Balancing the Federal Budget: Trimming the Herds or Eating the Seed Corn?

Just when it seems that the government is once more wallowing in huge budget deficits and that a balanced budget is a thing of the past, this book by noted organization and fiscal administration expert Irene Rubin only gains more significance for the insights it offers about current condition. While the book recounts the struggle to balance the budget, it also gives a glimpse of the real problems agencies have experienced and will continue to suffer from because of hollow government and the mismatch between agency mission and workforce reduction. Rubin's book speaks to those who care about government and its public and how the market -- of contractors and clientele groups of government programs -- have caught agencies in games of survival. The book carries one of the emerging paradoxes of public administration today: that while agencies are beaten by mismatched personnel cuts and growing missions, they become less able to resist Congressional mandates. They learn to obscure quality reductions because lower performance might invite more cuts; yet hiding the pain only seems to prove the existence of slack and that reduction was deserved in the first place. It's amazing for Rubin to have captured this picture of government bureaucracy at this moment in time.