The Center for Social Data Analytics Colloquium: Rachel Augustine Potter

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Talk Title: Going Private: Presidents and the Outsourcing of the Administrative State

Abstract: Though headlines warn of an imperial presidency and an all-powerful administrative state, the facts tell a more paradoxical story. Since 1960, the U.S. population has grown by 88% and inflation-adjusted federal spending has increased by 530%, yet the federal workforce has remained flat at around two million employees. The gap between the image of a sprawling bureaucracy and the reality of a lean one is explained by contractors. The federal government relies on a vast contractor workforce—obscured from public view and many times the size of the civil service—to perform a wide range of tasks, including highly skilled and policy-relevant work. Unlike merit-protected career bureaucrats, contractors have strong incentives to please the boss, making them a malleable workforce and tremendously useful to presidents for political purposes. Going Private explores how contractors are deployed to advance the president’s agenda by staffing priority issues, bypassing recalcitrant bureaucrats, and providing politically valuable services. By relying on the private sector to do government work, presidents both get their work done and expand the power of the office. These trends, long in the making, have taken on new urgency in the Trump 2.0 era, where efforts to weaken the career civil service, shutter agencies, and centralize executive control have made contractors even more valuable. While Going Private focuses on the decades leading up to this moment, it shows how the groundwork was laid for today’s dramatic reconfiguration of the administrative state.

Bio: Rachel Augustine Potter is an Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia and a Senior Fellow at the Miller Center for Public Affairs. Her research focuses on American political institutions, with a particular emphasis on the executive branch and the bureaucracy.