Not infrequently, policy problems can be caused by laws made at another level of government. Practitioners know that these laws often mandate supply without demand and ignore alternative means of achieving the same public purposes. An issue then for managers and the public is how to change the law. In any case, this particular problem is well structured and amenable to standard problem-definition techniques. Whether policymakers and budgetary institutions will use them in policy formulation is a different question.
The NewYork city rat problem, noted above, is also an example of a well structured problem. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani declared war on the city's estimated 28 million rats ( representing a 4:1 rat-to-resident ratio, double that of Washington, DC) by establishing an interagency Rodent Extermination Task Force With an annual budget of $ 8 million (Spurgeon 1997) . As usual, resolution of the problem required reconciliation of competing problem definitions. As noted, the scope of the problem was estimated first by data on reported rats and rat bites, in other words, rats were and are a public safety issue. But if the problem is defined rather as a health issue, then the solution lies in more competent building inspections and steeper fines for owners and those who leave