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This essay reviews the range of literature that uses a biographical approach to probe leadership in public administration. What are the variations in this approach? What have we learned? What should be done in the future? The genre is examined through several books and articles that have studied agency leaders and government departments.

For most of U.S. history, presidents have issued signing statements to comment on bills being signed into law. These statements often are hortatory and comment on the merits of the new law. In recent decades, presidents also have used signing statements to indicate portions of laws that they consider unconstitutional. Pointing out such parts of new statutes is not a problem, but indicating that the president may not execute part of the law is problematic. President George W. Bush used signing statements in an aggressive way to imply that he might not faithfully execute more than 1,000 provisions of statutes that he signed into law. This essay argues that this practice undermines the rule of law and threatens the separation of powers system.

The factors of public administration improvement in the article are being analyzed. These factors aretypical to any public administration institution regardless of its size, performance particularity or level.The goal to diagnose the condition of all public administration institutions in Lithuania was not raised forthis research. For this particular reason, the administrations of Lithuanian district municipalities becamethe object of the empirical research. The diagnosis of the condition of Lithuanian district municipalities'administrations was accomplished. On the basis of theoretical and empirical investigations of the authors,a model of performance improvement of Lithuanian public administration institutions (on the selfgovernmentlevel) was developed.