and benefits for 2006-2007—were attributable to the federal grant to Head Start.

On November 4, 2008, Bennett won the mayoral election, and on November 19th, Burke sued to have him declared ineligible under the provisions of 42 U.S.C. 9851, the pertinent portion of which applied the Hatch Act to Head Start Grant recipients.

“Any agency which assumes responsibility for planning, developing and coordinating Head Start programs and receives assistance under this subchapter shall be deemed a State or local agency. An agency that operates a Head Start program and receives federal grants to assist with the program is treated as a local government agency funded through Federal grants or loans, meaning that the agency and its employees’ political activities are subject to the restrictions of the Hatch Act.”

The trial court had analyzed this language and concluded that while Bennett had indeed been ineligible to run for mayor, neither Burke nor anyone else had tried to have Bennett disqualified prior to the election. It also, explicitly, found that “the violation was not willful or intentional,” and that the issue hadn’t been raised during any of his three prior election bids. And the trial court further noted that

“No evidence indicates Bennett willfully flouted the Act. No one from Office of Special Counsel informed him that he was precluded from running. No one from Hamilton Center told him the Act precluded him from being a candidate. His role with Early Head Start was essentially non-existent. Hamilton Center did not consider Bennett an employee of Early Head Start. Bennett approved work orders for minor repairs on two facilities.”

After analyzing the operation of Indiana’s election laws and Hatch Act provisions under the circumstances of the case, the trial court had concluded that Bennett could serve as Mayor, since his election had removed him from employment at the Center and had thus “cured” any defect.

The appellate court disagreed. After an exhaustive analysis of case law and relevant state and federal statutes, the Court held that Bennett had been an employee of a nonprofit agency that the law deemed to be a state or local agency, that the nonprofit status of that agency was irrelevant, and that—despite the negligible proportion of his pay that came from the Head Start grant, his employment was “in connection with” an activity “financed in whole or in part by loans or grants made by the United States.”

The ruling that Bennett had been ineligible to run and was ineligible to serve ended up being cold comfort to Burke, however, because the Court went further and declared the office vacant. Burke could not assume the office because the voters had not had access to all relevant information when they cast their ballots. (This part of the ruling raises a number of interesting questions about voters’ right to information, but analysis of that part of the ruling is inapposite here, and must therefore await a different inquiry.)

How Did We Get Here?

The original Hatch Act was passed in 1939, restricting certain political activities by federal employees, and the use of public funds for partisan or electoral purposes. It also forbid officials paid with government funds from using their positions to promise jobs, promotions, financial assistance, or any other benefit intended to coerce campaign contributions or political support. The act took its name from the Senator who sponsored it in reaction to disclosures that WPA officials were using their position to advantage the campaigns of local Democrats. (The original name of the legislation was “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities.”) In 1940, the original measure was broadened to include state employees paid wholly or partially from federal funds.( In 1994, the restrictions were eased somewhat; however, those changes are not relevant to the analysis in this case.)

Ever since its passage, the legislation has been controversial: proponents claim that it is necessary in order to keep government officials from coercing their workers to do partisan campaigning, while opponents believe the Act denies those workers the ability to exercise their First Amendment liberties. In the wake of the original Hatch Act, states have passed so-called “Little” Hatch Acts that apply similar restrictions to state government employees.

Whatever the merits or drawbacks of this particular piece of legislation, the real problem arises by reason of the sea change in the world of public administration since its passage. The term “governance” has all but replaced the older, more concrete “government;” it has come to be viewed as a more accurate descriptor of contemporary state structures, where—among other things—an ever-increasing percentage of the work of the state is outsourced to for-profit, non-profit and faith-based organizations. (Frederickson, 1996; Kettl, 2000; Milward and Provan, 2000; Pierre and Peters, 1998; Salamon, 1989; Hill & Lynn, 2005).

As  Table 1 indicates, the outsourcing trend in the state of Indiana follows this pattern. Outsourcing as a percentage of the state’s overall expenditures more than doubled from 4.9% in 2005 to 11.0 % in 2008.[1]

Table 1:  Indiana: Outsourcing as a % of State Expenditures  2005-2008

YEAR

Dollars Contracted % Change from previous year

State expenditures (thousands) Dollar amt contracted as % of state expenditures
2005 $1,293,588.47 35% $26,362,908.00 4.9%
2006 $2,152,039.51 66% $26,958,772.00 7.9%
2007 $2,613,261.79 21% $28,809,586.00 9.0%
2008 $2,857,871.15 9% $25,262,415.20 11.0%

The reasons for this growth in “government by proxy” are varied, but among its roots are distrust of government and an often-reflexive preference for markets and/or civil society. What many of those holding that reflexive preference fail to recognize is that contracting-out is not “privatization,” properly understood—that is, the choice of private surrogates to deliver services on behalf of government agencies obscures but does not alter the fact that government is choosing, directing and paying for those services, and is thus ultimately responsible for them.

The relationship between governmental units and their surrogates has been the subject of a copious literature, much of which has focused on the wide variety of issues raised by these cross-sectoral partnerships. Understanding the complexity, diversity and significance of those issues is helpful if we are to fully appreciate the implications of the Terre Haute Mayoral election.

The Problem(s) of ‘Governance’

There are undoubted benefits to government that accrue through contracting, outsourcing and other public-private partnerships. Those benefits include flexibility, the ability to hire expertise not available in-house, the ability to address short-term needs without adding permanent employees to the payroll and many others. But the practice also raises a number of thorny issues, some of which should have been anticipated, others that are more surprising.

Constitutional and Ethical Issues

The “New Public Management” paradigm envisions the substitution of new forms of collaboration and management for the traditional hierarchical and bureaucratic chains of command. These new delivery methods, however, cannot and should not mean the abandonment of our constitutional values, nor of the constitutional norms of liberty, equality, and fairness. Nor should they obviate public actors’ obligations to meet the standards for government behavior that stem from the constitution and are incorporated in public law. (Jensen & Kennedy, 2005). As Donald Kettl has observed (1993, p. 40), the government “is not just another principal dealing with another agent.” The skepticism about government performance that prompted development of privatized governing arrangements should not be mistaken for a lack of concern over how public authority is deployed.

Public administration scholars, unlike their law school colleagues, have paid very little attention to the constitutional implications of government by proxy, and that is a troubling omission, because the issues here are foundational. Public administration in the United States is grounded in a very specific constitutional philosophy, one that begins by placing certain limitations on actions that may be taken by the state. The Bill of Rights prohibits government from engaging in behaviors that would be constitutionally and legally appropriate if done by a private-sector actor. Efforts to keep government responsible and accountable—politically, fiscally, ethically and constitutionally—thus depend upon the ability to identify government and to recognize when it has acted. “Governance” may be robbing citizens and public managers alike of the ability to make that crucial threshold identification. (The situation in Terre Haute would certainly suggest that to be the case.)

Public officials too often fail to recognize the importance of the State Action Doctrine, which defines invasions of constitutional rights as acts taken by government. Actions taken by the private sector may or may not be lawful, but by definition cannot be unconstitutional. Fortunately, there are a few public administration scholars—notably John Rohr and David Rosenbloom—who have emphasized the importance of the normative role played by the constitution. As Rohr (1990) wrote in an introduction to Constitutional Competence for Public Managers (Rosenbloom, 1992, 2002; Rosenbloom and Piotrowski, 2005; Rosenbloom, Carroll & Carroll 2000)

[W]e are witnessing the gradual reintegration of constitutionalism and public administration. I say reintegration because of the obvious connection between public administration and constitutionalism in The Federalist Papers. So integral was administration to the intent of the framers that the authors of The Federalist Papers made more frequent use of the word administration and its cognates they did of the words Congress, President or Supreme Court. (p. xiii)

The book itself makes explicit the connection between “public values” and the “daily decisions and operations of public managers.” (p. xvi)

Political theorists and public administrators alike emphasize the importance of legitimacy to public administration. Legitimacy requires fidelity to constitutional norms. As Michael Spicer has noted, “in the absence of consensus surrounding the role of government, bureaucracy becomes increasingly seen simply as a tool by which some groups gain benefits and privileges at the expense of others.” (Spicer, 1995, p. 4). A legitimate exercise of authority, no matter how coercive, is different in kind from the exercise of raw power unrestrained by adherence to constitutional norms and values, and it is seen differently by members of the polity. That difference is especially critical to those on the “front lines” of state and local government, who must make and implement policies that are anything but abstract to the citizens they affect.

The central question of both political philosophy and public administration is “What is the role of the state, and how should that role be managed?” What, in other words, are the convictions that should animate public service, and how should that service be defined? The United States Constitution rests upon very specific understandings of human nature, the role of the state and natural and human rights. Those particular understandings and the philosophical commitments that flowed from them led the founders to sharply limit the power of the state. To put it another way, the original American concept of liberty was in the negative: liberty was seen as an individual’s right to be free from state control or interference, subject only to the equal rights of others.

In order to limit government, however, one must first define it. And such definition is becoming increasingly problematic. The two elements of the usual definition—exclusive jurisdiction over a particular geographic area (an important element of  sovereignty) and a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive power—are arguably integral to popular understanding of the concept of statehood, or government. But both elements are undergoing redefinition.

Distinguishing Between Public and Private

Collaboration among the sectors is certainly not new, but over the past few decades, as contracting and other forms of collaboration have increased, scholars have documented increases in organizational overlap and interdependence and sectoral blurring in general (e.g. Cooper, 2003). Non-profits, for example, are becoming more “business-like” and commercialized (Weisbrod, 1998). Nonprofits and private organizations alike have become almost entirely dependent upon government funding, which calls into question their very identities as “nonprofit” associations or  “private” enterprises (Bozeman, 1987).

Numerous approaches to distinguishing among organization types can be found in the literature but none capture the full complexities and dimensions of organizational archetypes (Rainey, 2003). Dahl and Lindblom (1953) produced one of the earliest typologies, constructing a continuum with government-controlled agencies on one end of the spectrum and market-controlled enterprises on the other. They used organizational characteristics—including  objectives, incentives, and authority—to determine an organization’s position on that continuum. Interestingly, Dahl and Lindblom found that some organizations defied classification; i.e., corporations partially owned by government.

A very different approach to classification emphasizes ownership and funding (Walmsley & Zald, 1973), and yet another, proposed by Blau and Scott (1966), focuses on whether organizational outcomes benefit those who share ownership of the entity or whether the benefits accrue to the public’s interests. (Other scholars have pointed out that it is not always a simple matter to define that public interest (Mitnick, 1980).   Bozeman (1987) observes that every organization has some degree of “publicness;” he then attempts to capture this attribute in two dimensions: political authority and economic authority.) Ironically, despite the lack of consensus on how to define organizational types and which organizational characteristics should be relied upon in making that classification, there is no shortage of research comparing the effectiveness of public and private actors. Such comparisons have included schools (Chubb and Moe, 1990). hospitals (Savas, 2000), and airlines (Backx, Carney, & Gedajlovic, 2002), among others. It is not an exaggeration to say that there is a robust “cottage industry” of scholars attempting to chart the shifting dimensions of our public-private divide.

The changing definitions of public and private have not been caused solely by the growth of contracting out, of course; in industrialized nations, and perhaps elsewhere, the growth of the global economy and the worldwide penetration of the Internet are also increasingly challenging traditional notions of territorial jurisdiction. In America, the steady expansion of government since the New Deal has already required us to rethink the relationship between government power and fundamental rights. But the advent of widespread contracting, where a growing number of services are paid for by government but delivered by contractors, has raised a host of new questions, including but certainly not limited to the following:

  • Are partnerships with businesses and nonprofit organizations creating a new definition of government?
  • How can we claim that private organizations are inherently more efficient if we can’t distinguish public from private organizations?
  • Is contracting extending, rather than shrinking, the state?
  • Does the substitution of an independent contractor for an employee equate to a reduction in the scope of government, as some proponents apparently believe?
  • If we are altering traditional definitions of public and private by virtue of the new governance—turning for-profit and non-profit organizations into unrecognized arms of the state—what is the effect of that alteration on a constitutional system that depends upon the distinction between public and private as a fundamental safeguard of private rights?
  • If the constitutional system is being altered, what are the implications for political theory and public management?
  • What about traditional notions of ethical behavior? i.e., to whom does the contractor owe a duty of care? Of loyalty?

In other words, what happens to constitutional rights when the comingling of public and private becomes so pervasive that citizens can no longer tell who is exercising authority? What happens when no one—not even the courts—can tell where public starts and private stops?

Political Accountability

Constitutional accountability is not the only area complicated by the increasing incoherence of our governing structures and blurred sectoral boundaries. Political accountability is similarly compromised. Political accountability requires visibility and transparency; it requires an ability to recognize the locus of decision-making, and the identity of the office or officer in charge. To put it another way, voters can’t “throw the bums out” if they can’t tell who the bums are.

In their seminal book “Nonprofits for Hire,” Smith and Lipsky explored the issues raised for nonprofit organizations when they entered into partnerships with government agencies (1993). Among the many outcomes they explored was the effect of these relationships on governmental accountability. As they noted, “Government accountability to citizens is undermined when responsibility for admission, treatment and outcomes seem to be in the hands of private organizations (p. 209). The inevitable confusion over who is in charge is exacerbated in many cases where the services in question are being delivered to disadvantaged and/or marginalized populations. As Smith and Lipsky also pointed out,

“ These are private workers who are representing the state to citizens, but under the sponsorship of nonprofit agencies whose connections to government and to the average citizen may be very tenuous. At best, citizens would have a difficult time knowing when a matter was agency policy, and when it was government policy. Thus workers in nonprofit agencies buffer public policy to citizens and obscure the realities of public policies, because policies are mediated by nonprofit agencies” (p. 14).

There are sound reasons for favoring transparency in government: transparency generates trust by providing clear lines of authority; it invites citizen oversight and facilitates the monitoring of government agencies by the public and the media. Conversely, a lack of transparency breeds distrust, and an inability to determine lines of authority undermines political accountability. These are not abstract concerns. The increasingly impenetrable maze of contractual and legal ties among public agencies and their private sector “partners” has been a significant and growing deterrent to the sort of political accountability envisioned in our constituent documents.

Recognizing the need for clarity if we are to hold government constitutionally or politically accountable is one thing; fashioning rules or formulas for doing so has proved to be considerably more difficult. The jurisprudence of state action is as incoherent and tangled as the reality of “governance” relationships.  As one commentator has wryly noted, the Court’s ‘sifting’ and ‘weighing’ in state action cases “differs from Justice Stewart’s famous ‘I know it when I see it’ standard for judging obscenity mainly in the comparative precision of the latter ” (Brest, 1982, pp. 1296-1330).  On one hand, the mere fact that a regulatory agency exercises oversight of a licensee and has thus implicitly approved the licensee conduct at issue has been held insufficient to attribute an action to the state (Jackson v. Metropolitan 1974).  On the other hand, where government intentionally funds an unconstitutional program conducted by private actors, the Courts have generally—but not always—found state action (Norwood v. Harrison 1973). Agencies looking to the courts for guidance are likely to be disappointed.

This is not to say that the Courts have not made strides with respect to extending some constitutional obligations to government collaboration with “corporate forms. ” For example, in  Brentwood Academy v. Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association (2001) the Court created what is arguably a new category of state action, which it called “entwinement,”  intended to cover a broader range of outsourcing activities. However, approximately half the states have yet to apply transparency statutes to outsourced functions, and state agencies typically do not require private contractors to maintain records relevant to their public functions, nor  do they afford protections to whistle blowers (Feiser, 2000). [2]

Management Issues

By far the most scholarly attention given to the evolving modes of delivery for public services has centered on contracting and oversight problems. One way to categorize this literature is to differentiate between before-the-fact and after-the-fact concerns. As one would expect, before-the- fact issues involve the initial decision on whether or not to contract, typically referred to as the “make or buy decision”. There is also a growing literature on effective contract negotiation and management, concerns that arise after the decision to contract out has been made.

The prevailing assumption is that the private sector can produce goods and services more efficiently, i.e. more outputs for less inputs (Averch, 1990). In this view the principal objective of government is “budget maximization” (Downs, 1967; Niskanen, 1971). Government oversupplies (produces more than would be socially efficient) at greater than minimal cost (Fernandez, 2009). This technical and allocative inefficiency is due to the lack of favorable market conditions. Therefore, the theory goes, government outsourcing can reduce the cost and size of government and improve service delivery (Cooper, 2002; Osborne and Gaebler, 1992; Savas, 2000).

An opposing argument points out that cost savings are frequently less than anticipated (e.g. Greene, 2002), and sometimes do not materialize at all.  Several researchers have noted that contracting has obscured our ability to quantify government employees; a civil service head count no longer provides an accurate picture of the size of government (Light, 1999), because although the number of workers receiving government paychecks may have declined, the total number of people actually working full-time for government has increased (Gutman & Willner, 1976; Smith & Lipsky, 1993). Thus, the more accurate measure is one that relies on the total cost of service delivery (Rosen, 2005).

As several researchers have noted, both sectors bring strengths and weaknesses to service delivery. That is, the price system in free economic markets can control economic and production decisions, but political authority is a more inexpensive means of social control (Dahl &  Lindblom, 1953). According to this view, political hierarchies and economic markets are two alternative mechanisms for controlling political economies. The basic idea is that it is easier to direct people to obey the law than to work out a compensation system for doing so.

