ABSTRACT
Policy analysis aims at providing information that contributes to making an agency politically and socially relevant. This chapter assesses the damage that the planning-programming-budgeting system has done to the prospects of encouraging policy analysis in American national government. Planning was well accepted at the various levels of the Defense Department with the variety of joint service plans, long-range requirement plans, logistical plans, and more. PPBS discredits policy analysis. To collect vast amounts of random data is hardly a serious analysis of public policy. The chapter considers ways and means of increasing the demand for and supply of policy analysis. There would be a much larger demand for policy analysis if it were supplied in ways that would meet the needs of high level officials. A Congress that takes seriously its policy role should be encouraged to contract for policy analysis that would stress different views of what the critical questions are in a particular area of policy.
