The University of Virginia's Dr. Brian Balogh addressed this question at the annual Maine Town Meeting held on May 15, 1998. Dr. Balogh defined "Big Government" as having five components: programmatic will, a measure of what the state seeks to do and is expected to do; administrative capacity, the number of people employed by the state bureaucracy; fiscal autonomy, the ability to expand programmatically and carry out agendas; political distance, the geographic scope of those governed; and cultural capacity, the ability to influence public opinion.

"Public choice" literature argues that politicians and bureaucrats have been able to trick the American people by engineering a bureaucratic perpetual motion machine subject to few outside controls. Balogh quoted Robert Higgs who believed that war was the primary factor in creating big government and high spending. Progressive historians believe that powerful presidential leadership is the force that has led national government towards reform, expanding its power along the way and institutionalizing the modern presidency. Modernization, defined as industrialization, urbanization and professionalization, required institutional responses that have led to the modern American state, say others.

In our quest to understand how we got big government in a political culture that is wary of big government, we need to better understand the men and women who built the very programs that collectively would constitute big government, says Balogh. Ultimately big government comes from us. For better or worse, we have organized politically in the twentieth century in the form of crosscutting interest groups, from fraternal organizations to religiously inspired movements. A most important task is providing a rationale and the mechanisms of administration for programs that affect the majority of Americans. Said Balogh, "program builders have built the state one program at a time and with the utmost sensitivity to market mechanisms and local control accounts for America's rank as one of the weakest central governments among industrialized nations."