What We Have to Show for 30 Years of New Public Management: Higher Costs, More Complaints

“New public management” (NPM)—that now-hackneyed shorthand phrase for a set of loosely related ideas about government and public service reform—was ostensibly intended to create “a government that works better and costs less” (in the famous words of the United States’ 1993 National Performance Review, reworking Bentham’s famous “aptitude maximized, expense minimized” slogan of nearly two centuries before). So what do we have to show for three decades or so of NPM reforms? The short answer seems to be: higher costs and more complaints.