POLS 3030: Public Admin

An authorizing committee is a type of congressional ______ committee.

"appropriations" is not the answer

______ focus on funding levels.

"authorizing committees" is not the answer

Minorities comprised ______ percent of the Senior Executive Service in 2005.

12

Which of the following types of legislation creates programs and limits the amount of money to be spent managing them?

Authorizations

The transparent performance strategy of government reform was championed by which presidential administration?

Barack Obama

The president prepares the overall budget and ______ oversee(s) federal budget appropriations.

Congress

According to the Constitution, all of the following hold true EXCEPT

Congress faithfully executes laws.

The Budget and Accounting Act revolutionized the federal budgeting by transferring a significant amount of authority from ______ to ______.

Congress; the president

________ use(s) private sector experts and outside organizations to do government work.

Contract administration

All of the following are measures included in GPRA EXCEPT:

Debt ratio

Reinventing Government and the Taxpayer Bill of Rights are examples of which type of reform?

Downsizing

According to the author, there is substantial evidence that control of administration has always ranked as a high priority for Congress.

False

Bureaucracy is a feature of the public sector, not the private sector.

False

Citizens and elected officials demand a lower standard of ethics than that expected in the private sector for political appointed public administrators.

False

Dwight Waldo and Woodrow Wilson were the earliest public administration scholars, each writing around the 1890s.

False

Dwight Waldo contends that public administration should emphasize "one rule of good administration for all governments alike" as well as a particular country's needs.

False

Formal program evaluation is an ineffective method of providing regular, high quality feedback.

False

Government's customer service movement is a concept with roots back to Woodrow Wilson.

False

Implementation of federal programs never includes state and local governments

False

Most of the federal government's financial activity takes place through direct tools.

False

Participative decision-making seeks to improve decision-making by involving markets.

False

Red tape is generally considered a positive characteristic of public administration because it helps to ensure efficient execution of public provisions.

False

Revolving-door restrictions allow federal employees to move easily between federal agencies and private-sector businesses with which they have conducted official government business.

False

Rule of Law became and even more effective tool or safeguard to ensure accountability as government took on more relationships with third-party interests.

False

Systems theory emphasizes the effect of interest groups on an organization.

False

Tax expenditures are essentially free for the government to issue because they do not include a direct government expenditure on a public good or service.

False

The concept of ____________Accountability ensures that agency officials spend money on the programs they are charged with managing-and only on those programs.

Fiscal

What piece of legislation passed in 1993 requires executive branch agencies to define their goals and measure their performance in achieving them?

Government Performance and Results Act

Recovering from which of the following national tragedies revealed the failure of so-called "vending machine government"?

Hurricane Katrina

Articulated by his book published in 1936, the theory that government can use the budget to steer the economy can be attributed to

John Maynard Keynes.

All of the following have launched major human capital campaigns EXCEPT the

National Academy of Public Administration.

_______ occurs when administrative law judges within the agencies hear individual cases.

Not "Administrative Rule-making"

The ______ proposes the budget and the ______ authorizes expenditures and determines how revenues are obtained.

President; congress

All of these methods have been used to reduce the workforce EXCEPT

Promotions

Progressives such as Woodrow Wilson wrote that ____________ would serve as a check to safeguard citizens from a tyrannical bureaucracy.

Rule of Law

The Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration is most closely associated with which of the following barriers to information flow?

Secrecy

_______ places value on interactions with the environment.

Systems theory

______ prohibits federal workers from being involved in political campaigns.

The Hatch Act

_____ was created by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.

The Senior Executive Service

What is the civil service system?

The collection of rules and procedures that govern the employees who work in career positions in government.

The classic standards for hiring and firing, the preferences for veterans in recruitment, and the prohibition against nepotism, among other requirements, all fall under

Title 5 of the U.S. Code.

Any real organizational system, including a public organization, is extremely complex and therefore difficult to describe fully with a simple model.

True

It is hard to remove mediocre employees in the civil service.

True

Most people believe defense is the largest category of spending.

True

Out of fear that their best employees might leave to seek higher positions in the private sector, government supervisors often engage in grade creep.

True

Over the last two decades, government has grown fastest at the state and local levels.

True

Paradoxically although the Senate committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform have the broadest responsibility and strongest powers for overseeing administration, they have traditionally ranked low in prestige.

True

Participative decision making depends on the acquisition of information from those affected by decisions.

True

The Government Performance and Results Act has significantly changed the fabric of congressional oversight by requiring that agencies increase the amount and the quality of the information they give to Congress.

True

Total government employment has grown in proportion to the growth of the population.

True

Two-thirds of the members of the Senior Executive Service have advanced degrees.

True

The classic question of basic budgeting: "On what basis shall it be decided to allocate x dollars to activity A instead of activity B?" can be attributed to whom?

V.O. Key

This piece of legislation requires agencies to report to Congress and GAO on available positions requiring Senate Confirmation.

Vacancies Reform Act

______ and information are the main issues that each decision-making approach must tackle

Values

The Incrementalism theorist _____________ argue that __________ budgeting techniques best answer how to allocate scare resources.

Wildavsky; bottom up

The Senior Executive Service has experienced all of the following problems EXCEPT

a lack of employees with advanced degrees.

According to the text, _____ is the foundation of bureaucracy in a democracy because it allows ____ to control administrator's actions.

accountability; elected officials

In pursuing the objectives of government regulation the following three features are central:

adequacy of resources, regulatory procedure, delegation of legislative power.

