The problem, as numerous scholars have pointed out, was that the politics administration dichotomy did not hold. As Waldo meticulously detailed in his literature review, there was ample evidence that bureaucracies pushed some values over others , that bureaucracies acted as power brokers among competing special interests, and that lawmakers were increasingly reliant on and influenced by the expertise and opinions of administrators. Administrative theory simply could not ignore these realities and continue to usefully shape the direction of the discipline. At a minimum, Waldo argued, the concept of democracy and all its messy implications had to be brought back into administrative theory. Administrative scholars had to recognize that their central principle—efficiency—was not value neutral, and that its uneasy relationship with democratic principles had to be recognized (Waldo 1952, 90).