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Terry M. Moe argues that the interests of modern presidents lead them to eschew the "neutral competence" of professional staff agencies for the "responsive competence" more typical of presidential loyalists and the White House staff This article examines the critical case of the Bureau of the Budget, 1939-1948, an agency that Moe claims faced a Faustian choice between sacrificing neutral competence or failing to respond to presidential needs. The scholarly and historical record indicates that, contrary to Moe's claims, the agency maintained high levels of both neutral competence and responsiveness to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman during this period Moreover, the behavior of both the agency and its presidential clients was "rational" given the agency's structure and mission and given presidential needs.
Political scientists, public administration scholars, and presidents themselves have expended a great deal of energy considering the question of what sort of institutional and personnel arrangements enhance the ability of presidents to govern effectively. Recently, political scientist Terry M. Moe's (1985) theory of "responsive competence" has gained ascendancy in the field. According to Moe, the political expectations of the modern presidency have forced presidents to eschew the "neutral competence" of established executive branch institutions and instead seek "responsive competence" through centralizing the activities of policy development and executive branch coordination within the White House and by appointing presidential loyalists to positions deep within the bowels of executive agencies. Although the strategy has not been particularly successful, and has clear disadvantages, Moe claims that efforts to establish such a politicized presidency represent rational and inevitable responses to the demands of a modern president's political environment.
To support his argument, Moe draws heavily on the history of the U.S. Bureau of the Budget (BoB), renamed the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). From its founding in 1921 to its renaming in 1970, the BoB is reputed to have been a bastion of operational expertise, nonpartisanship, and professionalism that is denoted by the term neutral competence. Moe argues that modern presidents, beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, found the BoB to be largely unresponsive to their political needs for timely information and action consistent with their activist policy goals. The central mission of the BoB has been to achieve economy and efficiency in government, a...