The goal of Privatizing the Polity is both ambitious and important to public administration scholars. Ochs sets out to examine the extent to which public antipoverty programs since the 1996 bipartisan welfare reform have worked toward the goal of reducing poverty. Importantly, the author argues that this significant change relies extensively on the devolution of public policies to states and, subsequently, to private (both for-profit and nonprofit) corporations. As such, the success or failure of welfare reform needs to be evaluated through the complicated arrangement of public-private financing and provisions that vary significantly across the states. As such, the book will interest those concerned with how public-private contracts are managed, how well the “hollow state” implements public policies, and how effective government and private service providers are in jointly achieving goals.