A Mid-Term Appraisal-The Reagan Presidency: Limited Government and Political Administration
评估里根政府头两年如何推行有限中央政府和增强国防的治理哲学，分析其行政改革对公共行政的影响，适合研究美国政治与行政的学者。
President Reagan's philosophy of governance has been the unswerving agenda of his administration. It is a tenaciously optimistic faith. Limited central government, with enhanced defense capacity, and some return to state-centered federalism are one side of the president's hope. A relatively unrestrained private economy and individual self-reliance are the flip side of this belief, with variations on themes of deregulation, capital formation, and social services reductions. This article assesses public administration in the Reagan administration during its initial two years of strategically staged and energetic efforts to implement that philosophy of governance. Except for significant general governmental retrenchment and enlarged emphasis on Carter initiatives to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse, public administration developments have had a low profile. Several of them, however, have been and are important. Some have been positive. Most crucial, however, public administration under President Reagan has been dominated by the presidential agenda and political actions to implement it. A counter revolution to 50 years of social and political views was proclaimed by Reagan loyalists as the goal at the outset of the new administration. The hope of many was to reverse trends since the New Deal and to erase much of what transpired as a result of the Great Society. The president proclaimed that view with dramatic clarity in his inaugural address: Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.' That was not mere rhetoric for the moment. That outlook, above all else, has expressed during its first two years the Reagan administration's definition of its 1980 electoral mandate. It has been played forcefully and with unsurpassed dramatic skill as a heroic answer to a historic calling. The Reagan philosophy has been pursued to a significant extent as ideology; as the answer to America in search of itself. Theodore White, in his 1982 book of that title,2 stressed that a search for