Market failure theory is consistent with this perspective (Weimer & Vining, 1999). It holds that there are certain conditions that make it impossible for the market to operate efficiently. Some goods/services are properly classified as “public goods” because their characteristics make it impractical or impossible to exclude non-payers (“free riders”) from their benefits. A favorite example is a lighthouse. Some may choose to pay for the service, but even the free riders will enjoy the benefits of the light. Similarly, the market is inefficient when a transaction between two parties affects (or spills over to) non- parties.  When, for example, pollution associated with the production of a good cannot be confined to the parties who pay for the service, even those who were not parties to the bargain will be affected, in this case negatively. Other goods and services have natural monopoly characteristics (i.e., the telephone until approximately 1984), in which case the market will also be inefficient. And finally, the market cannot operate efficiently in cases of informational asymmetry; when buyers and sellers lack full knowledge of the effects of a transaction, they cannot make informed decisions. These instances are among the traditional justifications cited for government regulation.

As the practice of contracting has become more pervasive, a separate literature has developed to address after-the-fact management concerns: How shall the contract be designed? How much detail is enough, and how much is too much?  Increasing reliance on contracting has led to a burgeoning literature on effective contract management.  Indeed, “privatization increases the imperative for public management rather than relaxing or easing it” (Rainey, 2003, p. 417).  The policy implementation literature focuses on the effects of resources, political support and other ingredients for successful contracting (O’Toole, 1986; Hall & O’Toole, 2000). Trust matters, too: sociologists have emphasized the role of trust in contracting (e.g. Granovetter, 1985) and economists have focused on trust’s role in reducing both transaction costs (Williamson, 1985) and agency costs (Jensen & Meckling 1976).

Although there is no dominant theoretical approach to determining what leads to successful contracting, several elements are typically highlighted, including the role of competition, monitoring, trust, and public management capacity (Van Slyke, 2003; Fernandez, 2009) As previously noted, a primary argument for the comparative efficiency of the private sector is that goods and services are produced in a competitive environment. A similar argument is that competition among potential suppliers is essential to government contracting (Borcherding, 1977). Indeed, the arguments for privatization over government delivery of public services assume competition (Van Slyke, 2003). Competitive bidding is necessary to reveal the lowest cost (Pack, 1989). Counter arguments also exist: competition can disrupt the delivery of services (Smith and Lipsky, 1993), provide an incentive for reduced quality (Kamerman & Kahn, 1989), or increase transaction costs (Sclar, 2001; Kettl, 1993). How many contracts are awarded to a sole bidder, or to a bidder chosen from a very small pool, has thus far gone undocumented, but anecdotal evidence suggests it is more the norm than the robust competition assumed by this literature.

The argument for the importance of monitoring typically relies on agency theory. In the public sector, there are two agency relationships: the voters (principals) and the bureaucracy (agents), and the bureaucracy and the contractor. The contract must be designed with incentive alignment and risk transfer objectives in mind (Hart & Holmstrom, 1987), because problems arise when the preferences of a principal and agent diverge.  As Machiavelli reminded the Prince, contractors (in his case, mercenaries) are only loyal to their pay; their real interests are at odds with those of the State.

The agency problem also implicates the issues of transparency and accountability addressed earlier. Government transparency implies access to relevant information. Citizens can neither act nor vote on what they don’t know. If government is to be fully accountable to its citizens there must be some degree of transparency. Contracting also creates problems for public managers because it complicates lines of authority and control, which also affects accountability. And because contracting adds a new level of complexity for public managers, those managers need a new set of skills, including but not limited to negotiating and bargaining expertise and mediation experience (Kettl, 1993).

Sovereignty
Contracting even implicates issues of national sovereignty. In December 2003, The Guardian reported that private corporations had become the second biggest contributor to coalition forces in Iraq after the Pentagon, and noted that the proportion of private contractors had grown markedly since the first Gulf War in 1991, when it was 100 to 1. By 2003, the proportion was ten to one, and nearly a third of the budget earmarked that year for the wider Iraqi campaign, or $30 billion dollars, went to private companies in what the Guardian called “a booming business” of replacing soldiers with highly paid civilians not subject to standard military procedures.

.  This “booming” private sector has soaked up much of the expertise that became available as armies downsized after the Cold War, and its emergence has allowed America to wage war by proxy, without the congressional and media oversight to which conventional warfare is subject. Before the prisoner abuse scandal, as noted in the preceding section, most criticism of contracting focused upon perceived financial improprieties, and the public management challenges posed by privatization: lack of oversight, poor record keeping, ties between bidders and political actors, and the award of huge, “no bid” or “closed bid” contracts. Yet fiscal mismanagement and improprieties, while destructive of trust in government and the political structure, are only one aspect of the problem.

In June of 2003, Peter Singer published a book titled “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry,” in which he explored warfare by proxy (including occasional use of “low profile” forces to solve “awkward, potentially embarrassing” situations). Singer identified three categories of private military contractors: 1) Provider firms offering direct, tactical assistance—anything from training programs to staff services to front-line combat; 2) Consulting firms drawing primarily upon retired senior officers selling their strategic/administrative expertise back to the military; and 3) Support firms providing logistic and maintenance services. A host of  legal, policy and management questions are raised by this vastly expanded use of private companies. Among those identified by Singer include whether the ties of these organizations to their countries of origin will weaken as markets become more globalized, and opportunities for profit conflict with obligations of patriotism. Will states lose control of military policy to companies whose first responsibility is to clients and shareholders? How will foreign policy decision-making change when a declaration of war entails “hiring” soldiers rather than deploying young citizens? Will companies pursuing profits lobby successfully for military “solutions” to global conflicts? How will we control the behavior of “private” combatants?

Whatever the eventual answer to these and many other questions posed by these arrangements, Singer argues that governments are surrendering a defining attribute of statehood, the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. If our legal system is increasingly unable to answer the question “when has government acted?” what will happen when we no longer know what a government looks like?

Conclusion

In Terre Haute, Indiana, voters and candidates are unfamiliar with the academic literature exploring the intricacies of these public-private contracting relationships. It is unrealistic—and unfair—to expect otherwise. They, and we, are entitled to a system that is intelligible to people of ordinary intelligence. They, and we, are entitled to know who is in charge of what, and even more importantly, who can be held responsible for violations of their rights as citizens. Whatever the merits or drawbacks of “governance” or government-by-surrogate, a public management that takes citizens’ interests seriously will recognize the considerable burdens and “transaction costs”—financial, ethical and constitutional—that are being incurred solely as a byproduct of complexity.

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Rohr, J. A. (1990). To run a constitution : the legitimacy of the administrative state. Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas.

Rosen, H. (2005). Public finance (7th ed.). Boston: Irwin McGraw Hill.

Rosenbloom, D. H. (1992). The Constitution as a Basis for Public Administrative Ethics. Essentials of Government Ethics. New York: Viking Penguin.

Rosenbloom, D. H. (2002). Public administration and civil liberties. Public Administration Review, 62, 58-60.

Rosenbloom, D, Carroll, J, & Carroll, J. (2000). Toward constitutional competence for public managers: Cases and commentary. Itasca, IL: Peacock.

Rosenbloom, D. H., & Piotrowski, S. J. (2005). Outsourcing the Constitution and Administrative Law Norms. The American Review of Public Administration, 35(2), 103.

Salamon, L. M., & Lund, M. S. (1989). Beyond privatization : the tools of government action. Washington, D.C.

Savas, E. S. (2000). Privatization and public-private partnerships. New York: Chatham House

Sclar, E. D. (2001). You don’t always get what you pay for: The economics of privatization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Singer, P. (2002). Corporate warriors: The rise of the privatized military industry and its ramifications for international security. International Security, 26(3), 186-220.

Smith, S., & Lipsky, M. (1993). Nonprofits for hire: The welfare state in the age of contracting: Harvard University Press.

Spicer, M. (1995). The founders, the Constitution, and public administration: A conflict in worldviews: Georgetown University Press.

Van Slyke, D. (2003). The mythology of privatization in contracting for social services. Public Administration Review, 296-315.

Wamsley, G. L., & Zald, M. N. (1973). The political economy of public organizations: a critique and approach to the study of public administration. Lexington, Mass.,: Lexington Books.

Weimer, D., & Vining, A. (1999). Policy Analysis: Prentice Hall Upper Saddle River, NJ.

Weisbrod, B. (1998). To profit or not to profit: The commercial transformation of the nonprofit sector: Cambridge University Press.

Williamson, O. E. (1985). The economic institutions of capitalism. New York: Free Press.

Statutes

Hatch Political Activity Act of 1939, Ch. 40, 53 Stat. 1147; Act of July 19, 1940, Ch. 640, 54 Stat. 767.

The Hatch Act, 5 U.S.C. 7321-7326

Little Hatch Act, 5 U.S.C. § 1501 et seq.

Cases

Brentwood Academy v. Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association, 531 U.S. 288, 305 (2001), (Thomas J., dissenting)

Burke, Appellant-Petitioner v. Bennett, Appellee-Respondent (2008)

No. 84A01-0801-CV-2. Vigo Circuit Court.

Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co., 419 U.S. 345 (1978).

Norwood v. Harrison, 413 U.S. 455 (1973).


[1] Information in this table retrieved from Indiana Department of Administration (IDOA).Professional service contract reports 2002-2008. Retrieved April 16, 2009, from http://www.in.gov/idoa/2527.htm. See also www.idoa/files /psc_05-06.pdf. and United States Census. Federal, state, and local government finances. Retrieved Jan 2009-April 20, 2009, Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/govs/www/estimate.html

[2] See Rosenbloom and Piotroski (2005) for a review of state action developments.

Religious Philanthropies and Government Social Programs

Government agencies have partnered with a wide variety of religious philanthropies for many decades, and for most of that time those partnerships have garnered relatively little attention or comment. That state of affairs changed rather abruptly in 1996, with the passage of Section 104 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (“PRWORA”).

PRWORA was the first of a series of legislative acts that are usually referred to collectively as “Charitable Choice” laws. They were promoted as efforts to encourage greater numbers of religious charities (euphemistically labeled “faith based organizations[1]), to work with agencies of government to provide social services to the needy. The original charitable choice measures were buried within the massive welfare reform bill signed into law by President Clinton; however, when George W. Bush was elected President in 2000, he unveiled (with a good deal of fanfare) a new “Faith-Based Initiative” incorporating and building on charitable choice legislation. The Initiative was frequently described as a centerpiece of Bush Administration domestic policy.

Both the Bush Faith-Based Initiative and the various pieces of legislation that preceded it triggered a number of policy debates and generated significant political opposition. Those policy debates revolved around several quite disparate concerns, most notably:

  • Religious Liberty. It is fair to say that most critics of charitable choice laws and the Bush Faith-Based Initiative focused upon the First Amendment issues involved. The Establishment Clause prohibits government from funding, endorsing or sponsoring religious activities. The American electorate has never reached consensus on what constitutes endorsement or sponsorship—or, for that matter, what constitutes “religion.” It should thus be no surprise that charitable choice legislation touched an already-inflamed civic nerve.
  • Welfare and Poverty. The definition and design of social welfare programs, the reasons for poverty, and the definition of the “deserving poor,” have been notably contentious issues in American policy debates, for reasons deeply    rooted in history and religious culture.  Both welfare reform and charitable choice reinvigorated that debate and generated additional scholarship around the topic of poverty.
  • Contracting Out. The practice of providing government services through third-party surrogates or intermediaries rather than through employees, often (incorrectly) called “privatization,” and the management challenges attendant to such delivery, has been at the center of acrimonious scholarly and public debate for at least the past quarter-century.
  • Efficacy. Efforts to measure the effectiveness of various social programs encounter methodological difficulties and resource constraints that complicate (or preclude) program evaluation generally, and social service delivery mechanisms particularly. In the absence of reliable empirical data, ideological convictions hold sway; thus the often-repeated claim that faith-based organizations achieve better results at lower cost—a claim that has not been, and probably cannot be, empirically verified.

While the Faith-Based Initiative implicated all of these hotly debated issues, religious organizations contemplating a relationship with government need most of all to understand the parameters of the first two—church-state relationships and Americans’ deep, religiously rooted divisions over poverty and welfare.

Religious Liberty and the First Amendment

While the scope and effect of the First Amendment’s religion clauses have always been a subject of debate (especially since passage of the 14th Amendment and the application of those clauses to the states), many historians and legal scholars argue that they must be understood as a primary example of the Founders’ emphasis upon limiting the power and jurisdiction of the state. In this view, the original purpose of the religion clauses was to remove matters of religious belief and practice from the cognizance of the state (Munoz, 2003).  Whatever the Founders’ actual intent, the Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence over the years has vacillated between so-called “strict separation” and “accommodation.”  Each shift of interpretation has been met with satisfaction by some factions and denunciation by others. To characterize these highly politicized interpretations of the religion clauses as “contested” would be a distinct understatement; partisans view each case not just as a resolution of the matter at hand, but as a harbinger of decisions to come. When faith-based initiatives were introduced into this highly-charged political context, extravagant claims—pro and con—should have been predictable.

The contemporary application of the religion clauses rests upon an extensive jurisprudence.  The genesis of much of that jurisprudence was a 1946 decision in which Justice Hugo Black summarized the Establishment Clause; in an eloquent paragraph that has since been cited in numerous cases, Black wrote:

“The Establishment Clause means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.” (Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1, 1946)

In other words, what government cannot do is benefit or burden religion itself. The mere fact that tax dollars are paid to a religious organization is not equivalent to funding religion, and a contract with a government agencies does not, without more, turn the contractor into an arm of the state for constitutional purposes. Government may constitutionally purchase services, including social services, from sectarian sources, or enter into other partnerships that involve the transfer of tax dollars to such entities so long as the funds support secular rather than religious activities. Problems only arise when government agencies contract with “pervasively sectarian” organizations, or with organizations that ignore applicable First Amendment constraints.

“Pervasively sectarian” organizations are defined by the courts as those in which the religious elements are so fundamentally interwoven into every aspect of programming that it would be impossible to separate them for purposes of ensuring that support goes only to the permissible, secular activities.  The question of constitutionality does not end with the inquiry whether an institution is pervasively sectarian, however; as Lupu and Tuttle have written,

“The U.S. Supreme Court’s current interpretation of the Establishment

Clause bars government funding of a broader set of activities than that encompassed by the phrase ‘inherently religious activities.’ [The Bush Administration’s formulation for “pervasively sectarian”] The Court’s interpretation does prohibit direct government funding of activities that are ‘inherently religious,…such as religious worship, instruction or proselytization,’ but it also prohibits funding of any activity that has significant religious content, whether or not that activity is ‘inherently religious.’” (Lupu and Tuttle, 2004:73)

First Amendment issues raised by faith-based contracting can be either administrative or substantive; that is, they can arise because of the way a program is administered or conducted, or because the provisions of the law (or the nature of the program) are unconstitutional. The potential for religious bias in the bid process is one concern. Constitutional law professor Douglas Laycock has noted that “choosing someone to deliver social services is more complex than picking the low bidder on a pencil contract. How do you keep thousands of government employees, federal state and local, from discriminating on religious grounds when they award grants and contracts?” (U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, 2001). The saliency of Professor Laycock’s concern was underscored by statements issued by Pat Robertson and others during the original debates over Section 104, warning the administration against contracts with the Nation of Islam or the Scientologists. As Richard Foltin of the American Jewish Committee noted well before the passage of Charitable Choice laws,

“It seems almost inevitable that, whatever claims may be made that contracts will be allocated on the basis of merit, in any given community the religious groups most likely to receive funds will be those associated with ‘mainstream’ faiths. And, even if the contracts are allocated on a totally objective basis, there is likely to be sharp distrust and suspicion that this is not the case.” (AJC 1990)

These warnings have proved prescient. Since 1996, a number of cases have been brought against government agencies, alleging preference for religious organizations. (In some cases, the preference was quite explicit: in American Jewish Congress v. Bernick, the challenge was to a California “solicitation for proposals” that was by its terms limited to “faith-based organizations or their nonprofit affiliates”—the state had established a religious “set aside” program. California responded to the lawsuit by settling the case, and discontinuing the program.)

There are also First Amendment issues involved in contract monitoring. The Free Exercise Clause protects religious organizations against unwarranted intrusion, and the Supreme Court has interpreted the Establishment Clause to prohibit excessive “entanglement” between government and sectarian organizations. What is “unwarranted” and what degree of supervision amounts to “entanglement” are subject to interpretation.

At the heart of all First Amendment concerns is the constitutional requirement that government funds support only secular activities. Consistent with that requirement (if somewhat under-protective of it), charitable choice laws prohibit use of tax dollars for proselytizing, and further prohibit conditioning service delivery upon participation in religious activities. However, states have limited managerial resources with which to monitor programmatic content for constitutional compliance. Middle managers hired to administer service contracts cannot be expected to recognize any but the most egregious First Amendment violations, and most have very limited time to devote to such issues. If a constitutional violation is alleged and proven, the state can be held liable (only the government can violate the Bill of Rights, because the Bill of Rights is, essentially, a list of things that government is forbidden to do), but because the laws do not define “religious organizations” or “proselytization,” state contract officers don’t get much guidance on these matters. The Welfare Information Network, a widely consulted internet resource for government officials and others who deal with welfare issues, has noted that “dialogue and ‘gut instinct’ are guiding the implementation of the ban on proselytization when contracting with federal funds.”

