The topics for this Discussion are: choose and answer any two questions from the following below:

1. Which of the three major administrative reform strategies-downsizing, reengineering, or continuous improvement-do you find to be the most compelling and why? What are the weaknesses inherent in the other two?

2. Discuss the 2010 Pew Center on the States and Public Policy survey cited in the text where residents of the five most financially distressed states commented on their distrust of government yet their high expectations of that government. What do you think of these incongruities?

3. How are unionization and collective bargaining different in the public sector than in the private sector? What are some of the creative ways that government employees have shirked on the job in order to send a message to employers? Do you think the current union relationships are working for government employees and employers?

4. Comparing bureaucracies around the world, does it strike you as strange that the U.S. bureaucracy, as measured proportionately as government employment as a share of total employment, falls in the middle range of the world's industrialized nations? Do you find it strange that the U.S. bureaucracy is far smaller than the government bureaucracies of Ireland, France, Finland, Hungary, and Canada and about the same size of bureaucracies as Australia, Portugal, Poland, and Spain? What do you think accounts for large government bureaucracy and our perceptions of them from country to country?

5. Civil Service employees can be fired for just cause but according to the text, " . . . the larger problem is removal of the mediocre." Often people get redistributed because it is so difficult to fire them. What do you think about this?