Bertelli begins by explaining how a principal-agent relationship can describe the democratic connection between citizens and administrators through their elected representatives. He then confronts the question of efficiency by considering the experience of the New Public Management movement, which focused on introducing incentives and market competition into public management, in the United States and internationally. The book next turns to the political sport of big-government-bureaucracy-bashing and how it misinterprets modern public governance structures, explaining the latter as the essay progresses. The book concludes with a discussion of how contemporary public administration scholars and public intellectuals do not do an effective job of countering such arguments and how this was quite different in the work their counterparts before World War II. Public administration, Bertelli argues, has lost its pragmatism in the face of political attacks.