Inadequate monitoring resulting either from a lack of resources or a lack of sufficient constitutional competence has been highlighted by several lawsuits. In one example, early in 2005, a federal judge blocked the Bush Administration from providing future funding to an Arizona mentoring organization that injected religion into its programming.  MentorKids USA used tax dollars to support worship and religious instruction; the program hired only Christians to work as mentors and required mentors to sign and adhere to a “Christian Statement of Faith” and code of conduct (New York Times, 2005). In another case, a federal magistrate ruled unconstitutional a Montana faith-based rural health program based upon its “overt religiosity” and commingling of faith and health services (Freedom from Religion Foundation v. Morh, 2004).

The challenge faced by state program managers is to ensure constitutional compliance by religious contractors without engaging in undue interference with their operations—interference that might be deemed to be “entanglement,” and thus a violation of those contractors’ First Amendment rights.  As the Rev. Castanon of the United Methodist church warned in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Faith Based Solutions,

“As long as government attempts to separate what is religious from secular in entities like churches, synagogues, mosques, etc. it risks becoming excessively entangled with religion, thus advancing it or hindering religion, both clear violations of the establishment clause.” (U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, 2001)

Managing contracts and evaluating contractor performance without intruding upon the constitutional prerogatives of the religious organization involved can be especially difficult when the faith-based provider has chosen not to form a 501(c)(3) affiliate, because monitoring and evaluation of fiscal performance will require review of books and records, and program costs may not have been segregated from other financial information.  Even if there is a separate entity, some inquiry into the finances of the religious organization may be necessary if, for example, a church, synagogue or mosque is entitled under the contract to reimbursement of substantial in-kind support to the program. Analysis of the cost of providing services may include the value of volunteer time, use of church equipment and facilities, and similar accommodations. Valuing those accommodations may require more review than the faith-based organizations feels is constitutionally appropriate.

Finally, there is the requirement that public administrators provide secular alternatives for program participants who do not want a faith-based provider. Even assuming that welfare recipients know they have a right to a secular provider and are willing and able to exercise that right, an assumption that may be unwarranted (Kramer, De Vita and Finegold 2005), providing an alternative can be a challenge in more rural states, or rural areas of states. Even in urban areas, access to more than one or two providers is frequently inconvenient or impractical for welfare clients who must depend upon public transportation.

Ensuring that administrative processes conform to constitutional requirements may be more complicated than lawmakers recognize, but it is certainly possible. Much more difficult issues arise when the social programs being funded are essentially religious in nature. When government is directly contracting with faith-based drug treatment providers, or engaging in religiously-infused prison counseling, there is an almost insurmountable constitutional barrier. The nature of the dilemma is illustrated by the testimony of numerous advocates of religious interventions: they are very clear that they believe the most effective way to help drug addicts or prisoners is through religious transformation—what President Bush called “the power of faith”(Milbank, 2001). A quotation from Jack Cowley, national director of operations for The InnerChange Prison Fellowship Ministry is illustrative.  Cowley explained, “We see crime as a result of sin and therefore we know that a relationship with Christ can heal people.” Unlike social services like job training and placement, day care or medical assistance—services that can be delivered in a constitutionally appropriate manner—many drug and prison programs are not merely faith-based, they are faith-infused. It is not accidental that so many prison programs are called “Ministries.”

Programs like InnerChange, Teen Challenge or House of Hope are centered on religious belief.  Acceptance of Jesus is the program. Prison Fellowship Ministries, one of the most prominent of the religious prison programs, argues that crime is fundamentally a moral and spiritual problem that requires a moral and spiritual solution, and goes on to state that “Offenders do not simply need rehabilitation; they require regeneration of a sinful heart.”  Operation Starting Line, another faith-based prison program, urges participants to “make the decision for Christ.” (Christian Science Monitor, 2000)

Faith-based drug treatment programs are equally focused on spiritual transformation as a methodology.  Perhaps the best-known exemplar of faith-based drug treatment programs is Teen Challenge. Religious conversion is absolutely central to Teen Challenge, as the following information from its website illustrates.

“The main focus of Teen Challenge of Chattanooga, Inc. is that of being a spiritual growth center where biblical principles are taught. 80% of the respondents credited developing a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as a major influence in helping them to stay off drugs.”

A review of a study by Dr. Aaron Bicknese, also posted on the Teen Challenge web page, contains the following passage:

“Responses to survey questions by Teen Challenge graduates confirm that a commitment to Jesus Christ provided them with the moral willpower needed to overcome a wide range of serious addictions…The study found that according to responses from graduates, the nature of the commitment to Jesus Christ was crucial; it was not enough to have a vague belief in a higher power, one must commit to the Christ of the Bible.”

Successful or not (Teen Challenge’s success claims are vigorously disputed by academic critics of the program), government funding for programs having religious transformation as their central goal is by definition funding for religion, and therefore constitutionally impermissible. Other programs encompassed by the Charitable Choice initiatives may create environments within which constitutional violations are more likely to occur, but it is possible to conduct such programs in a constitutionally appropriate fashion. Funding for programs like Teen Challenge and Prison Fellowship Ministries, however, are clearly indistinguishable from funding for religion and—under decades of First Amendment jurisprudence—constitutionally prohibited.

The prohibition on direct government funding need not be fatal to the participation of all faith-intensive programs; there are alternatives to direct government contracts with such agencies that would arguably be constitutionally permissible. In Agostini v. Felton ,  the Court (quoting from Witters v. Washington Department of Services for the Blind) explained that in order to be constitutionally permissible, any public money earmarked for secular purposes that ultimately goes to pervasively religious institutions must do so “only as a result of the genuinely independent and private choices of individuals.” In 2002, the Supreme Court resolved a number of uncertainties about the use of vouchers when it handed down its decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris. That case arose out of a Cleveland, Ohio school choice experiment. The Court ruled that voucher programs passed constitutional muster if—and this is a critical if for Charitable Choice programs—the beneficiaries are provided with a genuine, meaningful choice between religious and secular programs.

A properly structured voucher program for social services allowing recipients to choose between religious and secular providers would be very likely to pass constitutional muster. (Kennedy, 2001; Minow, 1999) If public dollars have been allocated for a secular purpose (nursing home care or drug treatment, for example) and if there is a “genuinely independent and private” choice of service provider, then—just as there is no constitutionally persuasive reason to prevent an elderly person seeking nursing home care from spending her benefits in a nursing home run by her religious denomination—there should be no reason to prevent a drug-dependent teen from choosing to enroll at Teen Challenge. (This approach would not save most prison ministries, for obvious reasons.) As the Court struggles for neutrality in its application of the religion clauses, as it searches for a formulation that neither burdens nor benefits religious practice and belief, the exercise of intervening independent choice sufficient to insulate government from a charge of endorsement would seem to be the fairest way to achieve evenhandedness.

Of all the First Amendment questions raised by Charitable Choice and the Faith-Based Initiative, the issue that has been most politically contentious was the law’s explicit exemption of religious contractors from federal and state anti-discrimination laws. It has always been the case that religious organizations’ free exercise rights entitle them to an exemption from civil rights laws to the extent that such laws conflict with their religious beliefs.[1] In most states, however, this exemption has never applied to programs funded by government contracts. Those states acknowledge that religious organizations have a First Amendment right to hire and fire people in a manner consistent with their religious principles when they are spending their own money; they draw the line when use of government dollars is involved.  The argument is that religious organizations don’t have to take government money, and if they choose to do so, they should be held to the same rules that apply to other bidders. Proponents of greater faith-based participation in government programs believe this is discriminatory. They see the religious provider’s “freedom to select employees dedicated to their faith-based mission” as critical to the protection of institutional integrity. (Esbeck, Carlson-Theis and Sider, 2004).

Although the law on point remains scanty to nonexistent, the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Norwood v. Harrison may offer guidance to religious organizations debating whether contracting with government will require a change in hiring practices. In Norwood, the Court considered the constitutionality of Mississippi’s practice of “lending” school textbooks to private schools that practiced racial discrimination, and ruled that the Constitution bars action by the state that aids private discrimination. The Court held that it is “axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish” (Norwood, 1973: 465). Proponents of the charitable choice exemption dismiss Norwood because “Eradication of racially segregated public schools is a duty of the state…To permit faith-based organizations to staff on a religious basis undercuts no duty of the state to ensure that it refrain from religious discrimination.” (Esbeck, Carlson-Theis and Sider, 2004:38).

As Melissa Rogers has noted, however, it is more difficult to dismiss Dodge v. Salvation Army, decided in 1989. In that case,

“[T]he only court to have squarely faced this issue so far ruled in an unreported decision that, when an employment position within the religious organization was funded ‘substantially, if not exclusively’ by the government, ‘allowing the [religious organization] to choose the person to fill or maintain the position based on religious preference clearly has the effect of advancing religion, and is unconstitutional.” (Rogers 2005)

Given the paucity of precedent on this point, a 2010 settlement in Lown v. Salvation Army may suggest where the weight of legal opinion lies. The suit was filed in 2004, and asserted that the Salvation Army—a long-time partner in government anti-poverty programs—had ‘reinvigorated’ the religious content of its programming and made unlawful changes to its employment practices. According to the plaintiffs, the newly revised Salvation Army employment forms ask applicants to list the last ten years of church affiliations; require that they waive confidentiality of private communications with clergy and authorize disclosure of those communications to the Salvation Army; and ask for explicit commitments to support the organization’s religious mission and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. The complaint also alleged that the work environment had become “religiously hostile” to employees who believe they are being asked to breach their professional obligations to teenagers at risk for HIV, sexually-transmitted diseases, or pregnancy (Lown, 2004). In February, 2010, the government conceded the impropriety of funding employees subject to such terms, and settled the case on terms demanded by the plaintiffs. While settlements are not precedents, they do signal what lawyers on a case believe would be the likely outcome of litigation.

Poverty and Welfare Policy

A religious charity contemplating a partnership with government would be well advised to understand the contending influences on poverty policy and the theological and political roots of the very different perspectives they will encounter.

Welfare policy disputes have an even longer pedigree than does the modern idea of religious liberty in a limited state. The origins of our contemporary debates over government-funded social welfare programs can be traced at least as far back as 1349, the year England enacted the Statute of Laborers. That act prohibited citizens from giving alms, or charity, to those who had the ability to work—that is, to “sturdy beggars” (Handler and Hasenfeld 1997). This first attempt to deal with what we would later call welfare was not about providing assistance; it was about forcing people to work. Not until 1601, in the reign of Elizabeth I, would a tax be levied to provide material assistance to the poor. The Elizabethan Poor Law established three categories of needy people: children without parents (or at least without parents who could care for them adequately); the able-bodied; and the incapacitated, helpless or “worthy” poor. Vagrants, or able-bodied persons who refused to work could be “committed to a house of correction, whipped, branded put in pillories and stoned, or even put to death”(Indiana Dept. of Public Welfare 1985). Help—however meager—was limited to the deserving, or “worthy” poor.

The Elizabethan Poor Law incorporated a moral and theological distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor that would eventually be carried to the British colonies and reproduced in the laws of virtually all American states. It was the model that settlers brought to the New World; it was the approach adopted by the original thirteen colonies, and as people moved west, it was the approach incorporated in the Ordinance of 1787, which prescribed rules for governing the Northwest Territory. To a significant extent, the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, the “categorizing” of people needing assistance, and the emphasis upon work have remained the primary framework through which the general public and federal and state policymakers view social welfare and poverty issues today.

This paradigm found considerable support in religion. The belief that poverty is evidence of divine disapproval—that virtue is rewarded by material success—was held in one form or another by a number of the early Protestants who settled the colonies; it is a theological perspective that has continued to influence American law and culture. It wasn’t until the Great Depression that blaming the poor for their own poverty became a minority position, and American lawmakers widely acknowledged the need for some sort of social safety net. Even then, it would be a mistake to assume that the dislocations of the 1930’s or the passage of New Deal legislation changed Americans’ deeply-rooted beliefs about poverty, welfare, or their own history of self-reliance. As social historian Stephanie Coontz has written, “Most Americans agree that prior to federal ‘interference’ in the 1930’s, the self-reliant family was the standard social unit of our society. Dependencies used to be cared for within the ‘natural family economy’ and even today the healthiest families ‘stand on their own two feet.’” (Coontz 1992, 69)

Coontz and other scholars have demonstrated that this widely-held belief in self-sufficiency is inconsistent with the reality of the American experience. Pioneer families owed their very existence to massive federal land grants and state economic investment in new lands. In the early twentieth century, western populations depended on government construction of dams and federally subsidized irrigation projects. During the Depression, government electrification projects and other government subsidies were critical to the survival of the family farm.  In the 1950’s, Coontz notes, suburban families were “more dependent on government handouts than any so-called ‘underclass’ in recent U.S. history,” (Coontz 76) thanks to the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act that subsidized the educations of a whole generation; and to the Federal Housing Authority and the Veterans’ Administration, which allowed Americans to purchase homes with artificially low down-payments and subsidized interest rates. Meanwhile, billions of dollars of government-financed inventions, production processes, and research enabled businesses to flourish, and by the 1970s, Social Security had virtually wiped out the historic tendency for the elderly to be the poorest sector of the population.

Of course, many, if not most, of these programs benefited the middle and upper classes rather than those in need. Even between 1965 and 1971, during the height of Great Society anti-poverty initiatives, 75 percent of American social welfare dollars went to the non-poor. Nevertheless, despite the lessons of the Depression and the documented, pervasive reliance of middle and upper-income families on a wide variety of government assistance programs, acceptance of poor relief or welfare continues to be viewed by many Americans as an entirely different matter, and as evidence of a moral or character deficit. Neither welfare reform nor charitable choice can be understood without recognizing both the persistence and widespread acceptance of that perspective, and the continuing vitality of religious doctrines that support and inform it. Opposition to those measures, on the other hand, cannot be understood without recognition of equally significant, countervailing political and religious influences that have argued for social justice and greater governmental responsibility for the poor. As Mary Jo Bane and Brent Coffin have eloquently reminded us,

“Indeed, these great religious traditions differ in their beliefs about ultimate reality, their approaches to community, and the types of institutions they foster. Yet for all their enduring differences, these traditions share central commitments: to the equal worth and sacredness of all men and women; to recognizing our shared vulnerability as finite creatures; and to our common needs for nurture and support to achieve our potential as creative participants in family, community and society. The Torah, Bible and Koran especially stress that the covenant community requires of its members a special obligation to the poor and vulnerable; by their treatment, the character of the entire community is measured.” (Bane and Coffin 2004)

While many religious communities believe that charitable works should be done through non-governmental channels, many others have insisted that working for social justice and sharing responsibility for those less fortunate must be a shared obligation of religious communities and government institutions. As with so many other issues in a diverse society, there has been no one “religious” or “faith-based” approach to social welfare issues. While many religions can point to a long history of outreach to the needy, both the nature and the extent of those efforts have reflected significant differences rooted in both doctrine and history.

The religious roots of Americans’ historic approach to the (ostensibly) secular issue of poverty give evidence of the continuing salience of a Calvinist worldview that has shaped a distinctively Protestant approach to charitable and voluntary activities.

“In the nineteenth century, Catholics and Protestants who may all have agreed with the abstract proposition that ‘true Christian stewards’ would share their talents and material resources with others to benefit society nevertheless had quite different perspectives on the reasons for stewardship, and significantly different beliefs about what such stewardship entailed. Protestants generally believed that they would be saved through faith, not works; accordingly, they tended to see acts of benevolence not as a way to earn salvation, but as a way to manifest the depth of their faith (Oates 2003) and to evidence their likely status as elect. Catholics, on the other hand, had been taught that salvation rested on good works as well as faith, and that charity was a religious duty incumbent upon all believers. For them, charitable works were a way to earn salvation, not evidence of its probability.” (Kennedy 2007)

The doctrine of original sin has also played a role in shaping cultural attitudes toward poverty. Together, these doctrines have encouraged a belief that the poor are suffering for a reason, and that assisting them—helping them escape poverty—would thwart God’s will. As one historian has put it, “Poverty was not understood as a problem to be fixed. It was a spiritual condition. Work-houses weren’t supposed to help children prepare for life; they were supposed to save souls.” (Bigelow 2005)

These attitudes were never universally held; they co-existed, however uneasily, with early evangelical beliefs about the importance of covenant and the duty citizens owe each other. Furthermore, as America experienced industrialization and other social changes giving rise to new problems, including increases in alcoholism and prostitution, many Protestant denominations recognized a moral imperative to act. These competing theological and economic positions would later harden into the opposition philosophies we now call Social Darwinism and the Social Gospel. An understanding of those very different worldviews is critical to an understanding of contemporary arguments for and against charitable choice.

The two names most commonly associated with Social Darwinism are Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. Spencer was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Darwin, but he took it a step further; he adapted—or appropriated—Darwin’s theory of natural selection to justify an economic position. As Spencer saw it,

“Blind to the fact that under the natural order of things society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating faithless members, these unthinking, though well-meaning, men advocate an interference which not only stops the purifying process, but even increases the vitiation—absolutely encourages the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent by offering them an unfailing provision, and discourages the multiplication of the competent and provident by heightening the difficulty of maintaining a family.” (Spencer, quoted in Walsh, 2000:6)

Similar sentiments led Americans like William Graham Sumner to dismiss any moral claim on society’s resources by those less fortunate.

