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The theme of this article is that for reasons related more closely to politic incentives rather than fiscal reality there is a tendency among some policy makers to make wrong choices in attempting to manage fiscal stress and crisis, preferring to use more easily negotiated "quick fixes" such as across-the-board cuts in spending for programs that do not contribute much to deficits and debt. In fact such cutting usually makes the fiscal situation worse rather than better because they reduce economic growth in the private sector needed to pull out of debt and economic recession (Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2012). Typically, such budget reductions result in increased unemployment as public sector jobs are cut, further reducing revenues to government while increasing unemployment insurance cost of government. Fiscal stress is defined as when revenues fall short of expenses but a government or other public entity in debt remains able to obtain loans to finance current operations and debt restructuring, albeit at increasingly higher level of interest while they participate in some form of debt restructuring. Fiscal crisis occurs when governments no longer can get loans and are not able to sell their debt in financial markets at any price. This article examines US fiscal stress conditions and management approaches and then compares the US experience to that of the European Union and the Eurozone. It explains that while there is genuine need for changes in fiscal policy, such changes should be proposed, analyzed thoroughly, negotiated and implemented carefully over time rather than yielding to political expedience using debt panic as a means of forcing the adoption of quick but unworkable approaches to resolution of the real problems that cause both short and longer-term fiscal stress.

Among the issues debated presently by public management scholars and practitioners is whether the wave of New Public Management-oriented reform in nations around the world has passed the crest and is now in decline. It is difficult to generalize across nations and within nation states on this issue because the evidence is mixed. Alternative arguments are made by participants in this symposium to the effect that NPM (a) is in decline, (b) is still on the rise, (c) has entered the phase of implementation, which takes much longer and is more difficult to evaluate. Proponents of the third view indicate that the phase of political rhetoric and initial NPM program development is over in most contexts. Emphasis is now placed upon attempting to making changes instituted in the past decade work as intended to deliver results to meet the expectations articulated widely at the beginning of the reform era. Other issues related to why NPM developed as it has, and how it has been put into practice are articulated by participants in this dialogue. One issue given particular attention is the role and impact of e-government as a complement to or an integral part of NPM.

Public management has evolved as a distinct sub-discipline within the larger discipline of management over the past several decades. Public management is different from what is often referred to as "traditional public administration" in that the former focuses more on what happens within governments and on the operation of the line functions of government while public management pays more attention to the operation of government organizations from the perspective of their interaction with the environments in which they operate. Public management tends to conceive of governments and governance systems similar to the ways that organizational theorists focus on strategic behavior in response to contingency in the environment. Public management views organizations that provide services to the public as adaptive systems influenced by critical variables in their surroundings. Additionally, public management incorporates an economics perspective on the value of competition between organizations in markets, and also business/marketing thinking about strategic positioning of products/services and product/service lines relative to the attributes of consumer preferences and market demand.

In late February 2004, well-known and highly respected Canadian academic Donald Savoie was appointed to assist the Canadian government, "to help overhaul the management and accountability of government in the aftermath of [a] scandal." Among the remarks Savoie made to the press upon appointment was the following excerpt, "New public management has been completely discredited, thank God" (The Ottawa Citizen, 2/27/04). Savoie's comment and the article that carried it were brought to the attention of the IPMN community by Alasdair Roberts. The comment stimulated a dialogue about NPM on the IPMN listserver that is represented in this symposium, in roughly the order in which comments were transmitted, with only minor editing. The dialogue tells much about current views on the utility, or lack thereof, of New Public Management and how the maturation of NPM is perceived by the international community of scholars in the field of public management.

At the end of November 2004, well-known and highly respected scholar Steven Kelman of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University asked a question about research on outyear budgetary consequences of agency cost savings. Kelman's question stimulated a dialogue on the topic on the IPMN listserver that is represented in this symposium, in roughly the order in which comments were transmitted, with only minor editing. The dialogue tells much about current views on the utility, or lack thereof, of research on outyear savings and the wisdom of allowing agencies to carry-forward savings from one year to another.

Various systems to integrate performance measurement into budgeting are applied in nations around the world. Governments at all levels have embarked on a journey into performance measurement and management. Performance budgeting, and the application of performance analysis in budgeting, is a topic of a considerable discourse in the public management community. This symposium provides dialogue and comment on efforts to integrate performance evaluation into the executive budget process at the federal government level in the United States of America under the administration of President George W. Bush. The experience of other nations also is addressed.

Michael Barzelay (London School of Economics and Political Science) gained considerable scholarly attention for his book Breaking Through Bureaucracy (1992). His latest book began as an invited lecture delivered in 1997 in tribute to the late Aaron Wildavsky at the invitation of the Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP) at the University of California, Berkeley. GSPP hosts the Wildavsky Forum annually and Barzelay's lecture was the third in this series.

This essay is intended to provide information that elected officials, public managers and others need to understand and to better assess alternative methods for improving the management of economic and fiscal stress through restructuring. Analysis of restructuring may be segmented into a variety of sub-topic areas including the causes of economic and fiscal stress, methods for improved management of restructuring, issues and dilemmas faced by public officials and managers attempting to manage restructuring, The range of non-mutually exclusive approaches to management of restructuring includes (a) doing nothing, likely to work only for a short time if economic and fiscal stress persists, (b) increasing revenues through a variety of means including borrowing while reducing expenditures, (c) increasing employee and organizational productivity and employing a set of more innovative responses that are productivityrelated. This essay addresses all of the issue areas indicated above in the context of the ongoing global condition of economic stress. In terms of the immediacy of the issues addressed in this essay, at the time of this writing the fiscal crisis in Greece was most prominent in the news, and a key question arose whether a bailout of Greece and perhaps other financially weakened European nations, if needed, would or should rely on traditional entities such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or whether a European Monetary Fund should be established. The motivation to resolve the fiscal crisis in Greece was driven by the potential impact of government bankruptcy on the value of the Euro, the common currency of the European Union.

This study analyzes the decisions and actions of the President, Congress, and Pentagon leadership for 1989 to 1992 to reduce the defense budget for the period 1990 to 1997. The objective of this research is to indicate how the Department of Defense developed and began to execute plans for significant downsizing. Management of declining budgets by DoD is evaluated employing a framework for analysis of fiscal stress in public sector organizations. Major force structure reductions and cuts in DoD operational and capital budget accounts are analyzed. Weapons system terminations and military and civilian personnel cuts are detailed. Efforts to improve DoD efficiency through implementation of the Defense Management Report are assessed. Military base closure and realignment is reviewed. Redefinition of the base force structure in response to revised threat assessment and changes in the international security policy environment including improved East-West relations, reduced probability of conventional war, tactical and strategic nuclear disarmament, and operation Desert Storm also is addressed.

The goals of the Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act of 1990 are numerous and highly ideal. While these goals are commendable, several potential roadblocks to their achievement may exist. This article points out nine such potential reasons why, in practice, the CFO Act's goals may not be obtainable.

Analyzes decisions and actions of the President, Congress, and Pentagon leadership, 1989-92, to reduce the defense budget for the period 1990-97.