The seminal work that justified the need for a theory of bureaucratic politics is Dwight Waldo’s The Administrative State (1948). Waldo did not construct a theory of bureaucratic politics in this book, but here and in later writings he made two critical contributions that have supported all subsequent efforts to do so. First, he undertook a devastating critique of the extant research literature. He argued that public administration scholarship revolved around a core set of beliefs that cumulatively served to constrain theoretical development. Key among these were the beliefs that efficiency and democracy were compatible and that the work of government could be cleanly divided into separate realms of decision and execution. These beliefs led public administration scholars to champion efficiency as the central goal of public agencies, to develop a “science” of administration to maximize that efficiency, and to ignore the political ramifications of these beliefs and the prescriptions they implied.