“But the weak who constantly arouse the pity of humanitarians and philanthropists are the shiftless, the imprudent, the negligent, the impractical, and the inefficient, or they are the idle, the intemperate, the extravagant and the vicious. Now the troubles of these persons are constantly forced upon public attention, as if they and their interests deserved especial consideration, and a great portion of all organized and unorganized effort for the common welfare consists in attempts to relieve these classes of people….Now who is the Forgotten Man? He is the simple, honest laborer, ready to earn his living by productive work.” (Sumner, quoted in Walsh, 2001:7)

While later social scientists would conclude that the biological theory of evolution cannot and should not provide a framework for social policy, evangelicals like William Jennings Bryan saw Spencer and Sumner’s philosophy as the logical outgrowth of Darwinian biology, and a refutation of the essential philosophy of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Bryan’s rejection of the biological theory was largely motivated by his conviction that its grounding in natural selection would be used exactly as Sumner and Spencer were using it—to justify harsh and punitive social policies and to undercut the importance of government efforts to address systemic causes of poverty.

The social problems and misery accompanying the dislocations of industrialization evoked a very different response from clergymen like Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenberg. Rather than biblical justifications for poverty, they stressed the biblical injunction that made man his brother’s keeper. They criticized excesses of capitalism and competition and worked to ameliorate the causes and effects of poverty. Their “social gospel” rejected the notion that the poor were solely responsible for their own misery, and they championed efforts by government to address the structural and systemic forces that prevented the poor from improving their lot. Rauschenberg, in particular, was a pivotal figure in creating and promulgating the Social Gospel; his books—Christianity and the Social Crisis and Christianizing the Social Order—were broadly influential among mainstream Protestants, and enunciated a philosophy that fit well with the missions of the numerous voluntary organizations being formed as a response to the social problems of the day.

“Rauschenbusch despaired of individualized attempts at social service because they perpetuated the corrupt social system. Sin was both individual and corporate. Saving souls was important, but so was transforming the social order.” (Leonard, 1988: 249)

Curtis has described the social gospel as the religious expression of progressivism in the early twentieth century, and as a departure from the nineteenth-century Protestant emphasis on individualism. “In place of unbridled competition, individual responsibility for success, and government policies of laissez faire, social gospelers proposed cooperation, social responsibility for justice, and an interventionist welfare state.” (2001) The Social Gospel thus reflected a significant shift in Protestant theology. For those who accepted the social gospel, salvation became a communal obligation rather than an individual one. It required a concerted attack on the “poverty, vice and filth that prevented many Americans from staying on the road to redemption” (Curtis, 2001).

The God of the social gospel was not the angry and judgmental God of the Puritans. This God was “immanent,” a loving, parental deity who had endowed mankind with moral agency which was to be used to improve the world and make it suitable for His kingdom. This view of God, and man’s relationship to Him, produced a further shift away from concern with the afterlife, and toward much more earthly concerns with the evils of poverty, depravity and injustice. Those who believed in the social gospel rejected the view of the poor held by the social Darwinists; for many of them, their personal experiences and volunteer work had convinced them that individual efforts alone were insufficient to change the conditions of poverty. Accordingly, they de-emphasized individual salvation in favor of what might be called “social salvation” or social justice, and the importance of improving the lot of the communities they lived in. Perhaps the most significant element of the social gospel was its emphasis on the importance of institutional structures in thwarting or enabling individual efforts. In sharp distinction to the social Darwinists, adherents of the social gospel emphasized structural or systemic solutions over personal transformation, and lobbied for communal and governmental solutions to social problems.

The theological and philosophical divide between those who adhered to the Social Gospel and those whose roots remain in Social Darwinism continues to inform—and inflame—policy disputes over welfare policy in the 21st Century.  It would be misleading, however, to suggest that welfare policy disputes are simply contemporary manifestations of earlier theological debates.  Charitable choice and the President’s Faith-Based Initiative are part of a movement that can be broadly described (depending upon the political viewpoint of the narrator) as either a backlash against, or a correction to, the creation of what has been called the “administrative state” during the latter half of the twentieth century.  That changing governmental landscape was itself a response to rapid, dramatic changes in American society, especially the growth both of actual diversity and (thanks to communications technology) awareness of it. The rapidity of technological innovation, the increased mobility of populations, the nationalization and globalization of legal and economic systems, and the seemingly inexorable growth of government have all contributed to a sharpening of the tensions between America’s historic individualism and the growing interdependence of its citizens—not to mention the historic religious debate about individual versus social and governmental responsibility.

To all of these changes we must add the weakening of Protestantism’s hegemony over American culture. America has become steadily more diverse, and there are now many more religious voices offering solutions to the question “what shall be done about the poor?”  Catholicism teaches that salvation rests on good works as well as faith, and that collective giving is preferable to individual charity because special spiritual benefits accrue to those who unite with fellow believers in acts of charity and social compassion. Catholic theology insists that the needs of the poor take priority among the church’s good works, and that teaching has characterized Catholic charity. That same theology has motivated Catholic leaders to support governmental social welfare provision. Jews have never constituted more than a small percentage of the U.S. population, but Judaism has contributed disproportionately to the broader American culture, especially in the areas of philanthropy and social justice. Tzedakah requires that Jews give aid and assistance to the poor and elderly, and that they support other worthy causes. In Judaism, the highest form of giving is that which enables a person to become self-sufficient. Thus, many of the earliest Jewish social service agencies offered language, financial, and job assistance so that immigrants would be able to provide for themselves, and, in turn, offer assistance to other immigrants who arrived after them. (There was also a prudential motivation for concentrating early philanthropic efforts on needs within the Jewish community itself, growing out of culturally internalized lessons of Jewish history: if the Jews did not take care of their own poor and elderly, no one else would. And if the Jews were seen as a burden to others, if they were unable either to sustain themselves or to contribute to the larger society, they would suffer discrimination and possibly even expulsion.)

More recent waves of immigration have added other religious traditions—notably Islamic and Asian—to the American philanthropic landscape, and the beliefs of those immigrants will undoubtedly continue to shape and reshape national attitudes about poverty, charity and the obligation of the state, just as throughout American history, religious beliefs have motivated charitable giving and prompted (sometimes radical) moral and political movements for social change and equal justice. (Skopol 2000)

Aside from the particulars of their charitable convictions, it is important to recognize how many of America’s original religious settlers brought with them not only distinctive theological beliefs about poverty and misfortune, but their own historical reasons to distrust the power and motives of government. From the earliest days of the country, the “dissenting” churches that had come to America to find religious liberty were skeptical of governmental involvement with religion, and fearful of state overreaching. From early settlers like the Baptists to later groups like the Jews, many of America’s religious communities have been insistent upon the separation of church and state, and fiercely protective of their religious autonomy. Those beliefs persist, and continue to inform opposition to the acceptance of government dollars for faith-based social service programs, even while many religiously affiliated programs, including many operated under the auspices of those same religious groups, have increasingly come to depend upon those dollars.

The Lay of the Land: Implementing Charitable Choice

The religious beliefs and constitutional constraints described above have constituted the framework within which partnerships between religious charities and government agencies have operated. And they have operated for a very long time. Whatever else one might say about charitable choice and the Faith-Based Initiative, the idea of partnerships between religious philanthropies and government was anything but new.

As we have seen, large-scale government efforts to combat poverty did not exist before the Depression; by that time, many religious organizations had been providing services to the indigent and the elderly for decades. Government partnerships with established charitable institutions that had been providing social welfare were thus inevitable, and were—and have remained—largely uncontroversial. Most—although certainly not all—of the long-time religious social service providers are separately incorporated nonprofit charitable organizations like Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services and Jewish Family Services that offer both employment and assistance on a professional, nondiscriminatory basis. Often, too, the structures of government programs have operated to minimize concerns about church-state violations. In many cases, government funds follow the individuals entitled to the benefits involved. For example, Medicaid patients may choose a nursing home or hospital, which then receives payment from the government. While these and similar benefits are not generally referred to as vouchers, they are functionally indistinguishable from vouchers, and they have long been an accepted part of the social service landscape. Direct contracts and other collaborations between government units and pervasively sectarian organizations, including individual congregations, have been less common, but far from unusual.

Government financial support for religiously affiliated organizations providing social services has thus been a longstanding feature of most public welfare programs.  In a 1969 study of findings from a 1965 survey of 406 sectarian agencies in 21 states, Bernard J. Coughlin reported that 70 percent of them were involved in some type of purchase of service contract with the government.  A 1982 study by F. Ellen Netting, focusing on government funding of Protestant social service agencies in one Midwestern city, found that some agencies received between 60 and 80 percent of their support from the government, and that approximately half of their combined budgets were government-financed. As far back as 1994, government funding accounted for 65 percent of the nearly two-billion-dollar annual budget of Catholic Charities USA, and 75 percent of the revenues of the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services. These and similar studies provide evidence that—whatever the merits or flaws of current faith-based initiatives—it is simply inaccurate to suggest that government partnerships with religious providers are something new.

Furthermore, in contrast to the frequent challenges to public religious displays, and persistent, vocal opposition to public funding for religious elementary and secondary schools, this longstanding allocation of public tax dollars to religious social services providers has gone virtually unchallenged. There are two major Supreme Court precedents: Bradford v. Roberts, an 1899 case permitting the flow of public dollars to religious hospitals, and Bowen v. Kendrick, decided in 1988. Bowen involved an Establishment Clause challenge to the Adolescent Family Life Act. The Family Life Act provided funding to a variety of local organizations, including religious organizations, to support counseling of teenagers about premarital sex and teenage pregnancy. The Court in Bowen acknowledged a danger that counseling services might be delivered by sectarian groups in a manner that violated the Establishment Clause, but declined to find the Act facially unconstitutional merely because that danger existed.  According to the majority, a successful challenge would have to rest upon the particulars of a specific program; the mere inclusion of religious contractors in the program was held not to constitute a per se Establishment Clause violation. Funding for religiously affiliated schools, on the other hand, has generated a significant jurisprudence, and many efforts to direct public funds to such schools have been struck down.

Despite this seeming inconsistency between the cases involving social welfare services and those involving schools, the courts have actually been quite consistent—and virtually unanimous—in their insistence that, whatever else the Establishment Clause may mean, it absolutely forbids government funding of religion. What the case law in both areas has also recognized is that mere payment of tax dollars to a religious organization is not the same thing as funding religion. Historically, the relative lack of litigation over government support for religious social services can be explained at least in part by the fact that the secular nature of the services involved is so readily apparent.  Hospitals and nursing homes are providing medical care; day care facilities are supervising children; job placement counselors, drug treatment facilities and the like have secular counterparts engaged in providing similar, if not identical, programs. While economists remind us that dollars are fungible, so that support for one activity frees up funds that can then be used elsewhere, it is relatively simple to calculate the costs of nursing services or child care, and reasonable to argue that if payment of government dollars is only sufficient to cover those determinate costs, public money is subsidizing only the secular activity. (In the school context, where litigation of First Amendment issues has been copious, direct funding programs that have passed constitutional muster have generally been those involving an identifiably secular benefit available to all citizens—immunization, speech and hearing testing, transportation—where exclusion of children attending religious schools was deemed to burden the free exercise rights of parents opting for religious education.)

For many years, these legal and constitutional issues were salient primarily to large, sophisticated religiously-affiliated providers and their lawyers. Their current prominence is in large measure a result of the growth of American government during the past century, and more recently, the exponential growth of government contracting.  Not only has the scope of government action increased at all levels, but the mechanisms through which government addresses public problems and delivers public services have changed radically. The issues raised by this fundamental shift in the way government does business are central to the concerns over charitable choice and government partnerships with religious philanthropies; the shift has dramatically increased the visibility of such partnership arrangements.

As noted, government agencies in the United States have paid religious organizations to house, clothe and counsel the poor since the earliest days of state involvement in social welfare programs, and the religious organizations providing those government-financed social services have ranged from 501(c) 3 affiliates of denominational entities, like Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services, to “pervasively sectarian” organizations like the Salvation Army, to individual congregations.  In fact, many proponents of “Charitable Choice” legislation and President Bush’s “Faith-Based Initiative” describe those policies as simply an attempt to level a playing field that already includes significant numbers of religious players. They argue that fear of overzealous application of the First Amendment has kept some smaller religious providers from bidding on government contracts, and characterize the legislation as merely an effort to ensure that government officials do not inappropriately require participating “faith-based” contractors to diminish or eliminate religious components of their services. Whatever the merits of that claim, the fact is that public tax dollars are routinely used to purchase social services from sectarian providers—and have been so used for decades.

The passage of charitable choice laws thus built upon a substantial history of government cooperation with religious philanthropic organizations. But those laws also introduced a number of questions that—at least at this writing—remain unanswered.  Some of those questions are overarching, philosophical ones: what are the dynamics—historical, ideological—of this debate; what does it tell us about the ongoing tensions of democratic governance and policymaking for a diverse citizenry? Other questions focus upon more pragmatic and immediate concerns, many of which were raised by ambiguities in the legislation: what do these laws require of government managers? How will charitable choice and the Faith-Based Initiative affect welfare clients and services? How do the First Amendment and other constitutional provisions affect program administration? The broad issues—and some of the specific questions raised by the legislation—can be categorized as follows:

  • Definitional issues. Government has contracted with religious organizations ever since it has provided social services.  Furthermore, there are enormous variations among religious organizations.  How are the faith organizations targeted by these measures different from Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services, the Salvation Army, and government’s many other long-time religious partners? What are “faith-based” organizations, and how do they differ from other nonprofit organizations? What do we mean by “programmatic success” and “efficacy”?
  • Funding Issues. The effort to recruit new faith partners was not accompanied by additional funding for social services. To the contrary, the amount of money budgeted for social services declined.  With no new money, have charitable choice laws simply shifted funds from one set of religious providers to another—presumably, from government’s traditional religious partners (who generally operate in accordance with applicable professional norms) to providers more focused upon the “personal transformation” of clients? (Thus far, these laws have had little impact upon the identity of religiously-affiliated contractors; whether that changes is an open question.) What will happen to small, grass-roots faith-based organizations if diminished public resources make funding streams unreliable? Will government funding affect the character or mission of small religious organizations new to the contracting regime? If so, how?
  • Constitutional issues.  The First Amendment does not prevent government from doing business with faith organizations, but that doesn’t mean that any program run by a religious provider will pass constitutional muster.  There is a constitutionally significant distinction between programs that are offered by a religious provider or in a religious setting, and programs in which religious observance or dogma are central to service delivery. What mechanisms are proposed to ensure that services are delivered in a constitutionally appropriate manner? What is the capacity of public managers to ensure constitutional accountability, and what resources are available to them for monitoring compliance? Can we avoid government favoritism for certain religious providers over others, or privileging of either religious or secular providers? How can we ensure constitutional accountability?
  • Evidence issues.  John DiIlio, the first Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, readily admitted the absence of credible research supporting the assertion that religious providers are more effective, quoting the academic adage that “the plural of anecdote is not data.”  DiIlio expressed his hope that future studies would provide answers to such questions.  One can recognize that many faith-based and religious organizations do important, often exemplary, work without taking that indisputable fact as evidence that religious organizations as a category are more effective than secular ones.  At the time the White House implemented its Initiative, no evidence for such an assertion existed. (It is also worth noting that religious sociologists have criticized this emphasis upon efficacy, suggesting that to focus on religion’s “effectiveness” is to profoundly misunderstand the nature of religion—that such instrumental approaches to religion are self-defeating. As Neibuhr has reminded us (Neibuhr 193:12), the instrumental value of faith for society is dependent upon faith’s conviction that it has more than instrumental value (Althauser, 1990)).
  • Management Issues. With the passage of charitable choice laws, the public officials whose job it is to manage faith-based contracts were faced with many ambiguities and unanswered questions. The question for them was not, for example, whether government should partner with religious organizations to provide social services.  It always has, and undoubtedly always will.  The question is “under what circumstances are such partnerships appropriate and when they are, how should they be structured and monitored?”  Similarly, the question is not whether, in the abstract, religious programs or secular approaches are preferable. The question for government program managers is “what organizational characteristics are most likely to predict successful program delivery, and how can I determine which of the bidders for this contract possesses those characteristics?” “How will I define and measure accountability?” Complicating these management questions is the reality that in a federalist system, different states approach implementation of Charitable Choice differently. Those differences will also pose management challenges.  Finally, contracting with government presents nonprofit managers with challenges of their own: managing cash-flow and absorbing transaction costs; responding to government monitoring and reporting requirements; and compliance with constitutional restrictions and government program regulations. These management challenges can be particularly onerous for small organizations unaccustomed to a contracting environment.

Making a Decision to Participate

At some point, the small grass-roots religious charities and religious congregations that are the ostensible targets of charitable choice laws must decide whether entering into a partnership or contract with a government agency is right for them. A review of First Amendment philosophy and jurisprudence, an understanding of where they and others with whom they will be working fall on the spectrum of theological approaches to poverty, and a familiarity with the history of American social welfare partnerships will inform that question, but it won’t answer it. The conceptual grounding is necessary, but not sufficient to answer the numerous practical questions that should be identified and addressed before a final decision is made.

In the wake of President Bush’s announcement of his “Faith-Based Initiative,” I led a team of researchers in an exploration of that Initiative and the charitable choice legislation on which it was based. One of the products of our research was a video for use by government agencies and congregations considering entry into a new faith-based partnership. In the video, we identified questions that prospective partners should be prepared to answer in order to decide whether the proposed collaboration is likely to be mutually beneficial. Those questions grew out of interviews with dozens of people in the religious community who have “been there”—agency directors, faith leaders and constitutional experts who have managed and studied effective partnerships as well as those that have failed. Those interviews suggested three areas for careful consideration: capacity, commitment and constitutionality. These questions are particularly important for congregations considering a first-time contract with a government agency.

