Policy Analysts: A New Professional Role in Government Service

Abstract

T HE MAIN contemporary reform movement in the federal administration of the United States (and in some other countries as well) is based on an economic approach to public decision-making. The roots of this approach are in economic theory, especially micro-economics and welfare economics, and quantitative decisiontheory; the main tools of this approach are operations research, cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis, and program budgeting and systems analysis; and the new professionals of this approach are the systems analysts. Together, these elements constitute main components of the Planning-ProgrammingBudgeting System, as first developed in the Department of Defense and now being extended to most executive departments and establishments. In essence, these reforms constitute an invasion of public decision-making by economics. Going far beyond the domain of economic policy-making, the economic approach to decision-making views every decision as an allocation of resources between alternatives, that is, as an economic problem. Application of suitable tools of economic analysis should therefore, in this opinion, contribute to the improvement of decision-making, whatever the subject matter of the decision may be. This is the main