cover image Revolution at the Roots: Making Our Government Smaller, Better and Closer to Home

Revolution at the Roots: Making Our Government Smaller, Better and Closer to Home

William D. Eggers, Bill Eggers. Free Press, $25 (432pp) ISBN 978-0-02-874027-0

Charging that our centralized federal bureaucracy is wasteful, inefficient and ill-suited to many of the tasks it now handles, the authors present a blueprint for down-sizing federal government and devolving power to states, cities and neighborhoods. Fellows of the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles, Eggers and O'Leary, who have conducted workshops with local leaders around the country, argue that federal poverty relief, job training, day care, drug abuse, arts and other programs work to undermine community and individual initiatives. Such efforts, they suggest, should be the responsibility of private-sector organizations and voluntary self-help groups. They profile governors who are streamlining state government--John Engler of Michigan, William Weld of Massachusetts, New Jersey's Christine Todd Whitman--as well as business-minded mayors such as New York City's Rudolph Giuliani, Cleveland's Michael White and Philadelphia's Edward Rendell, who are privatizing services, cutting the work force and shifting services and decision-making to the neighborhood level. In place of a welfare system, which in their view encourages dependency, they advocate letting each state choose whatever course it deems best--workfare, group homes, time limits, etc. This sure-to-be-controversial report is both a handbook for reform and a critique of big government. Author tour. (Sept.)