By Capacity, we meant an evaluation of the assets each partner brings to the collaboration: personnel, money, expertise, facilities. By Commitment, we meant willingness based upon a clear understanding of what such a partnership entails and the responsibilities the partners are assuming. And by Constitutionality, we meant affirmative answers to two important questions: do both partners understand what the law requires, and are they prepared to abide by those requirements?

Capacity. Assessing capacity requires calculating how many people will be required to manage and staff the proposed program, and whether those persons will be paid staff, volunteers, or a combination. Research suggests that congregations tend to be most successful with programs that are short-term and finite: It is one thing to collect food for a food pantry; quite another to run a daily meals program. The average congregation is 75 people; the average annual congregational budget is $100,000 (Bane, 2002).  If an average congregation is proposing to enter a contract to provide social services, it is likely that those services will depend heavily on volunteers. How dependable will those volunteers be during sustained program periods? Will they be diverted from other congregational tasks? If so, who will take over those jobs? Do the volunteers have the experience and background necessary to provide the services in question? If the congregation is counting heavily on a particular volunteer, does it have a plan for what would happen if she falls ill or moves or dies? Does it have a back-up? The personnel challenge was summed up by Rev. Odell Cleveland, who runs the very successful Welfare Reform Liaison Project in North Carolina:

“When you talk about replicating a program, you have to have compassion and expertise. Ninety-seven percent of my staff have degrees; some of them advanced degrees. It’s more than sister so-and-so who’s willing to help. People have to be trained. People have to be educated and trained and know what they’re dealing with, because you can have all the good intentions in the world, but if you are not trained and qualified to handle these situations, if you’re not careful, you can do more harm than good.” (Cleveland 2002)

Capacity also includes financial considerations. How will this program be funded? Will all the money come from the government? If so, what will happen if the contract isn’t renewed? What about cash flow? In many states, payment is only made when a desired outcome has occurred: when the client is placed in a job, or leaves welfare, or achieves whatever the program’s goal may be. If services must be provided for several months before payment is received, can the congregation finance services during that time?

“Transaction costs” are an often overlooked capacity issue, and can come as a real shock to small programs that previously did not have to cope with the accounting and paperwork demands of government agencies. These are not arbitrary or unwarranted requirements; if a government agency is committing tax dollars to a program, it has an obligation to ensure that the money is being properly spent. However, that entails periodic audits, site visits, and paperwork that most congregations have not previously encountered. Does the congregation have the accountants, bookkeepers and clerical support needed to comply? Have the costs of compliance been factored in to the contract amount? Will resources have to be diverted from client service to compliance?

The final capacity question concerns program size. Will the contract require an expansion of services? If so, is the expansion feasible? Some social scientists have suggested that the virtue of many grass-roots religious programs—the reason programs are successful—is their small scale and ability to engage clients personally. If the program must grow in order to comply with the government contract, will it lose the immediacy that made it work?

Commitment. The primary mission of a congregation is ministry. Before a congregation contracts to provide social services, it needs to consider whether the contract will divert attention and resources from that primary mission. A corollary question is whether contracting with government will mute the congregation’s prophetic voice. As the Rev. John Buehrens of the Unitarian Universalist Association has warned,

“If you’re on the government dole, your independence as a servant of God who is called to comfort the afflicted, yes, but also to afflict the comfortable and also to speak the moral word to government, becomes diminished. That’s a great danger. It’s a spiritual danger.” (Buehrens, 2002)

There are practical questions as well: If a preschool program is noisy and rambunctious, will members of the congregation be annoyed? If the meals program increases wear and tear on the church kitchen, will congregants balk at the expense of maintenance and repair? If the program serves people very different from those in the congregation—much poorer people, those from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, immigrants, ex-convicts—will the congregation still support the program?

Commitment can be evaluated by asking these questions: what is the congregation’s goal? Is it congruent with the government agency’s goal? Is the congregation prepared for the inconvenience and disruption that may accompany the program? And perhaps most important, are the expectations on both sides of the partnership, governmental and congregational, clear?

Constitutionality. Questions of capacity and commitment apply to all proposed government contractors, secular or faith-based. But the First Amendment creates added issues for religious contractors—we have touched on only a few of those issues in this chapter. Congregations considering a government contract must be prepared to learn about and live within the constitutional rules, whether or not it agrees with them. As previously explained, the First Amendment prohibits the use of tax dollars to support religious organizations or for religious purposes. However, what constitutes support, or a religious purpose, is often unclear. The Supreme Court has never ruled that government may not purchase secular goods or services from religious entities, and to take such a position would raise serious equal protection and free exercise concerns. Historically, however, the Court has refused to allow the flow of direct government aid (as opposed to vouchers) to organizations that are “pervasively sectarian.” Congregations, by definition, are pervasively sectarian. That makes it extremely important that the congregation be able to identify the secular service being provided, and the means by which its secular nature will be assured.

In an effort to determine whether congregational leaders are aware of the constitutional constraints applicable to faith-based partnerships, my research team surveyed congregations in South Bend, Indiana, a community large and diverse enough to be representative, but small enough to be manageable. We constructed a simple, ten-question instrument, testing for very basic constitutional principles.

The results supported one clear conclusion:  Large numbers of congregational leaders do not know what they need to know if they are to do business with government.  Of 103 responses, seventy-five disagreed with the statement “The First Amendment and other provisions of the Bill of Rights apply only to government action.” Understanding that the Bill of Rights limits only government action is absolutely basic to understanding the operation of American constitutional principles, including—importantly—the Establishment Clause. Worse, seventy respondents disagreed with the statement “If a congregation has a contract with government to provide services, the congregation may not include religious instruction or prayer as part of the services funded under the contract.”  Those were the most troubling responses, but forty-nine respondents (almost half) also disagreed with the statement “The First Amendment’s separation of church and state means that tax dollars cannot be used to fund religion or religious expression.” (In addition to a wrong response, several respondents wrote marginal notes to the effect that separation of church and state is not constitutionally required, and that they would feel no compunction about using tax dollars to save souls. Two offered their opinion that “separation of church and state is an invention of the ACLU.”)

It bears emphasizing again that there is no constitutional reason that congregations cannot partner with government; the issue is how such partnerships are conducted. Existing law is very clear about some things: Government can buy food for the needy from a congregation, but the congregation cannot require recipients to pray before eating it. Government can rent beds in a faith-based homeless shelter, but use of those beds cannot be conditioned upon attendance at bible-study. Congregations needn’t take the crucifix off the wall, or hide the bibles, but they cannot use tax dollars to purchase those—or other—religious items. Failure to understand these rules (or unwillingness to abide by them) is a danger signal for any government partnership.

Before a small religious charity or congregation signs on the dotted line, there should be full communication with the government agency proposing the partnership and with those in the organization or congregation who will become stakeholders in the project.

Conclusion

America’s social welfare “safety net” is the least generous and most haphazard of any Western industrialized nation. There are reasons for that, some sound, many not. We can argue about the policy decisions from our respective spots on the theological spectrum, but in the meantime, most of us will agree that we need to offer a helping hand to the millions of Americans who are struggling.

Faith-Based partnerships—done properly—are one way we can help.


[1] The term was undoubtedly intended to be inclusive of all religious charities; unfortunately, those responsible for coining it failed to recognize that equating faith with religion reflected a particularistic, Protestant conception of religion. Judaism and Buddhism are only two of the many religious traditions that are not “faith based.”


[1] Melissa Rogers has written an excellent history and explanation of the religious exemption offered under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. See “Federal Funding and Religion-Based Employment Decisions” in Ryden, David and Jeffrey Polet, Sanctioning Religion? Politics, Law and Faith-Based Social Services. Lynne Reinner, 2005.

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The Pedagogy of Governance

(w/Deanna Malatesta)


Section One: Introduction

Public administration scholars and schools of public affairs increasingly use the term ‘governance’ to describe the processes they study and teach. Governance—rather than the older word ‘government’—is thought to be a more accurate descriptor of the reality of contemporary state structures, where—among other things—an ever-increasing percentage of the work of the state is outsourced to for-profit, non-profit and faith-based organizations. (Frederickson 1997; Garvey 1997; Kettl 2000; Milward and Provan 2000; Pierre and Peters 1998; Salamon 2002; Hill and Lynn 2004).

The reasons for this growth in “government by proxy” are varied, but among its roots are Americans’ historic distrust of government and often-reflexive preference for markets and/or civil society. What many of those holding that reflexive preference fail to recognize is that contracting-out is not “privatization,” properly understood[1]—that is, the choice of private surrogates to deliver services on behalf of government agencies obscures but does not alter the fact that government is choosing, directing and paying for those services. For their part, reflexive opponents of contracting often fail to recognize that often—certainly not always, but often—the choice of a private intermediary will provide needed flexibility or expertise. Whatever the merits of these opposing ideological positions, this article is intended to suggest that—at a time that policymakers and public managers increasingly accept third-party government as an administrative norm—those concerned with the delivery of public affairs educational programs think long and hard about the implications of these practices—not just for public administration, but for a pedagogy that is grounded in specific constitutional norms.

Scholars and practitioners have focused significant attention on issues of fiscal and political accountability raised by outsourcing, but with few exceptions have paid little attention to the growing disconnect between the new ‘governance’ paradigm and the basic constitutional norms that have structured American government and public management for two hundred years. While the literature generated by privatization and the ‘reinvention’ movement is copious, it has dealt almost exclusively with the management challenges and fiscal accountability issues raised by contracting. More recently, scholarly attention has turned to the effects of outsourcing on nonprofit partners of government, and concerns about the transformation of organizations within the voluntary sector resulting from their increasing dependence on government dollars (Smith, 2006).

Public administration scholars have paid comparatively little attention to the constitutional implications of government by proxy, however, and that is a troubling omission, because the issues here are foundational. Public administration in the United States is grounded in a very specific constitutional regime, a regime that begins by placing certain limitations upon actions that may be taken by the state. Efforts to keep government responsive and accountable—politically, fiscally and constitutionally—thus depend upon our ability to identify government and government actors, and to recognize when the state has acted. “Governance” may be robbing citizens and public managers alike of the ability to make that crucial threshold identification.

This article expands upon the current governance literature in at least two respects. It details the relationship between the ongoing blurring of the sectors and longstanding expectations for constitutional government practices. It recommends a pedagogy of governance focused upon two standard administration and public management topics—democratic institutions and free-market capitalism—grounded in values that are often seen as competing. We argue the need to develop a greater appreciation of the field’s constitutional foundations while acknowledging the strengths of and preferences for markets, and we go a step further by specifying how this approach can assist public managers tasked with responsibility for contracting-out. We conclude by acknowledging the challenges inherent in such an approach.

The article proceeds as follows: Section Two discusses the Constitutional Bases of Public Administration. It describes the ways in which the evolution of third-party government has obscured both the actual scope of government activity and the identity of government actors, and makes the point that these evolving modes of service delivery present significant (and often-unrecognized) problems for constitutional and political accountability. Section Three argues that clarity and accountability are both essential if state exercise of authority is to be consistent with liberal democratic and constitutional principles. A brief review of the roots of State Action jurisprudence illuminates the pitfalls long recognized by legal scholars, but too often underappreciated in the public administration literature (Gilmour and Jensen 1998). Section Four sketches out the Pedagogical Implications of this state of affairs, and advocates an approach to developing an appreciation of the scope of the problem and addressing it within the public administration curriculum. In Section Five, we address the Challenges for both educators and practitioners that inheres in such an approach.

Section Two: The Constitutional Bases of Public Administration

Woodrow Wilson wrote that “it is getting to be harder to run a constitution than to frame one.” (Rohr 1986:1)  Wilson meant to call attention to the importance of constitutional values to questions of administrative legitimacy, and the dangers of forgetting that critical link under the pressures of day to day management challenges.

John Rohr, David Rosenbloom and other public administration scholars have emphasized the normative role played by the constitution. As Rohr wrote in an introduction to Constitutional Competence for Public Managers (Rosenbloom, Carroll and Carroll 2000)

[W]e are witnessing the gradual reintegration of constitutionalism and public administration. I say reintegration because of the obvious connection between public administration and constitutionalism in The Federalist Papers. So integral was administration to the intent of the framers that the authors of The Federalist Papers made more frequent use of the word administration and its cognates they did of the words Congress, President or Supreme Court. (xiii)

The book itself makes explicit the connection between “public values” and the “daily decisions and operations of public managers.” (xvi)

Political theorists and public administrators alike emphasize the importance of legitimacy, defined as operational rules rooted in constitutional norms, to public administration. As Michael Spicer has noted, “in the absence of consensus surrounding the role of government, bureaucracy becomes increasingly seen simply as a tool by which some groups gain benefits and privileges at the expense of others.” (Spicer 1995:4). A legitimate exercise of authority, no matter how coercive, is different from the exercise of raw power unrestrained by adherence to codes of normative values, and it is seen differently by members of the polity. That difference is especially critical to those on the “front lines” of state and local government, who must make and implement policies that are anything but abstract to the citizens they affect.

The importance of tying our teaching of public administrative practices to constitutional values rests in the central question of both political philosophy and public administration: What is the role of the state, and how should that role be managed? What are the convictions that should animate public service, and how should that service be defined? The United States Constitution rests upon very specific understandings of human nature, the role of the state and natural and human rights. Those particular understandings and the philosophical commitments that flowed from them led the founders to sharply limit the power of the state. Those limitations were both substantive and procedural. The original American concept of liberty was in the negative: liberty was seen as an individual’s right to be free from state control or interference, subject only to the equal rights of others, so long as one did not harm the person or property of non-consenting others. Even in those areas where government could legitimately impose rules, citizens had a right to demand clarity and specificity sufficient to permit the reasonable individual to know what actions were being proscribed (hence the “void for vagueness” doctrine).

In order to limit government, however, one must first define it. And such definition is becoming increasingly problematic. D.D. Raphael summarized the contemporary idea of the state by defining it as “an association having universal compulsory jurisdiction within territorial boundaries” (Kennedy, 2003:205).  The two elements of that definition—territoriality and a monopoly on the right to use certain types of force or power—are arguably integral to popular understanding of the concept of statehood—of government. Both are undergoing redefinition, and our students ignore that redefinition at their peril.

The changing nature of governing institutions cannot be attributed solely to the growth of contracting out, of course: in industrialized nations, and perhaps elsewhere, the growth of the global economy and the worldwide penetration of the Internet are increasingly challenging traditional notions of territorial jurisdiction. In America, the steady expansion of government since the New Deal has already required us to rethink the relationship between government power and fundamental rights. As previously noted, in the American system, rights were traditionally defined as limitations on the coercive power of the state; today, lawyers and political philosophers speak of both negative and positive liberties and debate the propriety and nature of affirmative “entitlements.”  The advent of widespread contracting, where a growing number of services are provided by and paid for by government but delivered by contractors, has raised a host of new questions: are partnerships with businesses and nonprofit organizations creating a new definition of government?  Is ‘privatization’ (understood as government contracting) extending, rather than shrinking, the state? Does the substitution of an independent contractor for an employee equate to a reduction in the scope of government, as proponents apparently believe?  Or does the substitution operate instead to shift the locus and visibility, but not the scope, of government activity (Kettl 1993; Smith and Lipsky 1993), and thereby blur the boundaries between public and private, making it ever more difficult to decide where “public” stops and “private” begins?  Given the growing complexity of government agencies and public/private relationships, can we even tell the difference between a contractor and an employee? When is it necessary to draw that distinction? If we are altering traditional definitions of public and private, employee and contractor by virtue of these new ‘governance’ relationships—turning for-profit and non-profit organizations into unrecognized arms of the state—what is the effect of these alterations on a constitutional system that depends upon the distinction as a fundamental safeguard of private rights? If the constitutional system is being altered, what are the implications for political theory and public management? And finally, in the midst of what might be characterized as a “paradigm shift,” what are the responsibilities of public administration educators?

Section Three: State Action and Constitutional Accountability

However we understand government, a central tenet of public administration theory in democratic regimes is that the state must be accountable to its citizens. Contracting out complicates accountability in a number of ways (Gilmore & Jensen 1998).  Smith and Lipsky were among the first to explore some of the issues for the nonprofit sector inherent in the transfer of state power to private providers (Smith and Lipsky 1993); more recently, legal scholars have addressed the issues of constitutional accountability raised by the emergence of what some now call “third-party government” (Minow 1999, Kennedy, 2001, Metzger, 2003).

One traditional way to enforce government accountability is through the courts. But just as a lack of transparency in contracting relationships can impede political accountability, the failure of state action jurisprudence to keep pace with the political reality of government contracting—the inability of current legal theory to draw clear distinctions between public and private action for purposes of assessing government responsibility—has significantly undermined constitutional accountability. We are in danger of losing an important constitutional check on the exercise of government power, because we rely upon our understanding of the state action doctrine in order to know when we may ask the courts to restrain government actors. If we do not have comprehensible rules defining who those actors are and what sorts of actions we may legally attribute to the state, the efficacy of constitutional litigation is undermined. If we are unable to convey to citizens the boundaries of government’s legal responsibilities, our ability to fashion appropriate political remedies will also be compromised. And if we are unable to describe with any specificity the actions that might lead to governmental and/or personal liability, we cannot adequately prepare public administration students for the duties they will assume.

