Recent reform processes of Western public sectors have been often reconciled under the common denominator of “New Public Management”. Public sectors in many Western countries are increasingly populated with disaggregated public bodies performing regulative and operative tasks, autonomously from their core ministries. Formally spoken, autonomous bodies established by or reformed under NPM-inspired reforms should be characterized by (1) being structurally disaggregated (at arm’s length) from the core ministry, (2) having a considerable amount of managerial freedom, (3) being under contractual relationships with the oversight authorities, and (4) having their tasks on the operations side of the policy-operations divide. This is the formal world. However in this article, we aim to investigate the extent to which real-life agencies reflect these formal and normative characteristics, by taking as an empirical setting the Flemish and Italian public sectors. Secondly, we also want to explore the effect of the country, age, and tasks of the agency, on the extent to which it reflects the characteristics of the NPM ideal-type, or not.