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Herbert Kaufman

Are Government Organizations Immortal? Paperback – January 1, 1976

by Herbert Kaufman (Author)

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An examination of the major units of federal executive departments shows that government agencies tend to persist, once established, but that terminations and dismantling is not negligible. Bibliogs

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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Brookings Inst Pr; Highlighting edition (January 1, 1976)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0815748396
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0815748397
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces

Best Sellers Rank: #4,400,504 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #163,803 in Politics & Government (Books)

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Fed Employees Ought To Read & Study This

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 7, 2021

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I've commenced study of the US Government Agencies. James Q Wilson identified this pamphlet in his "Bureaucracy" book (another must read for Federal Agency employees).

Herbert Kaufman, then a senior contributor at The Brookings Institution, answers with "Maybe Yes, Maybe No". He then goes on with a great commentary on several historical vignettes. He also clearly explains his methodology, the limitations, and then the results. Unsurprisingly, he pegs the number of continuously operating agencies/bureacracies at about 85%.

I enjoyed the pamphlet - a quick, easy read, chockfull of interesting data points and commentary.

I do wish that some Institution (Brookings Institution - are you reading this?) would undertake an effort to republish some of these old commentaries and books, and take on updating them as well. The best example in any genre I know of is Jason Zweig's commentary update of The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham.

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Mark Koerner

YES, THEY ARE.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 15, 2002

Critics of the federal government--especially conservative critics--are fond of saying that government agencies are almost never abolished. "No matter how ineffective they are, they just go on forever," is the oft-heard complaint.

In 1974, Herbert Kaufman tried to find out whether government agencies do go on forever. The result, ARE GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS IMMORTAL?, has to be the most interesting volume ever to come out of the Brookings Institution and the best 79-page book ever published.
Briefly, Kaufman compared the number of federal "organizations" (a larger group than bonafide "agencies") in existence in 1923 with the federal organizations of 1973. This was more difficult than it sounds, as Kaufman had to account for agency-mergers, name-changes, and changes in mission, but eventually he came up with some reasonable rules for what constituted the "same" agency over the span of half a century. He also supplemented his two agency censuses with data from various government reports to determine agency founding dates. All in all, the only real flaws in the study were that Kaufman eliminated the "independent commissions" as well as everything in the Department of Defense. He also failed to incorporate the agencies that were both created and abolished in the years _between_ 1923 and 1973, which may have skewed the results somewhat.
What Kaufman found was that federal agencies are indeed "immortal" for the most part, and that the number of agencies keeps on increasing like so many layers of sedimentary rock. The agency head-count went from 11 in 1789 to 123 in 1923 to 394 in 1973. Between 1923 and 1973, only 27 agencies were abolished. This gives government agencies an 85 percent survival rate over 50 years. Equally important, Kaufman found that the longer an agency was in existence, the better chance it had to survive. In other words, the federal offices created under Washington, Adams, and Jefferson had a better chance of still being around than the ones created under Eisenhower and Kennedy.
If there is any surprise here, it is in what Kaufman calls the "death-rate." F.D.R. and Truman presided over an expanding federal government, but during their administrations 12 agencies were abolished--a very high figure for a 20-year period. And no agencies disappeared between 1957 and 1973, making these years quite unusual.
At the end of the book, Kaufman discusses how the agency death-rate might be increased. Among other proposals, he deals with "sunset legislation," at that time a fad idea for getting rid of institutions that had outlived their usefulness or never been any good to begin with. Under the simplest version of sunsetting, first proposed by William O. Douglas, every government agency would have an expiration date; at that time, if Congress didn't specifically vote to keep the agency alive, it would be abolished. But Kaufman was if anything more skeptical of the sunset idea than he ought to have been. Since this book was published, some form of sunset review has become routine--though perhaps more at the state level than at the federal and local levels. What the long-run effects will be are uncertain, of course.
We need more books like this--at the very least a follow-up study to cover the last 25 years of administrative history. In a footnote on page 77, Kaufman laments that we have so little information, and he says we need more. "The journey," he writes, "has barely begun." Alas, 25 years later, it has still barely begun, even after Kaufman's brilliant start.

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