In order to understand the dimensions of this problem, and its (underappreciated) importance to public administration managers and educators, it is necessary to engage in a brief review of the genesis and early development of the state action doctrine. “State Action” was first defined by the Supreme Court in 1883, in the Civil Rights Cases (1883). Passage of the Fourteenth Amendment had prohibited states from denying, to persons otherwise entitled to them, the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship. The Court was addressing the scope of that prohibition.

“The Fourteenth Amendment expresses prohibitions (and consequently implies corresponding positive immunities), limiting State action only, including in such action, however, action by all State agencies, executive, legislative, and judicial, of whatever degree…Individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject-matter of the amendment. (Civil Rights Cases 1883:3).

As the Court recently restated the doctrine,

“[E]mbedded within our Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence is a dichotomy between state action, which is subject to strict scrutiny under the Amendment’s Due Process Clause, and private conduct, against which the Amendment affords no shield, no matter how unfair that conduct may be (National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Tarkanian 1988:.191).

The Court has thus established a distinction between invasions of rights that are constitutionally forbidden (“public” invasions) and those that are not (“private” invasions), and that distinction rests upon the identity of the actor. As one legal scholar has noted, “a central premise of U.S. constitutional law is that the Constitution imposes limits on the actions that governments can take.” The corollary premise is that “the rules governing private actors should be politically, rather than constitutionally, determined.” (Metzger 2003:1373)

The Bill of Rights was initially designed to limit the reach of the federal government; the Fourteenth Amendment later extended those limitations to bar similar action by the states.  Over the years, by the process known as “selective incorporation,” most of the provisions of the original eight amendments have been held to apply to state and local government units as well as to the federal government, (Twining v. New Jersey 1908;  Palko v. Connecticut 1937; Adamson v. California 1947; Berger 1977; Ely 1980). But the citizen’s protection is against the public actor only. Discriminatory acts, or denials of due process, or restrictions on speech by private parties, are all constitutional; indeed, they are entirely legal unless prohibited by virtue of legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Americans with Disabilities Act.

This distinction between public and private acts loses clarity in a number of contexts (indeed, it has been referred to as a ‘conceptual truth’) (Stone, Seidman, Sunstein & Tushnet 1986:1467). Accordingly, the Court has been obliged to develop rules allowing certain private acts to be attributed to government.  As Robert Gilmour and Laura Jensen (1998:247 ) have noted,

“When the relationship between government and citizen becomes more complex than that between a mere commodity or service provider and its customers, more than marketplace efficiency is required to hold the government and its proxies and surrogates accountable for their exercise of authority on behalf of the state.”

Acknowledging the need for such rules and actually fashioning them have proved to be very different matters. As one commentator has wryly noted, the Court’s ‘sifting’ and ‘weighing’ in state action cases “differs from Justice Stewart’s famous ‘I know it when I see it’ standard for judging obscenity mainly in the comparative precision of the latter ” (Brest 1980:1296-1330).  On one hand, the mere fact that a regulatory agency exercises oversight of a licensee and has thus implicitly approved the licensee conduct at issue has been held insufficient to attribute an action to the state (Jackson v. Metropolitan 1974).  On the other hand, where government intentionally funds an unconstitutional program conducted by private actors, the Courts have generally—but certainly not always—found  state action (Norwood v. Harrison 1973).

As many have noted, the current state action jurisprudence is incoherent; as the court has struggled with cases presenting different factual situations, the major casualty has been the very predictability that law is intended to provide. Worse, in an increasing number of situations, government contracting can provide a handy mechanism for evasion of the limits imposed by the Bill of Rights. As the dissent in one case noted,

“[T]he State can shield its legislation affecting property interests from due process scrutiny by delegating authority to private partners” (Flagg Bros. v. Brooks, 169: 153).

By the end of the twentieth century, as government increasingly delivered services through private and not-for-profit entities, the application of the doctrine became more complicated still.  Blum v. Yaretsky, decided in 1983 is an excellent example of the counter-intuitive results of state action litigation. The case involved an alleged due process violation arising out of involuntary discharges and transfers of Medicaid patients in a nursing home. Rhenquist, writing for the Court, declined to find state action on the grounds that “…a state normally can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State.”(1012)

Acknowledging that over 90% (and perhaps as many as 99%) of the patients in the facility were Medicaid patients, and that the nursing home was subject to pervasive governmental regulation, the Rhenquist majority nevertheless held

“That programs undertaken by the State result in substantial funding of the activities of a private entity is no more persuasive than the fact of regulation of such an entity in demonstrating that the State is responsible for decisions made by the entity in the course of its business.” (1004)

In dissent, Justice Brennan underscored the superficiality of this analysis.

“[N]ot only has the state established the treatment levels and utilization review in order to further its own fiscal goals, but … the State [has] set forth precisely the standards upon which the level-of-care decisions are to be made, and has delegated administration of the program to the nursing home operators, rather than assume the burden of administering the program itself.” (1013)

In the years since, the case law has only become more unpredictable and opaque. Courts have not hesitated to find state action in private prison and institutional detention cases (Blumel v. Mylander, 1996), often noting that the power to deprive an individual of liberty is a quintessentially governmental power (Plain v Flicker, 1986).  This line of reasoning is persuasive, but difficult to reconcile with cases like Wade v. Byles, where a private company providing security to a public housing project was held not to be a public actor despite the fact that the guards had authority to carry guns, arrest people, and use deadly force.

Complicating matters even further is the tendency of reviewing courts to apply different standards of analysis depending upon the nature of the constitutional right involved, generally without articulating the basis for those differences. Commentators have noted that, in cases involving racial discrimination or religious liberties, the Court has been much more willing to find—or assume—state action. (Finding a violation of the Establishment Clause requires the presence of state action, whether that requirement is articulated or not, since a private party cannot violate the constitution.) Some scholars have argued that the courts are more likely to find State Action in Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection cases than in cases alleging breaches of due process (Kennedy, 2001).

If state action jurisprudence is so complicated that lawyers often disagree on the presence or absence of governmental liability for particular actions, how can we teach students who will go on to be state and local managers to avoid outsourcing practices likely to embroil them in litigation? How can citizens, or corporations doing business with government agencies, know when the state has acted unconstitutionally—or even know when the state has acted—when increasingly, even organizations doing business with the government are unaware of the legal implications of those contracting relationships?

A case arising out of an election in Terre Haute,  Indiana, is perfect example of the “sectoral blurring” that has increasingly led to an inability to identify both public actors and relevant rules. In 2007, the town held municipal elections, and voted in a new mayor, Duke Bennett, who defeated the former mayor, Kevin Burke. Shortly after the election, Burke sued to have Bennett declared ineligible to serve, citing the provisions of Indiana’s Little Hatch Act prohibiting government employees from engaging in certain political activities. The trial court issued a somewhat convoluted ruling in which it affirmed the applicability of the statutes involved, but found that the election essentially had “cured” the problem, as Bennett by that time had taken office, and no longer held the position that had rendered him ineligible. Burke appealed.

The Indiana Court of Appeals reinstated the suit, ruling that Burke had been ineligible to run and was therefore not entitled to assume office. The appeals court did not stop there, however; it also ruled that Burke could not be declared the winner of the election either, since voters had not been informed that Bennett was ineligible. Bennett has appealed, and at this writing, the dispute is pending in the Indiana Supreme Court.

The case raises significant issues of federalism and even more significant (and troubling) evidence that the line separating public and private is rapidly becoming indecipherable, lost in a tangle of outsourcing, contracting, public-private partnerships and the like.

The  facts as the Court of Appeals described them were as follows: In 2005, Bennett had begun employment as Director of Operations at Hamilton Center, a local nonprofit established primarily for the purpose of providing behavioral health services. In 2007, the Center opened a Head Start program, for which it received a grant from Health and Human Services. (In 2007, the amount of the grant was $861,631.) Of that amount, $125,789 was for the Head Start program’s proportionate share of overhead, which included security, maintenance, liability insurance and similar generally accepted overhead costs. Bennett was responsible for providing and managing some of those overhead services, not simply for the Head Start program, but for all of the various programs conducted at Hamilton Center locations. The Court found that $2,041—or 1.84% of Bennett’s salary and benefits for 2006-2007—were attributable to the federal grant to Head Start.

On November 4, 2008, Bennett won the mayoral election, and on November 19th, Burke sued to have him declared ineligible under the provisions of 42 U.S.C. 9851, the pertinent portion of which applied the Hatch Act to Head Start Grant recipients.

“Any agency which assumes responsibility for planning, developing and coordinating Head Start programs and receives assistance under this subchapter shall be deemed a State or local agency. An agency that operates a Head Start program and receives federal grants to assist with the program is treated as a local government agency funded through Federal grants or loans, meaning that the agency and its employees’ political activities are subject to the restrictions of the Hatch Act.”

The trial court had analyzed this language and concluded that while Bennett had indeed been ineligible to run for mayor, neither Burke nor anyone else had tried to have Bennett disqualified prior to the election. It also, explicitly, found that “the violation was not willful or intentional,” and that the issue hadn’t been raised during any of his three prior election bids. And the trial court further noted the absence of any evidence indicating that Bennett had willfully flouted the Act, or was even aware of it.  As the court noted, “His role with Early Head Start was essentially non-existent. Hamilton Center did not consider Bennett an employee of Early Head Start. Bennett approved work orders for minor repairs on two facilities.”

The Terre Haute case illustrates the real dilemma public administrators face. Even if the courts manage to rationalize the state action doctrine, even if (as Rosenbloom and Verkuil have argued) state tort laws and other legal constraints can sometimes substitute for the doctrine’s indeterminacy, the unabated growth in public/private partnerships of various kinds, coupled with the seemingly inexorable increase in federal, state and local law and regulation, have created a situation in which no one can be certain where public stops and private begins.

Therein lies the issue most pertinent to educators: how do we teach future public administrators to safeguard constitutional accountability and legal clarity without sacrificing the administrative flexibility necessary to manage today’s third-party government?  These are issues requiring a pedagogy that reflects their importance.

Section Four: Pedagogical Implications

Contracting has significant implications for teaching public administration and public management courses, and those implications go well beyond contract management and cost accounting concerns. Public Administration programs must address the proper role of the state in delivering services to citizens. When should government be responsible for that service delivery? As an article in the Journal of Public Affairs Education put it,

Before there was public management, there was political theory: what should government do? What actions by the state are to be considered legitimate? What is justice? What is public virtue? …those of us who teach public management too frequently ignore those seminal questions for the necessary but inevitably more mundane skills of the profession—budgeting, planning, human resources management, policy analysis. But these practical subjects did not emerge from a void; they are inextricably bound up with our constitutional system, and that system in turn is the outgrowth of great philosophical debates about the proper ordering of human communities. It can be extremely rewarding for students to visit those debates. (One would love to say ‘revisit’ but that would be inaccurate; virtually none of them have familiarity with this intellectual history.)” (Kennedy 2003)

The first questions of political theory are: what should government do, what should government refrain from doing, and why? It is a truism that the existence of a problem is not a warrant for government action. There are many problems that government is uniquely able to address, and many other areas where government efforts to ameliorate problems simply create worse ones. Our classes need to include substantive, critical discussions about what those categories are, how they have developed, and the principled bases of the decisions involved.

A starting point would be a teaching module aimed at developing an understanding and appreciation of our constitutional architecture, including appropriate selections from constitutional history and the Federalist Papers, and with particular emphasis upon the concept of negative rights and the resulting state action doctrine. Key cases (and an acknowledgement of the continuing incoherence of the jurisprudence) would provide a foundation for discussion of the doctrine’s implications for public management. Such a course module would stress the normative nature of our constitutional conception of the role of the state—our national answer to the question “what should government do?”

Once we have explained that basic constitutional premise, we need to explore with our students the principled bases upon which contracting decisions should be made. The decision whether to contract public functions is a matter of public policy, and a decision with significant consequences, appreciated and unappreciated. In fact, policy analysis may be the curricular area most in need of substantive additional materials discussing some of the less obvious policy consequences of contracting.  A case in point: In December 2003, The Guardian reported that private corporations had become the second biggest contributor to coalition forces in Iraq after the Pentagon, and noted that the proportion of private contractors had grown markedly since the first Gulf War in 1991, when it was 100 to 1. By 2003, the proportion was ten to one, and nearly a third of the budget earmarked that year for the wider Iraqi campaign, or $30 billion dollars, went to private companies in what the Guardian called “a booming business” of replacing soldiers with highly paid civilians not subject to standard military procedures.   The “booming private sector” has soaked up much of the expertise that became available as armies downsized after the Cold War, and its emergence has allowed America to wage war by proxy, without the congressional and media oversight to which conventional warfare is subject.

In “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry,” published in 2003, Peter Singer identified three categories of private military contractors: provider firms offering direct, tactical assistance—anything from training programs to staff services to front-line combat; consulting firms drawing primarily upon retired senior officers selling their strategic/administrative expertise back to the military; and support firms providing logistic and maintenance services. Singer highlighted numerous legal, policy and management questions raised by this vastly expanded use of private military companies. Will the ties of these organizations to their countries of origin weaken as markets become more globalized, and opportunities for profit conflict with obligations of patriotism? Will states lose control of military policy to companies whose first responsibility is to clients and shareholders? How will foreign policy decision-making change when a declaration of war entails “hiring” soldiers rather than deploying young citizens? Will companies pursuing profits lobby successfully for military “solutions” to global conflicts? How will we control the behavior of “private” combatants?[2]

Such examples are emphatically not offered to suggest that contracting is never appropriate, or that it is inconsistent with liberal constitutional processes. Contracting is, or should be, ideologically neutral. It is a tool, and as with all tools, it will be useful in some cases, and counterproductive in others. Students—and public managers—are ill-served by rigid, ideological “either-or” approaches to these decisions. The point we make is that decisions about service delivery must include consideration of all of the relevant costs and benefits, including—but certainly not limited to—considerations  of democratic processes, transparency and constitutional accountability. President Obama recently underscored the importance of those considerations when he announced a government-wide review of federal contracting procedures, beginning with contracting decisions made by the Department of Defense (Wilson and O’Harrow, 2009).

In short, students studying for an MPA in the twenty-first century must be prepared to face challenges far different from those faced by former generations of public managers. This is not our great-grandfathers’ public administration, and Leonard White’s argument that “. . the study of administration should start from the base of management rather than the foundation of law…. “ can no longer be accepted as truth. (White 1987 [1926]: 56).  As Rosenbloom and Naff  (2008) have noted, there is no longer a question about the “partnership” between courts and public administration, because the courts increasingly prescribe the public administrative values that must shape public management behavior. If we do not teach students to recognize and internalize the constitutional bases of those values, we do them a grave disservice. It is vitally important that M.P.A. programs recognize the normative function of the law and discharge their responsibility to instill constitutional values in their students.

The American Society for Public Administration’s Task Force on  Education has come to the same conclusion, pointing out that the “…core mission of those offering the MPA degree must be to develop the capacity of graduates to exercise delegated public authority wisely, effectively, and lawfully.” The Task Force goes on to say thatthe United States Constitution, along with the constitutions of the states…anchor American public administration at all levels of government.”  The curriculum for the M.P.A. degree “should be such that it introduces or reinforces students’ understanding of their constitutionally-delegated authority.” The Task Force reasons that public administrators, as trusted public servants, are obligated to operate within the confines of the constitution (ASPA, 2008).

Unfortunately, however, there is considerable evidence that  public administration education does not adequately integrate constitutional values into the curriculum. Books on public administration and democracy often do not cover the Constitution (Kennedy 2007). Moreover, most M.P.A. programs do not require what Rosenbloom has called “constitutional competence” as part of the degree. A recent survey by NASPA confirms the deficiency:  even when law-oriented courses are available to M.P.A. students, only 45% emphasize the Constitution or the constitutional constraints on administrative behavior. Some 62% of M.P.A. programs do not require any law-oriented courses. Of the 86 survey responses received from NASPA schools, fewer than 3% agreed that students should have knowledge of the law (Rosenbloom and Naff, 2007).

A grounding in constitutional values has always been necessary to the proper practice of public administration and management, and the increasing use of third-party contractors to deliver government services has made such grounding more imperative than ever. Steven I. Schooner, who co-directs the government procurement law program at George Washington University, made that point when he was asked about the Obama administration’s decision to review government contracting practices. The most important part of that review, Schooner opined, is the evaluation of the “ability of the federal acquisition workforce to develop, manage and oversee acquisitions appropriately” (Wilson and O’Harrow 2009).  Other experts on the subject of government contracting agree that the practice comes with serious risk of losing accountability and raising the potential of corruption and political favoritism (Fernandez, 2007; Moe 1996; Kettl 1993; Sclar 2000).  The irony is that contracting out—done properly—can serve as a means of “countering coercive power of the state and protecting the personal freedom of citizens” (Fernandez,2007; Savas, 2000).  Any benefits of contracting out, however, require effective public management, and effective public management requires a grounding in the Constitution and constitutional values.

Section Five: Pedagogical Challenges

Government officials and public administration scholars alike have embraced third-party

government without adequately addressing two important policy issues:

  • Can we achieve efficiencies in service provision without sacrificing democratic norms of equity, accountability, transparency and due process that are fundamental to our political order and constitutional culture?
  • Are there some tasks so critical to our collective identity, to our sense of what it means to be a member of a political community, that they must be provided by citizens pursuing their civic duty rather than by businesses pursuing profit?  If so, what are those tasks, and how do we identify them? What makes them different?

