ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the contemporary context in which public policy is made and implemented, with a focus on how the tacit assumptions that undergird technical-rational solutions to messy, intractable social problems can unwittingly contribute to the breakdown of community, the creation of surplus populations, and through moral inversions and administrative evil even public policies of destruction. As a conceptual framework for thinking about public policy, problem solving implies and creates the expectation that a satisfactory end point, a solution, or, ideally, the elimination of a social problem can be achieved through the application of modern scientific methods. The fact that the majority of those affected by punitive welfare policy were children did not seem to matter, unless it became a political issue. For the most part, the problem is defined in terms of the impact of immigration on the economy and culture of the United States. The chapter also presents the operations overcast and paperclip.
