The rush to create a Department of Homeland Security has almost hidden a deeper issue: what direction our country will take in designing and managing public organizations.

Profound differences exist in the bills passed by the House and the Senate. They illustrate two competing models of public management to guide the new department, whose formation is taken as a given.

One model is taken from schools of business and private sector management practice, which stresses the need for managers to be held accountable to broad organizational goals but allowed considerable flexibility in how to plan and manage activities to achieve them. This model, sometimes called New Public Management, holds that best practices can be transferred from one type of organization to another; that individuals in organizations are motivated largely by self-interest, and as a result, should be rewarded through monetary incentives; and that managers should be accountable to higher authority around broad goal achievement, and not through compliance to a myriad of rules and regulations that constrain their ability to innovate, motivate, and reward. This is the model of public management that is reflected in the Bush Administration’s proposal, supported by the Republican leadership of the House and passed with only a few modifications by the lower chamber.

The second model holds that public management is fundamentally different from managing private sector organizations, and must be guided by rules that recognize the unique nature of the public sector. Tracing a line of thought that dates back to the formation of the modern American state in the early 20^th century, this model holds that the work of public administrators must be insulated from the corrupting force of partisan politics by rules guaranteeing civil servants protection from arbitrary treatment by superiors, even if it means limiting the ability of managers to hire, fire, and promote in a flexible manner. A corollary of its management philosophy is the notion that civil servants are motivated by a sense of mission or calling, and that purely economic rewards fail to tap the deep sense of responsibility that civil servants feel to society. As a leading scholar in Public Administration once noted, “public and private management are alike in all unimportant respects.” This public-sector-is-different model is the one that Democrats in both houses of Congress favor, and which is reflected in the Senate version.

The debate over the underlying nature of public management is, if anything, far more important than the reorganization itself. The goals of the reorganization—better sharing of information among agencies and better coordination of policy, perhaps savings by eliminating duplication and redundancy—are almost never achieved by this sort of crude shuffling of bureaucratic boxes. In some cases, the problems are made more acute by housing the programs in the same organization rather than by coordinating their activities across organizational boundaries.

The accepted faith of those in the field of Public Administration (whose input has barely been solicited on this issue) is that reorganization is almost always an essentially political act. In this case, the political end is to show the American public that the government is taking action on making them safe from terrorism, or to showcase an individual like Tom Ridge as a symbol of action when, in fact, there will be little he can accomplish as Secretary that he couldn’t do as a member of the White House staff.

Curiously, the godfather of the New Public Management model now being touted by Bush was none other than former Vice President Al Gore, who headed the National Commission on Public Service, a.k.a. The Gore Commission, in the early 1990s. It failed then to excite the public, even though it led fairly directly to the elimination of hundreds of thousands of federal civil service positions and championed the cause of flexible management. But the Gore approach also stressed participation by the employees themselves in planning change, and had none of the anti-bureaucrat rhetoric used by Bush and conservative Republican legislators to attack Gore during the 2000 campaign. Democrats arguing against the Bush approach can point to these differences, but should acknowledge that they, throughout the Clinton/Gore years, understood the need to cut down on the excessive rules and regulations governing federal personnel policy, procurement, and other limits on management autonomy.

The immediate questions facing the new department are how will it provide civil service protection for its employees and how will the constituent agencies work together and jell as an organization. Lurking in the background is the fear that the effort will be politicized, with the appointment to top management positions of individuals with no experience in public agencies and ties to business organizations that see the war as an opportunity for financial gain. What is needed is a model that takes the best parts of each of the competing approaches and melds them in a way that maximizes the advantages of each. Public jobs are not the same as private sector jobs; we saw that in the heroism of the New York firefighters, the courage of the FBI agent in Minneapolis, and the quick and imaginative thinking of the Pennsylvania state officials in saving the nine miners in Somerset County. Business models are based on short-term, bottom-line decisions that are not useful or appropriate for public sector managers. Going to business managers and business methods to solve problems of public administration is a bit like asking a dentist to perform open-heart surgery: much of the science is shared, but the specifics are profoundly different.

As governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge showed some appreciation for newer approaches to management, and wisely allowed successful pre-existing initiatives to continue and develop. As Secretary of Homeland Security, his first act should be to put together a group of top-level careerists from the constituent agencies to identify best practices, improve coordination and the sharing of vital information across agency lines, and formulate a strategic plan for managing homeland security over the long run. He should encourage his leadership team to work closely with their counterparts in state governments to plan a comprehensive national approach to security programs. Ridge’s most pressing task will be to convince the employees of the department (as Colin Powell has at the State Department), that their work is valued, that their patriotism and devotion to the public interest sets them apart, and that politics will have no place in a merit-driven, goal-achieving organization. It may be a hard pill for the Bush Administration to swallow, but it offers the best hope that the new department will achieve its goals, and perhaps point us toward a new era in public management thinking and practice.

Jeremy F. Plant is Professor of Public Policy and Administration at the School of Public Affairs, Penn State Harrisburg, where he teaches graduate courses in Public Management and conducts research on public policy and management issues.