VT Research Magazine Interviews CPAP’s Matt Dull: “Who’s Running the Country?”

The story of appointees as good servants and ghosts as spoilers

By Dana Cruikshank, College of Architecture and Urban Studies

“Matthew Dull is working to fill the gaps in what we know about how our government works – and how sometimes it doesn’t.

Turn on a prime-time cable channel or talk-radio show, and the message is clear: our federal government is broken. This consensus is shared by the more than 75 percent of Americans who recently told the Pew Research Council they feel “angry” or “frustrated” about the federal government. More than half of those polled said Washington needs “very major reform.”

Dull, assistant professor with Virginia Tech’s Center for Public Administration and Policy, sees a paradox in this conventional wisdom. While almost everyone agrees that the federal bureaucracy is broken, we know strikingly little about how government actually works. Dull’s research hopes to fill in these knowledge gaps by examining the interplay of politics and bureaucracy.” Read more of the article

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