American government in the new century is large, complex, and to some degree unorganized. Each individual section of government, be it a local government or an agency of the federal government, tends to know clearly what it wants, but the system as a whole lacks overall coordination, coherence, and control. Priority setting is not one of the strongest features of American government. An elected official coming to office with a commitment to give direction to the system of government will be disappointed in the extent of his or her ability to produce desired results, by the barriers to policy success, and by the relatively few ways in which the probability of success can be increased. These difficulties, however, may be compensated for by the flexibility and multiple opportunities for citizen inputs characteristic of American government.

        Despite the problems of coordination and control and the tradition of popular distrust of government, contemporary American government is active. It spends huge amounts of money and employs millions of people to perform a bewildering variety of tasks. These activities are not confined to a single level of government; all three levels of government are involved in making policy, taxing, spending, and delivering services. This activity is the reason why the study of public policy is so important. It is a means of understanding what goes on in the United States and why government does the things it does. The emphasis in the next portion of this book is on the processes through which policy is made. All governments must follow many of the same procedures when they make policy: identify issues, formulate policy responses to problems, evaluate results, and change programs that are not producing the desired results. American governments do all these things, but they do them in a distinctive way and produce distinctive results.