ABSTRACT
The chapter considers the period between 1960 and 1974. During these years, new intellectual movements and public policies undertaken by the executive and legislative power pushed to pluralize federal bureaucracy at social level, to ensure better and more meritocratic procedure for recruiting, to increase welfare benefits and rights for civil servants, and to measure the quality of bureaucratic action. Moreover, it considers the new theories elaborated by liberal and conservative scholars in the sixties for pluralizing and making more efficient public administration; it assesses the growth of the federal government and its functions during the Great Society years; and it focuses on the crisis of the early seventies during the Nixon administration, which put at risk both political legitimacy of the federal bureaucracy and the merit principle to select federal civil servants. It examines changes and continuities with the previous decades and the rising of new managerial ideas for reforming federal bureaucracy.
