The First 50 Years

The First 50 Years National Academy of Public Administration (1967-2017) By R. Scott Fosler President’s Note by Teresa W. Gerton The National Academy of Public Administration (the Academy) is an independent, nonprofit, and nonpartisan organization established in 1967 to assist government leaders in building more effective, accountable, and transparent organizations. Chartered by Congress to provide nonpartisan expert advice, the Academy’s unique feature is its over 850 Fellows—including former cabinet officers, Members of Congress, governors, mayors, and state legislators, as well as prominent scholars, business executives, and public administrators. The Academy helps the federal government address its critical management challenges through in-depth studies and analyses, advisory services and technical assistance, congressional testimony, forums and conferences, and online stakeholder engagement. Under contracts with government agencies, some of which are directed by Congress, as well as grants from private foundations, the Academy provides insights on key public management issues, as well as advisory services to government agencies. To access this document online, please visit our website at www.napawash.org/history. Copyright © 2017 by National Academy of Public Administration. All rights reserved. Published and hosted by the Academy Table of Contents PRESIDENT’S NOTE I PREFACE III CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 2 CHAPTER 2. ORIGINS OF NAPA 12 CHAPTER 3. FOUNDATIONS 28 CHAPTER 4. THE CLINTON YEARS 64 CHAPTER 5. THE BUSH YEARS 118 CHAPTER 6. THE OBAMA YEARS 150 CHAPTER 7. EPILOGUE 186 APPENDICES 204 President’s Note When I became the 16th President of the National Academy of Public Administration in January, 2017, our 50th Anniversary year, one of the first documents I read was Alan Dean’s history of the Academy’s first 25 years. His brief summary of the Academy’s incredible impact over its initial two and half decades left me even more impressed by this organization and its members, but it also left me wanting more. And yet, there wasn’t more…no one had kept the history of the second 25 years! Sure, we had reams of paper documents and virtual stacks of electronic files, but no one had told the story in such a way that it could be shared and passed on. As I began to ask around about who might take up the pen for such a task, one name kept coming back to me: Scott Fosler. Over lunch one day, I asked, and Scott later agreed. He drafted a general outline in late spring. Over the summer, the Academy’s staff and interns searched the archives; reviewed and indexed thousands of articles, meeting minutes, and reports; scanned hours of video from interviews and events; and provided Scott with volumes of raw content. He miraculously sorted, sifted, culled, and prioritized all of that, and crafted the history you now hold. From the beginning, we knew this document could not be comprehensive. In the time and pages available, we simply could not capture every event, every report, or the name of every Fellow I involved in every facet of the Academy’s myriad activities. What we did want to capture was the essence of the Academy, the arc of its history, its persistence through times of national and organizational stress, and its extraordinary value to the country. To the Academy’s team, including Elijah Evans, Lisa Trahan, Randy Lyon, Joe Mitchell, and interns David Bilger and Anne Lieber, I offer my thanks. The Fellows who reviewed and edited this document one last time before it went to print have my sincere appreciation. I am most deeply grateful to Scott for his willing spirit, his good humor, and his persistence throughout this project. Whether your tenure as a Fellow is one year or fifty, I hope you enjoy this story. But more than that, I hope you find it inspiring. It is a compelling story, one filled with hope and commitment and accomplishment, and one that should remind us that “a government that works, and works for all” is worth striving toward for another 50 years. Teresa W. Gerton President/CEO National Academy of Public Administration II Preface When Academy President Terry Gerton asked me to take on this assignment last spring, I was pleased to hear that she wanted an updated history of the Academy for the 50th anniversary, and honored to be asked to do it. But I had two concerns. One was time. And the other was the fact that I’ve been deeply involved with the Academy for a substantial part of that history. I worked through the time issue and concluded the project was doable on a tight schedule. As to the second concern, it brought to mind the thinking of Yale political scientist and Academy Fellow James Fesler about a similar dilemma when he considered writing an article on a 50- year look back at the Brownlow Committee,1 for which he was a staff member: A retrospective approach to an event of half a century ago carries the risk of unwarranted benignity. That risk is compounded if one was, as I, a participant in the event. I can only declare my interest and proceed with my present task, disciplined by awareness that this year is also the bicentennial of the Constitution, the centennial of Woodrow Wilson’s seminal essay, ‘The Study of Administration,’ and year one of a reaffirmation of the checks and balances system.2 III Invoking his droll sense of humor, Jim Fesler once told me that he thought the two of us must have a lot in common since one of us was a Fesler and the other a Fosler. So I feel at some liberty to follow his example, declare my interest and proceed with my present task, disciplined by awareness that several hundred Fellows who have also been deeply involved with the Academy will be sharing this opportunity for a 50th anniversary retrospection from their own perspectives. Fifty years is something of an arbitrary time period. But it also has some genuine meaning in human context. The Bible (Leviticus) talks of a 50-year Jubilee when all debts are to be forgiven, all property returned to its original owners, and all land allowed to lie fallow. It’s not clear to what extent this admonition was ever followed in practice, but its expression reflected more than theology alone. The Jubilee was also viewed as a way to alleviate swelling inequalities and avert associated economic, social and political calamities, as well as to restore nutrients to the soil.3 Jay Forrester, an MIT pioneer of the digital revolution who applied his computer prowess to problems of management and public policy, discovered what he believed to be a half-century pattern in the systems dynamics of societies.4 Forrester found support for this notion in (Kondratieff) economic long-wave theory that predicts a major economic and financial upheaval every 40 to 60 years, a notion largely dismissed by mainstream economists who nonetheless generally accept the existence of shorter-term economic cycles. Forrester was a rigorously objective scientist curious about what constituted the dividing line between theories that claimed to be scientific and habits of practice and conventional wisdom he found regularly at play in the management of organizations. His answer settled on fallible human cognition in both perspectives, with the IV fifty year spread constituting a period over which living memory and experience fade, as Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff found in their 2009 book, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.5 As the National Academy of Public Administration looks back on its first fifty years, we can see this dynamic of fading institutional memory at play, highlighted against the trajectory of the American system of governance. Many of the first generation of Academy Fellows that we have lost were consequential players in earlier phases of that broader history of our national democracy and its complex organizational forms. Consider the intermingled careers of four Academy Fellows whose lives spanned the 20th century. Luther Gulick (1892-1993) was born before Frederick Jackson Turner informed the world that the American frontier had closed,6 and lived to see the first Baby Boomer elected president of the United States in 1992. That was the same year the Academy ended its first quarter-century and started its second. Gulick began his career in the new field of public administration in 1915, was in personal contact with its earliest founders,7 and became a leader in its intellectual and institutional development for the next half- century (and beyond).8 In the immediate post-World War II period, future Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon (1916- 2001) challenged Gulick and the intellectual direction of public administration,9 a debate in which Dwight Waldo (1913- 2000) was soon fully engaged.10 At about the same time, Peter Drucker (1909 - 2005) was consciously deciding that a focus on the role and management of the business corporation posed the better hope for Western civilization than undue preoccupation with government per se.11 In the second half of the 20th century, as Gulick and Waldo remained firmly oriented toward the world of government, Simon V moved in the direction of generic themes of management, social organization and the emerging world of artificial intelligence,12 while Drucker made an intellectual round-trip back to his first love of social ecology more broadly defined, including public service and the rising importance of nonprofit organizations.13 I had the honor of meeting Simon and Drucker on occasion, and the privilege (and delight) of working with Gulick and Waldo, which also provided a bridge of personal connection to early founders of the field.

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