Waldo argued that administrative scholarship failure to incorporate politics explicitly into its theoretical development was a product of its early cultural and intellectual environment Yet, as administration scholars accepted efficiency as their central principle, they also accepted democracy a notoriously inefficient basis of organization as the central principle of the American political system.
This presented a problem in developing administrative theory. The formative era of administrative scholarship, with its focus on the scientific method, its guiding principle of efficiency, and its position in the shadow of business, meant that it developed in a decidedly undemocratic context.
By separating the work of government into two distinct operations and limiting their attention to the “nonpolitical” element, administration scholars were free to push for centralized power in the executive