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Korean Journal of Policy Studies
Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University

Korean J. Policy Stud. 2019; 34(1):1-21

pISSN: 1225-5017, eISSN: 2765-2807

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52372/kjps34101

Article

Agency Politicization and the Decline of Neutral Competence: The Case of OMB in the United States

Jae Young Lim1
1Jae Young Lim is a senior researcher at the Center for Government Competitiveness in the Graduate School of Public Administration at Seoul National University. E-mail: jaeyounglim@yahoo.com. This work has been supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2017S1A3A2065838). I want to thank the three reviewers for their thoughtful comments.

© Copyright 2019 Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Jan 09, 2019; Revised: Feb 27, 2019; Revised: Mar 18, 2019; Accepted: Mar 18, 2019

Published Online: Apr 30, 2019

Abstract

The modern presidency is heavily politicized. The president is expected to be the chief legislator, chief economist, chief psychiatrist, and chief diplomat for the nation and is the cog around which national affairs revolve. However, a politicized presidency signals the downfall of the managerial presidency that was buttressed by agencies with neutral competence. This article traces the evolution of an American budgetary agency, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from its inception to the present, documenting the baleful impact of the politicized presidency on the OMB. Amid politicization, the OMB lost its professional reputation for neutral competence and was replaced by the Congressional Budget Office as the foremost authority on national budgetary matters. This article, in essence, presents a cautionary tale of agency politicization in modern bureaucracy.

Keywords: modern presidency; Office of Management and Budget; politicized presidency; neutral competence; Congressional Budget Office