“John DiIulio’s freestyle mix of ideas from left and right performs this service beautifully. He focuses on questions that most elected officials are reluctant, even petrified, to talk much about.”
—E.J. Dionne
“John DiIulio has handed up the first half of the indictment. The federal Leviathan by Proxy is just as dysfunctional as he portrayed it.”
—Charles Murray
John DiIulio’s
Bring Back the Bureaucrats is an eye-opening account of the hollowing out of the American government. DiIulio, an expert on public administration at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that the US has fewer full-time federal officials than it did in 1960, while the amount of money they dispense has increased fivefold. In their place is a legion of for-profit contractors and non-profit NGOs with highly mixed motives, about which we know very little. In the process, misguided American hostility to the government has produced a massive challenge for democratic accountability.
—Francis Fukuyama, Senior fellow at Stanford and author of
Political Order and Political Decay
“Everyone should be upset with the problem DiIulio describes — both those who prioritize limited government and those who prioritize effective government. . . . The responses to ‘Leviathan by proxy’ will differ according to ideology. But any serious political movement on the right or left must now be a government reform movement.”
—Michael Gerson, The Washington Post
“DiIulio highlights the inadequacies and opacity of proxy government to make a counterintuitively conservative argument for adding a million new full-time civil servants to the federal ranks. . . . DiIulio’s analysis meshes well with a growing and pan-ideological scholarly literature on the modern American state that emphasizes its ‘hidden,’ ‘delegated,’ ‘submerged,’ ‘extended,’ and ‘divided’ qualities. Making government and its employees at once more visible and accountable is a reform agenda implicit in much of this work.”
—Sam Rosenfeld and Jake Rosenfeld, The American Prospect
“Reform is necessary, and DiIulio deserves credit for admitting that it may be impossible without more resources.”
—Patrick Brennan, National Review
“In Bring Back the Bureaucrats, John J. Dilulio Jr. concisely and passionately outlines the dangers of Big Government by stealth in the USA as bureaucratic tasks become increasingly outsourced to proxies including charities, business contractors and local government. . . . At just 142 pages, and with plenty of passion and colorful phrases, Bring Back the Bureaucrats could easily be read over a weekend by the average over-stretched bureaucrat. It is not an academic book but is full of clearly presented and pertinent facts that would provide a useful starting point for discussion for university students.”
—Ruth Garland, The London School of Economics and Political Science
“Recommended for public libraries, universities, and anyone interested in political science.”
—Dorothy J. Smith, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, The Christian Librarian
