Unpacking the Effects of Competing Mandates on Agency Performance

Abstract

Policy and Public Administration and co-director of the GW Regulatory Studies Center. His research focuses on agency policy making and implementation, including the impacts that organizational design, processes, and politics have on agency performance as well as how regulators and politicians respond to crises in regulated industries.Abstract: Public administration scholars and practitioners uniformly agree that saddling agencies with multiple mandates breeds dysfunction and impedes performance. However, less is known about the mechanisms by which combining purposes has these effects. This study of a broad set of U.S. federal agencies finds support for the conventional wisdom by showing that agencies balancing greater numbers of programs perform worse. The analysis further suggests that such organizations struggle largely because they are more likely to be forced to simultaneously adopt conflicting stances toward program targets. Moreover, when programs force agencies into conflicts in which they are asked to both support and restrain the same target, the resulting uncertainty among personnel regarding agency priorities helps explain why operations are negatively impacted. Thus, it is not simply that accumulating missions impedes agency performance but rather how those competing mandates interact that can define whether an agency will struggle to achieve its objectives. Research Article

Images of Coordination: How Implementing Organizations Perceive Coordination Arrangements

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Persistence or Partisanship: Exploring the Relationship between Presidential Administrations and Criminal Enforcement by the US Environmental Protection Agency, 1983–2019

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Strategic Management in Finnish and Norwegian Government Agencies

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