American Exceptionalism, Human Resource Management, and the Contract State

With the nature, scope, and pace of public sector contracting accelerating significantly during the Bush administration, and with the Obama administration promising to curb the contracting excesses of its predecessors, it is useful to take stock and ponder the consequences of this movement to date for human resource management. This article puts public sector contracting and its effects in a larger historical, political, and democratic context by (a) reviewing the American propensity for market-based solutions (including contracting) to government problems, a disposition rooted in American exceptionalist values; (b) chronicling how that predisposition has manifested itself in four successive and now overlapping expansions of contracting (from products, to services, to core governmental functions, to human resource management functions); and (c) showing how these developments have had significant consequences not only for the future of the public service but also for the values associated with democratic constitutionalism in the United States.