ABSTRACT
This chapter explains why American political and administrative theory have not established a legitimate place for public administration in the structure and process of government. It considers briefly the major historical efforts to establish dominant models of American public service. For American liberalism, democracy can be Madisonian or majoritarian, representative or participatory. The chapter provides the call attention to the public administration community's need to consider foreseeable changes facing federal personnel administration in efforts to rebuild the federal service and/or to develop new models for it. The historic lack of an interactive link between efforts to resolve the constitutional problems of the legitimacy of the American federal service on the one hand, and the nature of the service on the other, has made public administration highly dependent upon political vagaries. Even as theorists have ardently debated the constitutional foundations and political and structural characteristics of a legitimate "fourth branch," the federal service has continued to grow.
