The Politics of Agency Termination: Confronting the Myth of Agency Immortality

Abstract

This article examines agency mortality between 1946 and 1997 and argues that, contrary to popular belief, agencies are not immortal. Rather, agencies face significant risks of termination, particularly due to political turnover. When an agency's opponents gain power, the hazards of agency mortality increase. Principal among the findings of this paper are that 62% of agencies created since 1946 have been terminated and that political turnover is one of the primary causes of termination.

Coming to Terms with Termination of Public Organizations

“…The latter also treat organizational survival dichotomously (no in-betweens), but did not encounter mergers and splits (perhaps due to their specific population of New Deal organizations). To Lewis (2002) an organization is dead as the result of a combination of name change, change of proximity to the president and change of function of the organization, which leads to more terminations than the abolishment/merger/split definition. To Boin et al, the organizational structure and leadership would have to be changed, too, before the organization was considered terminated (2010: 6-7).…”

“…Here, we look into the effects of such design. The work of Moe (1989) inspired Lewis (2002Lewis ( , 2004 and Boin et al (2010) to study the effects of design on populations of federal US government organizations. From their studies we derived the following hypotheses:…”

“…The board structure and notfor profit legacy of the mutualities prevented them from the audacity that became detrimental over time to many of the stocks. In similar vein, Lewis (2002) and Boin et al (2010) looked at characteristics such as board structure (vs single administrators) or political appointments of government organizations to see if those characteristics in fact increased termination hazards.…”

“…Starting with Herbert Kaufman's seminal Are Government Organizations Immortal? (1976), scholars on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond studied the transformation of government-including the survival of public organizations Hogwood 1988, 1991;Lewis 2002Lewis , 2004Carpenter and Lewis 2004;Adam et al 2007;Boin et al 2010Boin et al , 2016Rolland and Roness 2011;Park 2013;MacCarthaigh 2014;James et al 2015).…”

Frå stabilitet til turbulens. 70 år med organisasjonsendringar i departementa – politisk design eller institusjonell tilpasning?

“…Funksjonane til desse forvaltningsorgana blir imidlertid ikkje borte om organisasjonane blir nedlagt. Så spørsmålet er derfor kvifor reorganisering spelar ei rolle (Lewis 2002). For det første er innflytelsen til politiske aktørar i stor grad påverka av den organisasjonsstrukturen dei har til disposisjon.…”