If  the tragedy of Abu Ghraib proved anything, it is that the substitution of contractors  for government employees or agents has not lessened our need to control how state power is exercised. If the (black) comedy that is the Terre Haute election debacle proved anything, it is that compliance with contracts and law alike require that applicable legal structures be known and knowable to those to whom they apply. Too few of our policy texts highlight these issues, or ask these hard questions, and too few of our classes devote time to explaining their importance, exploring their ramifications, or preparing students to cope with them.

It is high time we do so.   All indications are that students with MPA degrees will be in great demand over the next decade; article after article underscores the fact that the current government workforce is aging and retiring. After decades of ideologically-driven shrinkage, government employment is growing and new agencies are being established to meet a variety of emerging challenges.  As Schooner told Wilson and O’Harrow, “Realistically, if we want the government’s procurement dollars spent wisely, the government may need to hire tens of thousands of qualified, motivated, trained and responsible acquisition professionals.” Multiply that example many times over, and the market for MPA graduates is likely to be robust.

As schools of public affairs, we have an obligation to equip this new generation of public managers with the constitutional competence that will allow them to address new challenges without undermining our shared governing values.

Even when the policy consequences of contracting are not as potentially grave as in the military context, those consequences should be explored in classes on public management. For example, once a specific government agency has been charged with a responsibility, the question becomes one of delivery. Is this a job best handled by employees, or by contractors?  If it is the latter, what are the mechanisms we will need in order to ensure accountability for both program results and constitutional compliance?  It is only after we have gone through this analytical exercise that we can determine whether contracting out is an appropriate delivery method, and if so, how we can best structure the contracting relationship to provide clarity and protect the public interest.

It is a truism of public affairs education that when government acts, government should be accountable. The instrument government chooses should not alter that result. Whether government delivers drug counseling or job placement or any other service through a state agency, a for-profit or nonprofit provider, or a faith-based organization, the program should be properly understood for what it is: the empowerment of a third party to act for and on behalf of the state. It is state action in fact, if not necessarily in law. We do a disservice to those whom we are training to be public managers when we fail to explore the constitutional, management and policy implications of that fundamental fact.

References

American Society for Public Administration Task Force on Educating for Excellence in the MPA Degree. 2008.”Excellence in PA Report, Part 2,” PA Times 31 (No. 6, June): 21.

Berger, R. 1977. Government by Judiciary. Indianapolis, Indiana. Liberty Fund.

Brest, Paul. 1982. State Action and Liberal Theory: A Casenote on Flagg Bros. v.

Brooks.  University of Pennsylvania LawReview. 130(6) 1296-1330.

Ely, John. 1980. Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press.

Fernandez, Sergio. 2007. “What works best when contracting for services? An analysis of contracting performance at the local level in the U.S.” Public Administration 85 (No. 4)

Gilmour, Robert , Jensen, Laura S. 1998.  Reinventing Government Accountability: Public Functions, Privatization, and the Meaning of State Action.  Public Affairs Review, Vol. 58, No.3. pp.247-258.

Kennedy, Sheila. 2007. “Book Review: Meier, Kenneth J., & O’Toole, Lawrence J. Jr. (2006). Bureaucracy in a Democratic State: A Governance Perspective. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,” American Review of Public Administration 37 (No. 4): 501-504 (2007).

Kennedy, Sheila Suess, 2003. “Going by the Book: Connecting Public Administration to Political Theory.” Journal of Public Affairs Education. Vol. 9, #4, October.

Kennedy, Sheila S. 2001. When is Private Public? State Action in the Era of Privatization and Public-Private Partnerships. George Mason University Civil Rights Law Journal. Vol. 11, #2, Spring. Pp.203-223.

Kettl, Donald. 1993. Sharing Power: Public Governance and Private Markets. Washington, D.C. The Brookings Institution.

Metzger, Gillian. 2003. Privatization as Delegation. New York. Columbia Law Review, Vol. 103 #6, October. Pp.1367-1502.

Minow, Martha. 1999. Choice or Commonality: Welfare and Schooling after the End of

Welfare as We Knew It.  North Carolina. Duke Law Journal, Vol.49,  Pp.493-559.

Moe, R.C. 1996. “Managing Privatization: A New Challenge to Public Administration”, in B.G. Peters B.A. Rockman (eds), Agenda for Excellence 2: Administering the State. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House.

Raphael, D.D. 1990. “Problems of Political Philosophy.” Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey Humanities Press International.

Rainey, Hal. G. 2007. Understanding and Managing Public Organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Rohr, John A. (1986) To Run a Constitution: The Legitimacy of the Administrative State. Kansas. University of Kansas Press.

Rosenbloom, David H., James D. Carroll, and Jonathan D. Carroll.  2000., Constitutional Competence for Public Managers. Itasca, Illinois. F.E. Peacock Publishers, Inc.

Rosenbloom, David and Katherine Naff . 2007. “The Status of Law in Contemporary Public Administrative Literature, Education, and Practice” Paper Presented at Minnowbrook III Conference.  Lake Placid, NY

Savas, E.S. 2000. Privatization and Public-Private Partnerships. Chatham, NF: Chatham House.

Sclar, E.D. 2000. You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Singer, Peter. 2003. Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry.

Smith, Steven Rathgeb and Michael Lipsky. 1993. Nonprofits for Hire. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.

Spicer, Michael W. 1995. The Founders, The Constitution and Public Administration: A Conflict in Worldviews. Washington, D.C. Georgetown University Press.

Stone, Geoffrey, Louis M. Seidman,.Cass R. Sunstein and Mark V. Tushnet. 1986.  Constitutional Law, Little, Brown & Co.

White, Leonard. 1987 [1926]. “Introduction to the Study of Administration,” pp. 55-64 in Jay Shafritz and Albert Hyde, eds., Classics of Public Administration, 2nd ed. Chicago: Dorsey Press.

Wilson, Scott and O’Harrow, Robert Jr. 2009. “President Orders Review of Federal Contracting System.” The Washington Post, March 5. Accessed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/04/AR2009030401690_pdf

Cases Cited

Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883).

Twining v. New Jersey, 211 U.S. 78 (1908).

Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319(1937).

Adamson v. California, 322 U.S. 46 (1947).

Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co., 419 U.S. 345 (1978).

Norwood v. Harrison, 413 U.S. 455 (1973).

Flagg Bros. v. Brooks, 436 U.S. 149 (1978).

National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Tarkanian, 488 U.S. 179, 191 (1988).

Rendell-Baker v. Kohn, 457 U.S. 991 (1983).

Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U.S. 991 (1983).

Plain v.Flicker, 245 F. Supp.898 (D.N.J. 1986).

Wade v. Byles, 83 F.3d 902 (7th Cir. 1996).

Blumel v. Mylander, 919 F.Supp. 423 (M.D. Fla. 1996).


[1] While the literature has numerous and often conflicting definitions of privatization, in this article we use that term to describe the sale or other disposition of previously government-owned enterprises to the private sector, which subsequently takes responsibility for them—e.g., Margaret Thatcher’s privatization efforts  in Great Britain. In the U.S., the term is often used—inaccurately, we feel—to describe contracting relationships.

[2]Singer also argued that governments are surrendering a defining attribute of statehood, the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. If our legal system is increasingly unable to answer the question “when has government acted?” what will happen when we no longer know what a government looks like?

Civil Religion

The United States is one of the most religiously diverse countries in the world. Although the country is predominantly Christian, doctrinal differences among Christian denominations are often as deep as the differences between Christians and Jews or Muslims. Adherents of virtually every religion on the globe live in the U.S., and recent polls put the number of secular Americans (those unaffiliated with any religious body) at approximately 16%.

This diversity poses a significant challenge to America’s social and governing institutions: what commonalities enable and define the collective civic enterprise? What makes one an American? The United States’ national motto is e pluribus unum, “out of the many, one.” Prominent social and political theorists have long argued that a common belief structure, or “civil religion,” is required in order to turn the many into the one.

The term “civil religion” was first coined in 1967 by Robert N. Bellah, in an article that remains the standard reference for the concept. The proper content of such a civil religion, however, has been the subject of debate since the Revolutionary War. Over the past decades, as the nation’s diversity has dramatically increased, that debate has taken on added urgency, with political theorists, sociologists and scholars of religion all offering their perspectives to political and religious leaders.

In a culture as diverse as that of the United States, a “civil religion” or common value structure provides citizens with a sense of common purpose and identity. Despite the claims of some conservative Christians, Christianity does not provide that social glue; the United States is not and has never been an officially Christian Nation, although it has historically been culturally Protestant.

The U.S. Constitution contains no reference to deity, and specifically rejects the use of any religious test for citizenship or public office. In order to be consistent with the Constitution, any civil religion must respect the nation’s commitment to individual autonomy in matters of belief, while still providing an overarching value structure to which most, if not all, citizens can subscribe. This is no small task in a nation founded upon the principle that government must be neutral among belief systems. This constitutionally-required state neutrality has long been a source of considerable political tension between citizens intent upon imposing their religious beliefs on their neighbors and those who reject efforts to enforce religious hegemony. Thus far, no proposed value system or theorized civil religion has been entirely able to resolve that conflict.

To the extent that Americans do endorse an overarching ideology or civil religion, it is a belief system based upon the values of individual liberty and equal rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Bellah, Robert N. “Civil Religion in America.”  Daedalus, 1967; reprinted in Daedalus 134, 4 (Fall 2005), 40-56.]

A Very Tangled Web: Public and Private Redux

    A Very Tangled Web: Public and Private Redux

 

A Cautionary Tale

Terre Haute is a mid-sized town on the western border of Indiana. In 2007, it held municipal elections, and voted in a new mayor, Duke Bennett. Bennett had defeated the former mayor, Kevin Burke. Shortly after the election, Burke sued to have Bennett declared ineligible to serve, citing the provisions of Indiana’s Little Hatch Act prohibiting government employees from engaging in certain political activities. The trial court issued a somewhat convoluted ruling in which it affirmed the applicability of the statutes involved, but found that the election essentially had “cured” the problem, as Bennett by that time had taken office, and no longer held the position that had rendered him ineligible. Burke appealed.

            The Indiana Court of Appeals reinstated the suit, ruling that Burke had been ineligible to run and was therefore not entitled to assume office. The appeals court did not stop there, however; it also ruled that Burke could not be declared the winner of the election either, since voters had not been informed that Bennett was ineligible. Bennett has appealed, and at this writing, the dispute is pending in the Indiana Supreme Court.

            The case raises significant issues of federalism and even more significant (and troubling) evidence that the line separating public and private is rapidly becoming indecipherable, lost in a tangle of outsourcing, contracting, public-private partnerships and the like.

The  facts as the Court of Appeals described them were as follows: In 2005, Bennett had begun employment as Director of Operations at Hamilton Center, a local nonprofit established primarily for the purpose of providing behavioral health services. In 2007, the Center opened a Head Start program, for which it received a grant from Health and Human Services. (In 2007, the amount of the grant was $861,631.) Of that amount, $125,789 was for the Head Start program’s proportionate share of overhead, which included security, maintenance, liability insurance and similar generally accepted overhead costs. Bennett was responsible for providing and managing some of those overhead services, not simply for the Head Start program, but for all of the various programs conducted at Hamilton Center locations. The Court found that $2,041—or 1.84% of Bennett’s salary and benefits for 2006-2007—were attributable to the federal grant to Head Start.

On November 4, 2008, Bennett won the mayoral election, and on November 19th, Burke sued to have him declared ineligible under the provisions of 42 U.S.C. 9851, the pertinent portion of which applied the Hatch Act to Head Start Grant recipients.

“Any agency which assumes responsibility for planning, developing and coordinating Head Start programs and receives assistance under this subchapter shall be deemed a State or local agency. An agency that operates a Head Start program and receives federal grants to assist with the program is treated as a local government agency funded through Federal grants or loans, meaning that the agency and its employees’ political activities are subject to the restrictions of the Hatch Act.”

The trial court had analyzed this language and concluded that while Bennett had indeed been ineligible to run for mayor, neither Burke nor anyone else had tried to have Bennett disqualified prior to the election. It also, explicitly, found that “the violation was not willful or intentional,” and that the issue hadn’t been raised during any of his three prior election bids. And the trial court further noted that

“No evidence indicates Bennett willfully flouted the Act. No one from Office of Special Counsel informed him that he was precluded from running. No one from Hamilton Center told him the Act precluded him from being a candidate. His role with Early Head Start was essentially non-existent. Hamilton Center did not consider Bennett an employee of Early Head Start. Bennett approved work orders for minor repairs on two facilities.” 

After analyzing the operation of Indiana’s election laws and Hatch Act provisions under the circumstances of the case, the trial court had concluded that Bennett could serve as Mayor, since his election had removed him from employment at the Center and had thus “cured” any defect.

The appellate court disagreed. After an exhaustive analysis of case law and relevant state and federal statutes, the Court held that Bennett had been an employee of a nonprofit agency that the law deemed to be a state or local agency, that the nonprofit status of that agency was irrelevant, and that—despite the negligible proportion of his pay that came from the Head Start grant, his employment was “in connection with” an activity “financed in whole or in part by loans or grants made by the United States.”

            The ruling that Bennett had been ineligible to run and was ineligible to serve ended up being cold comfort to Burke, however, because the Court went further and declared the office vacant. Burke could not assume the office because the voters had not had access to all relevant information when they cast their ballots. (This part of the ruling raises a number of interesting questions about voters’ right to information, but analysis of that part of the ruling is inapposite here, and must therefore await a different inquiry.)

 

How Did We Get Here?

The original Hatch Act was passed in 1939, restricting certain political activities by federal employees, and the use of public funds for partisan or electoral purposes. It also forbid officials paid with government funds from using their positions to promise jobs, promotions, financial assistance, or any other benefit intended to coerce campaign contributions or political support. The act took its name from the Senator who sponsored it in reaction to disclosures that WPA officials were using their position to advantage the campaigns of local Democrats. (The original name of the legislation was “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities.”) In 1940, the original measure was broadened to include state employees paid wholly or partially from federal funds.( In 1994, the restrictions were eased somewhat; however, those changes are not relevant to the analysis in this case.)

Ever since its passage, the legislation has been controversial: proponents claim that it is necessary in order to keep government officials from coercing their workers to do partisan campaigning, while opponents believe the Act denies those workers the ability to exercise their First Amendment liberties. In the wake of the original Hatch Act, states have passed so-called “Little” Hatch Acts that apply similar restrictions to state government employees.

Whatever the merits or drawbacks of this particular piece of legislation, the real problem arises by reason of the sea change in the world of public administration since its passage. The term “governance” has all but replaced the older, more concrete “government;” it has come to be viewed as a more accurate descriptor of contemporary state structures, where—among other things—an ever-increasing percentage of the work of the state is outsourced to for-profit, non-profit and faith-based organizations. (Frederickson, 1996; Kettl, 2000; Milward and Provan, 2000; Pierre and Peters, 1998; Salamon, 1989; Hill & Lynn, 2005).

The reasons for this growth in “government by proxy” are varied, but among its roots are distrust of government and an often-reflexive preference for markets and/or civil society. What many of those holding that reflexive preference fail to recognize is that contracting-out is not “privatization,” properly understood—that is, the choice of private surrogates to deliver services on behalf of government agencies obscures but does not alter the fact that government is choosing, directing and paying for those services, and is thus ultimately responsible for them.

 
 
 
 
 

The relationship between governmental units and their surrogates has been the subject of a copious literature, much of which has focused on the wide variety of issues raised by these cross-sectoral partnerships. Understanding the complexity, diversity and significance of those issues is helpful if we are to fully appreciate the implications of the Terre Haute Mayoral election.

                                               

       The Problem(s) of ‘Governance’

            There are undoubted benefits to government that accrue through contracting, outsourcing and other public-private partnerships. Those benefits include flexibility, the ability to hire expertise not available in-house, the ability to address short-term needs without adding permanent employees to the payroll and many others. But the practice also raises a number of thorny issues, some of which should have been anticipated, others that are more surprising.

 

                                          Constitutional and Ethical Issues

         The “New Public Management” paradigm envisions the substitution of new forms of collaboration and management for the traditional hierarchical and bureaucratic chains of command. These new delivery methods, however, cannot and should not mean the abandonment of our constitutional values, nor of the constitutional norms of liberty, equality, and fairness. Nor should they obviate public actors’ obligations to meet the standards for government behavior that stem from the constitution and are incorporated in public law. (Jensen & Kennedy, 2005). As Donald Kettl has observed (1993, p. 40), the government “is not just another principal dealing with another agent.” The skepticism about government performance that prompted development of privatized governing arrangements should not be mistaken for a lack of concern over how public authority is deployed.

            Public administration scholars, unlike their law school colleagues, have paid very little attention to the constitutional implications of government by proxy, and that is a troubling omission, because the issues here are foundational. Public administration in the United States is grounded in a very specific constitutional philosophy, one that begins by placing certain limitations on actions that may be taken by the state. The Bill of Rights prohibits government from engaging in behaviors that would be constitutionally and legally appropriate if done by a private-sector actor. Efforts to keep government responsible and accountable—politically, fiscally, ethically and constitutionally—thus depend upon the ability to identify government and to recognize when it has acted. “Governance” may be robbing citizens and public managers alike of the ability to make that crucial threshold identification. (The situation in Terre Haute would certainly suggest that to be the case.)

