Efficiency could not remain the discipline’s talisman against politics, Waldo argued, because administration is political. In Waldo’s perspective, efficiency itself is a political claim. For example, how does one assess the efficiency of, say, a library, or the Department of Defense? If efficiency is defined as an input-output ratio, one has a choice of inputs and outputs to assess efficiency in both instances, although none is the unassailably objective “factual” option. As choosing among these options unavoidably involves values not just facts, efficiency can hardly be value neutral(Stone 2002, 65). If public administration insisted that its orthodox principles were politically neutral, Waldo argued, it would never be rid of the theoretical straitjacket it used to restrain itself from the world of politics. Waldo’s argument bought a tart response from Simon (1952b), but even as Simon went on the offensive, there were signs that Waldo’s point had sunk deep into the discipline. Published concurrently with Simon’s essay was another by an equally prominent scholar—Peter Drucker (1952)—who wholeheartedly agreed with Waldo’s assessment of the fundamentally political character of large-scale organizations, and suggested that, if anything, Waldo had not pushed his arguments far enough (see Simon 1952a for the complete essay on this point).