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D. Bradford Hunt, Gail Radford. The Rise of the Public Authority: Statebuilding and Economic Development in Twentieth-Century America., The American Historical Review, Volume 120, Issue 1, February 2015, Pages 269–270, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.1.269
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By the late twentieth century, the American administrative state had expanded far beyond traditional governmental bureaucracies, like the U.S. Department of Commerce or county-level departments of public health, to encompass a thicket of lesser-known entities, including federally funded research and development centers, publicly chartered corporations, and special-purpose districts. These ranged from the ambitious Tennessee Valley Authority to the specialized Jet Propulsion Laboratory to the lowly Springfield (Massachusetts) Parking Authority. Today, the number of governmental bodies is difficult to grasp. The U.S. Census in 2012 counted 90,106 federal, state, and local governmental units; Illinois alone had nearly 7,000 governments, including 3,227 in special districts.
How to explain this outcome? In a lucid, concise, and compelling synthesis, The Rise of the Public Authority: Statebuilding and Economic Development in Twentieth-Century America brings a historical sensibility to the evolution of extramural state building in the twentieth century. Author Gail Radford is “sympathetic to the critics” of public authorities, arguing that over reliance on the form has had “unfortunate consequences” for American state building. Public authorities, she contends, “generally lack democratic accountability, have a tendency to fragment and commercialize the public sector, and are poor tools for social justice or regional planning” (p. 2).
