Interestingly, the study of “implementation” did not exist per se in the early
stages of the development of public administration. This is not because
public agencies were not involved in implementation. Rather, in a sense,
implementation was invisible as a separate concept or function because it
constituted the whole of the field of public administration. Virtually the sole
purpose of public agencies was to implement politically determined policies
and programs. Because the goal of public administration was to maintain
neutrality and to use administrative expertise to achieve efficiency, there was
no need to have a concept of implementation, because the assumption was
that the policy would remain largely unchanged as public agencies acted
upon it. After all, as Wilson, Goodnow, and other founding scholars in the
field asserted, the political sphere made the decisions, and the administrative
apparatus simply and mechanically put them into action.