The participative approach utilizes ______ for decision making.

advisory committees of private citizens

Unlike traditional public administration which focused on ______ as the unit of analysis, implementation studies focus on___________.

agencies; programs and the results they produce

A congressional ______ commits money for spending, and congressional ___ create programs and place limits on the amount of money that can be spent.

appropriation; authorizations

Charles Lindblom is an advocate of the ______ approach.

bargaining

According to the text, the fundamental precepts of reengineering contradict the fundamental precepts of

both downsizing and continuous improvement.

The Program Assessment Rating Tool and zero-base budgeting are

budget reform techniques.

In addition to regulating autonomously, state and local governments

can administer national regulatory programs.

All of the following factors can hinder successful implementation EXCEPT

certainty

Three fundamental elements of the civil service system are:

classification; staffing; compensation

_____________ is the concept that individuals should receive equal pay for jobs of comparable value.

comparable worth.

The federal government has primary responsibility for spending in all of the following areas EXCEPT

corrections.

Regulatory administration revolves around all of the following main values EXCEPT

cost reductions.

According to the text, the American public is generally ______ regulation.

critical towards

The pluralist approach emphasizes interest groups whereas the humanist approach emphasizes

employees.

Cost-benefit analysis and Risk Assessment are two types of __________________ offered by regulatory agencies.

expert approaches

According to the text, improvement of government performance via better performance management has

fallen short.

Government mandates are

federally imposed regulations.

Of the three elements of accountability, which is the most traditional and widespread?

fiscal accountability

Weber wrote that officials should be __________, salaried, and selected on the basis of _______________.

fulltime; technical qualifications.

An advantage for contracting out is

gaining special expertise.

The traditional and dominant model of organizational theory is the

hierarchical approach.

The development of a strategy to recruit and retain the workers the government needs and to ensure that they produce strong and effective government programs describes which issue?

human capital

The ____________________ rooted in the dynamics of human relations, condemns the impersonality of bureaucratic hierarchies and so pleads for the humanizing of organizations.

humanist approach

The humanist approach emphasizes leadership, whereas the pluralist approach emphasizes

interest groups.

The goal for administrative responsibility is to maximize ______ controls and to minimize _______ controls.

internal; external

The major shortcoming of the rule of law approach to bureaucratic accountability is

it is impossible to translate laws into administrative action with precision and predictability.

Federally imposed regulations are also called

mandates.

Executive Core Qualifications are skills that should be possessed by

members of the Senior Executive Service (SES).

To American citizens the term "bureaucracy" most often means something

negative.

According to the text, federal reform efforts have borrowed strategies and ideas from all of the following EXCEPT

nonprofit organizations.

A proponent of the ______ approach would utilize an advisory committee of private citizens for decision making.

participative

According to the text, accountability is best described as a relationship between

people and actions.

Although elected officials authorize, direct and provide resources towards policy, ______ entrusted to administrators is what translates the intent of the laws into reality.

policy execution

Public organizations administer law, which makes them different from

private organizations.

Regulatory administration revolves around:

procedural fairness, substantive correctness, and achievement of goals

The fundamental building block of reengineering is

process

All of the following factors can hinder successful implementation EXCEPT

program evaluation

A government agency can hire according to any of the following methods EXCEPT

promoting from executive to full professional.

The government risks sacrificing control, responsiveness, and sometimes quality when it relies on ______ for program implementation.

proxies

Government by _________ uses third-party agents to deliver programs that the government funds.

proxy

A proponent of the ______ approach would favor privatization.

public-choice

The ______ approach holds efficiency as the highest value for decision makers.

rational

According to the text, ______ are the central nervous system of government.

regulations

Over the past thirty years, the total number of government employees has

remained steady when measured in gross numbers.

Continuous improvement is focused on _______________.

responsiveness

CompStat, which produces weekly reports on crime in each police precinct, is an example of

results-based management.

The two major methods used to determine whether to implement regulation are

risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis.

The politics-administration dichotomy maintains democratic accountability by

separating political decision making from administrative policy.

All of the following are complicating factors that must be taken into account when studying large-scale organizations EXCEPT

simple models.

The federal tax deduction for mortgage interest and local property taxes is considered a

tax expenditure

Management by objectives and zero-base budgeting are

techniques to reform incrementalism.

According to the text, government reform efforts across the globe

tend to mix and match downsizing, reengineering, and continuous improvement techniques with little regard for their inherent contradictions.

Graham Allison's account of decision making in the Cuban missile crisis most closely illustrates the merits of

the bargaining approach.

Efficiency has great value for the scientific management movement as well as for

the classical model.

Each of the following explains increased administrative action in policy formation EXCEPT

the decreased role of legislative involvement.

All of the following are challenges to structuralist perspectives and systems theory EXCEPT

the hierarchical challenge.

The government has failed in building human capital partly because of

the lack of adequate strategic human capital planning.

Woodrow Wilson's view on ________ has created a lasting scholarly debate.

the neutrality of public administration

According to the traditional rule, in order to exercise standing to sue, the plaintiff must show that a so-called legal wrong is involved.

true

Many federal government reform efforts have sprung from state and local governments.

true

According to the text, one of the biggest advantages of the participative approach is the

wealth of information received.

The structural approach and systems theory fail to account for

workers' happiness.