The Vending Machine Model of Government. . . "Much of the government continues to operate within the vending -machine model. Government still calculates and distributes monthly Social Security payments. It collects taxes and audits returns. It picks up garbage and mows parkland grass. It maintains national historic sites and runs mass transit. The vending-machine model is the great governance legacy of the nineteenth-century Progressives, and it tends to work reasonably well for programs that produce relatively routine services within hierarchies. [Problems like] Katrina , however, represent the new generation of problems. . . . They need instead a leveraged government across complex networks: government leaders who can effectively align public, private, nonprofit, American, and global players across the mess boundaries of action