Public Administration, 1927

Extract

The following pages represent an experiment. They are devoted to an initial attempt to summarize the most important events in the field of public administration in the United States for a calendar year. A series of such summaries, if they could be made reasonably complete, would presumably be of substantial value, at least to the academic world; the present survey, incomplete and unsatisfactory from many points of view, may at least serve as a point of departure for later enlargements and improvements. I am indebted to many correspondents for assistance in gathering the materials on which it is based; and I acknowledge my gratitude to them, without implicating them in the result.

Administrative Reorganization. Although the movement for reorganization of public administration has slowed down, significant steps were taken in 1927. Two large-scale state reorganizations were effected, in California and Virginia, the latter following a careful survey by the National Institute of Public Administration.

In California the bulk of the state work is consolidated in nine departments, the directors of which comprise the governor's council. This is an interesting legal reconstruction of the governor's council inherited from the eighteenth century in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire. The department of finance (Chap. 251) is given general powers of supervision over all matters concerning financial and business policies of the state, including specifically authority to audit, to visit and inspect institutions, and with the governor to authorize expenditures in excess of appropriations.