ИСТИНА

State programs of the Russian Federation have a significant potential to implement a number of complex and innovative projects. At the same time the real situation seems to be somewhat different from the corresponding legislation due to both formal and informal institutional environment. In this regard the purpose of the current study is to determine the real-life restrictions of the program approach within the actually existing Russian institutional environment of the middle of the 10th years of the 21st century. The main malfunctions of the program approach are divided into 3 groups: budgetary sphere restrictions, procedural and conceptual shortcomings. The most significant of them encompass such aspects as the secondary nature of the state programs according to the budgetary legislation; procedural difficulties in terminating the state programs’ implementation; the status equality of the responsible authority and the other participants in the part of compel and the status inequality in responsibilities; unrepresentative and irrelevant program indicators; blurring between the project and the process nature of a program, and some others. In order to be more specific, after listing general features the author puts main focus on the state program of the Russian Federation “Science and technology development in 2013-2020”. Attention is drawn to the number of the program’s ambiguities in terms of its goal, indicators and expected results, – and then to how the mentioned general shortcomings incarnate in the specific program. The author comes to a conclusion that an institutional trap hinders an implementation of state programs in Russia and stresses the need of a public administration reform.