ABSTRACT
The contemporary public sector devotes most of its resources to financing private sector production and consumption. The transcending development is the intermingling between public and private activities, and between federal government and state and local government operations. A more effective form of competition among alternative recipients of federal funds is the approach for improving the future structure and performance of the public sector. The modern public sector that is developing is hardly something aloof and entirely separate from the private sector. Rather, in its usual pragmatic fashion, the United States is fashioning policy tools not for the sake of their intrinsic beauty, but to achieve a growing variety of difficult and far-reaching national objectives. The typical federal agency indeed will probably be a policy formulator and overseer of programs dealing with operations which have been decentralized in a variety of ways and over a wide span of the American economy.