            Public officials too often fail to recognize the importance of the State Action Doctrine, which defines invasions of constitutional rights as acts taken by government. Actions taken by the private sector may or may not be lawful, but by definition cannot be unconstitutional. Fortunately, there are a few public administration scholars—notably John Rohr and David Rosenbloom—who have emphasized the importance of the normative role played by the constitution. As Rohr (1990) wrote in an introduction to Constitutional Competence for Public Managers (Rosenbloom, 1992, 2002; Rosenbloom and Piotrowski, 2005; Rosenbloom, Carroll & Carroll 2000)

[W]e are witnessing the gradual reintegration of constitutionalism and public administration. I say reintegration because of the obvious connection between public administration and constitutionalism in The Federalist Papers. So integral was administration to the intent of the framers that the authors of The Federalist Papers made more frequent use of the word administration and its cognates they did of the words Congress, President or Supreme Court. (p. xiii)

The book itself makes explicit the connection between “public values” and the “daily decisions and operations of public managers.” (p. xvi)

Political theorists and public administrators alike emphasize the importance of legitimacy to public administration. Legitimacy requires fidelity to constitutional norms. As Michael Spicer has noted, “in the absence of consensus surrounding the role of government, bureaucracy becomes increasingly seen simply as a tool by which some groups gain benefits and privileges at the expense of others.” (Spicer, 1995, p. 4). A legitimate exercise of authority, no matter how coercive, is different in kind from the exercise of raw power unrestrained by adherence to constitutional norms and values, and it is seen differently by members of the polity. That difference is especially critical to those on the “front lines” of state and local government, who must make and implement policies that are anything but abstract to the citizens they affect.

            The central question of both political philosophy and public administration is “What is the role of the state, and how should that role be managed?” What, in other words, are the convictions that should animate public service, and how should that service be defined? The United States Constitution rests upon very specific understandings of human nature, the role of the state and natural and human rights. Those particular understandings and the philosophical commitments that flowed from them led the founders to sharply limit the power of the state. To put it another way, the original American concept of liberty was in the negative: liberty was seen as an individual’s right to be free from state control or interference, subject only to the equal rights of others.

            In order to limit government, however, one must first define it. And such definition is becoming increasingly problematic. The two elements of the usual definition—exclusive jurisdiction over a particular geographic area (an important element of  sovereignty) and a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive power—are arguably integral to popular understanding of the concept of statehood, or government. But both elements are undergoing redefinition.

 

                                           Distinguishing Between Public and Private

Collaboration among the sectors is certainly not new, but over the past few decades, as contracting and other forms of collaboration have increased, scholars have documented increases in organizational overlap and interdependence and sectoral blurring in general (e.g. Cooper, 2003). Non-profits, for example, are becoming more “business-like” and commercialized (Weisbrod, 1998). Nonprofits and private organizations alike have become almost entirely dependent upon government funding, which calls into question their very identities as “nonprofit” associations or  “private” enterprises (Bozeman, 1987).

Numerous approaches to distinguishing among organization types can be found in the literature but none capture the full complexities and dimensions of organizational archetypes (Rainey, 2003). Dahl and Lindblom (1953) produced one of the earliest typologies, constructing a continuum with government-controlled agencies on one end of the spectrum and market-controlled enterprises on the other. They used organizational characteristics—including  objectives, incentives, and authority—to determine an organization’s position on that continuum. Interestingly, Dahl and Lindblom found that some organizations defied classification; i.e., corporations partially owned by government.

A very different approach to classification emphasizes ownership and funding (Walmsley & Zald, 1973), and yet another, proposed by Blau and Scott (1966), focuses on whether organizational outcomes benefit those who share ownership of the entity or whether the benefits accrue to the public’s interests. (Other scholars have pointed out that it is not always a simple matter to define that public interest (Mitnick, 1980).   Bozeman (1987) observes that every organization has some degree of “publicness;” he then attempts to capture this attribute in two dimensions: political authority and economic authority.) Ironically, despite the lack of consensus on how to define organizational types and which organizational characteristics should be relied upon in making that classification, there is no shortage of research comparing the effectiveness of public and private actors. Such comparisons have included schools (Chubb and Moe, 1990). hospitals (Savas, 2000), and airlines (Backx, Carney, & Gedajlovic, 2002), among others. It is not an exaggeration to say that there is a robust “cottage industry” of scholars attempting to chart the shifting dimensions of our public-private divide.

The changing definitions of public and private have not been caused solely by the growth of contracting out, of course; in industrialized nations, and perhaps elsewhere, the growth of the global economy and the worldwide penetration of the Internet are also increasingly challenging traditional notions of territorial jurisdiction. In America, the steady expansion of government since the New Deal has already required us to rethink the relationship between government power and fundamental rights. But the advent of widespread contracting, where a growing number of services are paid for by government but delivered by contractors, has raised a host of new questions, including but certainly not limited to the following:

·         Are partnerships with businesses and nonprofit organizations creating a new definition of government? 

·         How can we claim that private organizations are inherently more efficient if we can’t distinguish public from private organizations?

·         Is contracting extending, rather than shrinking, the state?

·         Does the substitution of an independent contractor for an employee equate to a reduction in the scope of government, as some proponents apparently believe?

·         If we are altering traditional definitions of public and private by virtue of the new governance—turning for-profit and non-profit organizations into unrecognized arms of the state—what is the effect of that alteration on a constitutional system that depends upon the distinction between public and private as a fundamental safeguard of private rights?

·         If the constitutional system is being altered, what are the implications for political theory and public management?

·         What about traditional notions of ethical behavior? i.e., to whom does the contractor owe a duty of care? Of loyalty?

In other words, what happens to constitutional rights when the comingling of public and private becomes so pervasive that citizens can no longer tell who is exercising authority? What happens when no one—not even the courts—can tell where public starts and private stops?

 

                                                Political Accountability

Constitutional accountability is not the only area complicated by the increasing incoherence of our governing structures and blurred sectoral boundaries. Political accountability is similarly compromised. Political accountability requires visibility and transparency; it requires an ability to recognize the locus of decision-making, and the identity of the office or officer in charge. To put it another way, voters can’t “throw the bums out” if they can’t tell who the bums are.

In their seminal book “Nonprofits for Hire,” Smith and Lipsky explored the issues raised for nonprofit organizations when they entered into partnerships with government agencies (1993). Among the many outcomes they explored was the effect of these relationships on governmental accountability. As they noted, “Government accountability to citizens is undermined when responsibility for admission, treatment and outcomes seem to be in the hands of private organizations (p. 209). The inevitable confusion over who is in charge is exacerbated in many cases where the services in question are being delivered to disadvantaged and/or marginalized populations. As Smith and Lipsky also pointed out,

“ These are private workers who are representing the state to citizens, but under the sponsorship of nonprofit agencies whose connections to government and to the average citizen may be very tenuous. At best, citizens would have a difficult time knowing when a matter was agency policy, and when it was government policy. Thus workers in nonprofit agencies buffer public policy to citizens and obscure the realities of public policies, because policies are mediated by nonprofit agencies” (p. 14).

There are sound reasons for favoring transparency in government: transparency generates trust by providing clear lines of authority; it invites citizen oversight and facilitates the monitoring of government agencies by the public and the media. Conversely, a lack of transparency breeds distrust, and an inability to determine lines of authority undermines political accountability. These are not abstract concerns. The increasingly impenetrable maze of contractual and legal ties among public agencies and their private sector “partners” has been a significant and growing deterrent to the sort of political accountability envisioned in our constituent documents.

            Recognizing the need for clarity if we are to hold government constitutionally or politically accountable is one thing; fashioning rules or formulas for doing so has proved to be considerably more difficult. The jurisprudence of state action is as incoherent and tangled as the reality of “governance” relationships.  As one commentator has wryly noted, the Court’s ‘sifting’ and ‘weighing’ in state action cases “differs from Justice Stewart’s famous ‘I know it when I see it’ standard for judging obscenity mainly in the comparative precision of the latter ” (Brest, 1982, pp. 1296-1330).  On one hand, the mere fact that a regulatory agency exercises oversight of a licensee and has thus implicitly approved the licensee conduct at issue has been held insufficient to attribute an action to the state (Jackson v. Metropolitan 1974).  On the other hand, where government intentionally funds an unconstitutional program conducted by private actors, the Courts have generally—but not always—found state action (Norwood v. Harrison 1973). Agencies looking to the courts for guidance are likely to be disappointed.

 

                                                    Management Issues

            By far the most scholarly attention given to the evolving modes of delivery for public services has centered on contracting and oversight problems. One way to categorize this literature is to differentiate between before-the-fact and after-the-fact concerns. As one would expect, before-the- fact issues involve the initial decision on whether or not to contract, typically referred to as the “make or buy decision”. There is also a growing literature on effective contract negotiation and management, concerns that arise after the decision to contract out has been made.

The prevailing assumption is that the private sector can produce goods and services more efficiently, i.e. more outputs for less inputs (Averch, 1990). In this view the principal objective of government is “budget maximization” (Downs, 1967; Niskanen, 1971). Government oversupplies (produces more than would be socially efficient) at greater than minimal cost (Fernandez, 2009). This technical and allocative inefficiency is due to the lack of favorable market conditions. Therefore, the theory goes, government outsourcing can reduce the cost and size of government and improve service delivery (Cooper, 2002; Osborne and Gaebler, 1992; Savas, 2000).

An opposing argument points out that cost savings are frequently less than anticipated (e.g. Greene, 2002), and sometimes do not materialize at all.  Several researchers have noted that contracting has obscured our ability to quantify government employees; a civil service head count no longer provides an accurate picture of the size of government (Light, 1999), because although the number of workers receiving government paychecks may have declined, the total number of people actually working full-time for government has increased (Gutman & Willner, 1976; Smith & Lipsky, 1993). Thus, the more accurate measure is one that relies on the total cost of service delivery (Rosen, 2005).

As several researchers have noted, both sectors bring strengths and weaknesses to service delivery. That is, the price system in free economic markets can control economic and production decisions, but political authority is a more inexpensive means of social control (Dahl &  Lindblom, 1953). According to this view, political hierarchies and economic markets are two alternative mechanisms for controlling political economies. The basic idea is that it is easier to direct people to obey the law than to work out a compensation system for doing so.

Market failure theory is consistent with this perspective (Weimer & Vining, 1999). It holds that there are certain conditions that make it impossible for the market to operate efficiently. Some goods/services are properly classified as “public goods” because their characteristics make it impractical or impossible to exclude non-payers (“free riders”) from their benefits. A favorite example is a lighthouse. Some may choose to pay for the service, but even the free riders will enjoy the benefits of the light. Similarly, the market is inefficient when a transaction between two parties affects (or spills over to) non- parties.  When, for example, pollution associated with the production of a good cannot be confined to the parties who pay for the service, even those who were not parties to the bargain will be affected, in this case negatively. Other goods and services have natural monopoly characteristics (i.e., the telephone until approximately 1984), in which case the market will also be inefficient. And finally, the market cannot operate efficiently in cases of informational asymmetry; when buyers and sellers lack full knowledge of the effects of a transaction, they cannot make informed decisions. These instances are among the traditional justifications cited for government regulation.

As the practice of contracting has become more pervasive, a separate literature has developed to address after-the-fact management concerns: How shall the contract be designed? How much detail is enough, and how much is too much?  Increasing reliance on contracting has led to a burgeoning literature on effective contract management.  Indeed, “privatization increases the imperative for public management rather than relaxing or easing it” (Rainey, 2003, p. 417).  The policy implementation literature focuses on the effects of resources, political support and other ingredients for successful contracting (O’Toole, 1986; Hall & O’Toole, 2000). Trust matters, too: sociologists have emphasized the role of trust in contracting (e.g. Granovetter, 1985) and economists have focused on trust’s role in reducing both transaction costs (Williamson, 1985) and agency costs (Jensen & Meckling 1976).

Although there is no dominant theoretical approach to determining what leads to successful contracting, several elements are typically highlighted, including the role of competition, monitoring, trust, and public management capacity (Van Slyke, 2003; Fernandez, 2009) As previously noted, a primary argument for the comparative efficiency of the private sector is that goods and services are produced in a competitive environment. A similar argument is that competition among potential suppliers is essential to government contracting (Borcherding, 1977). Indeed, the arguments for privatization over government delivery of public services assume competition (Van Slyke, 2003). Competitive bidding is necessary to reveal the lowest cost (Pack, 1989). Counter arguments also exist: competition can disrupt the delivery of services (Smith and Lipsky, 1993), provide an incentive for reduced quality (Kamerman & Kahn, 1989), or increase transaction costs (Sclar, 2001; Kettl, 1993). How many contracts are awarded to a sole bidder, or to a bidder chosen from a very small pool, has thus far gone undocumented, but anecdotal evidence suggests it is more the norm than the robust competition assumed by this literature.

The argument for the importance of monitoring typically relies on agency theory. In the public sector, there are two agency relationships: the voters (principals) and the bureaucracy (agents), and the bureaucracy and the contractor. The contract must be designed with incentive alignment and risk transfer objectives in mind (Hart & Holmstrom, 1987), because problems arise when the preferences of a principal and agent diverge.  As Machiavelli reminded the Prince, contractors (in his case, mercenaries) are only loyal to their pay; their real interests are at odds with those of the State.

The agency problem also implicates the issues of transparency and accountability addressed earlier. Government transparency implies access to relevant information. Citizens can neither act nor vote on what they don’t know. If government is to be fully accountable to its citizens there must be some degree of transparency. Contracting also creates problems for public managers because it complicates lines of authority and control, which also affects accountability. And because contracting adds a new level of complexity for public managers, those managers need a new set of skills, including but not limited to negotiating and bargaining expertise and mediation experience (Kettl, 1993).    

 

                                                            Sovereignty
         Contracting even implicates issues of national sovereignty. In December 2003, The Guardian reported that private corporations had become the second biggest contributor to coalition forces in Iraq after the Pentagon, and noted that the proportion of private contractors had grown markedly since the first Gulf War in 1991, when it was 100 to 1. By 2003, the proportion was ten to one, and nearly a third of the budget earmarked that year for the wider Iraqi campaign, or $30 billion dollars, went to private companies in what the Guardian called “a booming business” of replacing soldiers with highly paid civilians not subject to standard military procedures.

         .  This “booming” private sector has soaked up much of the expertise that became available as armies downsized after the Cold War, and its emergence has allowed America to wage war by proxy, without the congressional and media oversight to which conventional warfare is subject. Before the prisoner abuse scandal, as noted in the preceding section, most criticism of contracting focused upon perceived financial improprieties, and the public management challenges posed by privatization: lack of oversight, poor record keeping, ties between bidders and political actors, and the award of huge, “no bid” or “closed bid” contracts. Yet fiscal mismanagement and improprieties, while destructive of trust in government and the political structure, are only one aspect of the problem.   

         In June of 2003, Peter Singer published a book titled “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry,” in which he explored warfare by proxy (including occasional use of “low profile” forces to solve “awkward, potentially embarrassing” situations). Singer identified three categories of private military contractors: 1) Provider firms offering direct, tactical assistance—anything from training programs to staff services to front-line combat; 2) Consulting firms drawing primarily upon retired senior officers selling their strategic/administrative expertise back to the military; and 3) Support firms providing logistic and maintenance services. A host of  legal, policy and management questions are raised by this vastly expanded use of private companies. Among those identified by Singer include whether the ties of these organizations to their countries of origin will weaken as markets become more globalized, and opportunities for profit conflict with obligations of patriotism. Will states lose control of military policy to companies whose first responsibility is to clients and shareholders? How will foreign policy decision-making change when a declaration of war entails “hiring” soldiers rather than deploying young citizens? Will companies pursuing profits lobby successfully for military “solutions” to global conflicts? How will we control the behavior of “private” combatants?

         Whatever the eventual answer to these and many other questions posed by these arrangements, Singer argues that governments are surrendering a defining attribute of statehood, the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. If our legal system is increasingly unable to answer the question “when has government acted?” what will happen when we no longer know what a government looks like?   

                                               

 

 

                                                            Conclusion

            In Terre Haute, Indiana, voters and candidates are unfamiliar with the academic literature exploring the intricacies of these public-private contracting relationships. It is unrealistic—and unfair—to expect otherwise. They, and we, are entitled to a system that is intelligible to people of ordinary intelligence. They, and we, are entitled to know who is in charge of what, and even more importantly, who can be held responsible for violations of their rights as citizens. Whatever the merits or drawbacks of “governance” or government-by-surrogate, a public management that takes citizens’ interests seriously will recognize the considerable burdens and “transaction costs”—financial, ethical and constitutional—that are being incurred solely as a byproduct of complexity.

 

 

                                                         

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Statutes

Hatch Political Activity Act of 1939, Ch. 40, 53 Stat. 1147; Act of July 19, 1940, Ch. 640, 54 Stat. 767.

 

The Hatch Act, 5 U.S.C. 7321-7326

 

Little Hatch Act, 5 U.S.C. § 1501 et seq.

 

Cases

 

Burke, Appellant-Petitioner v. Bennett, Appellee-Respondent (2008)

 No. 84A01-0801-CV-2. Vigo Circuit Court.

 

Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co., 419 U.S. 345 (1978).

 

Norwood v. Harrison, 413 U.S. 455 (1973).