The Neutrality of Government Economists: How involved should agency economists and other bureaucrats be in policymaking?

• Author: Shapiro, Stuart
• Position: BUREAUCRACY

Economists are everywhere in government, or so it seems. Within the White House there is a Council of Economic Advisers and a National Economic Council. One of the most powerful institutions in government, the Federal Reserve, is run almost entirely by economists. Another powerful agency, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), is populated by both economists and those trained in public affairs programs, which include courses on economics. Many cabinet departments have sub-agencies dedicated to economic research (e.g., the Bureau of Economic Analysis in the Department of Commerce), and even those that don't have specific economic research agencies have offices or sections of offices that employ economists (e.g., the National Center for Environmental Economics at the Environmental Protection Agency).

One of the central debates in the public administration literature is over the desire for "neutrality" in government officials. The field traces its founding in part to an 1887 Political Science Quarterly article by Woodrow Wilson (yes, that Woodrow Wilson), "The Study of Administration," which argues for a separation between politics and administration. In the century and a half since then, scholars have debated what it means in practice to effectuate this separation, whether it is a good thing, and the meaning of neutrality among civil servants.

How should we think about the abundance of economists in positions of influence in government, considering these longstanding debates on neutrality? Some would immediately scoff at the idea that economists are in any way "neutral." With a common training, there are some ideas that economists bring consistently to any debate, such as the ability of markets to improve human welfare. Those who oppose this viewpoint would be among the most vocal detractors of characterizing economists as neutral.

But in many ways, some (but not all) economists represent the ideal of a civil servant as envisioned by the most classic interpretations of the politics/administration dichotomy. In recent research I conducted at several agencies, but most particularly the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Economic Research Service (ERS) in the Department of Agriculture, the dedication of government economists to the principle of neutrality stood out. Below, I discuss the varying views in the literature on neutrality in civil servants and explain how the economists at CBO and ERS strive for something close to the longest-standing of these ideals.

WHAT IS NEUTRALITY?

The desire for administrative neutrality in the late 19th century United States came from two impulses. One was a reaction to the Jacksonian spoils system, where the civil service was seen as a political tool of the president and the party machines that elected him. In other words, neutrality was seen as a counterpoint to partisanship, rather than neutrality on policy goals. This sentiment was embodied in the 1883 Pendleton Act, which gave rise to the modern civil service. The second impulse was the idea, embodied in the progressive movement and the "scientific management" literature, that there was a best way to accomplish the goals of an organization, whether that organization was a private business or the federal government.

However, as the federal government grew throughout the progressive era and particularly the New Deal era, the ideal of neutrality began to bump up against the realities of governing. The question of what it meant to be a neutral civil servant became increasingly prominent in the burgeoning field of public administration. Some conceived neutrality as meaning serving some ill-defined "general interest" as opposed to "special interests."...