The main purpose of the present paper is to critically analyze the principles of the public management reform adopted at the Federal level, showing its proximity and/ or distance from the concepts sustained by governance perspective versus New Public Management (NPM): two consolidated public administration movements of the late decades. The analysis is based on classics of public administration and contemporary researches on the reforms, aiming to subsidy future initiatives. The paper highlights five dichotomies at the basis of the 1995 State Apparatus Reform: politics versus administration, public policies formulation versus implementation, autonomy versus dependence, citizen versus client; and transparency versus efficiency. The main conclusions of the paper point out that, in the Brazilian context of re-democratization and post-privatization, is still possible to observe the dominance of NPM principles, and a certain distance from a governance network. The paper also recognizes the necessity to build up adequate models of governance, adapted to Brazilian local peculiarities.