The Bureaucracy
- Distinctiveness of the American bureaucracy
- Constitutional system and traditions
- Supervision shared
- A federalist structure shares functions
- Adversary culture leads to defense of rights and lawsuits
- Scope of bureaucracy
- Little public ownership of industry in the United States
- High degree of regulation in the United States of private industries
- Constitutional system and traditions
- The growth of the bureaucracy
- The early controversies
- Senate consent to removal of officials is challenged by supporters of a strong president
- President is given sole removal power but Congress funds and investigates
- The appointment of officials
- Officials affect how laws are interpreted, the tone of their administration, and their effectiveness
- Use of patronage in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to reward supporters
- Civil War a watershed in bureaucratic growth; showed the weakness of federal government
- A service role
- 1861-1901: shift in role from regulation to service
- Reflects desire for limited government, laissez-faire beliefs, and the Constitution's silence
- A change in role
- Depression and World War II lead to a role of government activism
- Introduction of heavy income taxes supports a large bureaucracy
- The early controversies
- The federal bureaucracy today
- Direct and indirect growth
- Modest increase in the number of government employees
- Indirect increase through the use of private contractors much greater
- Growth in discretionary authority
- Delegation of undefined authority by Congress
- Primary areas of delegation
- Subsidies to groups
- Grant-in-aid programs
- Enforcement of regulations
- Factors explaining behavior of officials
- Recruitment and retention
- The competitive service: most bureaucrats compete for jobs through OPM
- Appointment by merit based on a written exam
- Decreased to less than 54 percent of federal government work force
- The excepted service: most are appointed by other agencies on the basis of qualifications approved by OPM
- Fastest growing sector of federal government employment
- Examples: Postal Service employees and FBI agents
- But president can also appoint employees: presidential appointments, Schedule C jobs, and NEA jobs
- Pendleton Act (1883): transferred basis of government jobs from patronage to merit
- Merit system protects president from pressure and protects patronage appointees from new presidents ("blanketing in")
- The buddy system
- Name-request job: filled by a person whom an agency has already identified for middle- and upper-level jobs
- Job description may be tailored for person
- Circumvents usual search process
- But also encourages "issue networks" based on shared policy views
- Firing a bureaucrat
- Most bureaucrats cannot be fired
- Exception: Senior Executive Service (SES)
- SES managers receive cash bonuses for good performance
- But very few SES members have been fired or even transferred
- The agencies' point of view
- Agencies are dominated by lifetime bureaucrats who have worked for no other agency
- System assures continuity and expertise
- But also gives subordinates power over new bosses: can work behind boss's back through sabotage, delaying, and so on
- The competitive service: most bureaucrats compete for jobs through OPM
- Personal attributes
- Allegations of critics
- Higher civil servants are elitists
- Political appointees and career bureaucrats think about government and politics differently than public at large
- Correlation between type of agency and attitudes of employees: activist versus traditional
- Professional values of officials
- Allegations of critics
- Do bureaucrats sabotage their political bosses?
- If so, such sabotage hurts conservatives more than liberals; bureaucrats tend to be liberal
- But loyalty to bosses runs strong--despite the power of bureaucrats to obstruct or complain
- Whistleblower Protection Act (1989) created Office of Special Counsel
- "Cooperation is the nature of a bureaucrat's job"
- Most civil servants: highly structured roles make them relatively immune to personal attitudes
- Professionals such as lawyers and economists in the FTC: loosely structured roles may be much influenced by personal attitudes, professional values help explain how power is used
- Culture and careers
- Each agency has its own culture
- Jobs with an agency can be career enhancing or not
- Strong agency culture motivates employees but makes agencies resistant to change
- Constraints
- Biggest difference between a government agency and a business: hiring, firing, pay, procedures, and so forth
- General constraints
- Administrative Procedure Act (1946)
- Freedom of Information Act (1966)
- National Environmental Policy Act (1969)
- Privacy Act (1974)
- Open Meeting Law (1976)
- Assignment of single jobs to several agencies
- Effects of constraints
- Government moves slowly
- Government acts inconsistently
- Easier to block than to take action
- Reluctant decision making by lower-ranking employees
- Red tape
- Why so many constraints?
- Constraints come from us
- They are an agency's response to our demands for openness, honesty, fairness, and so on
- Agency allies
- Agencies often seek alliances with congressional committees or interest groups: "iron triangle"
- Far less common today; politics has become too complicated
- More interest groups, more congressional subcommittees, and easier access for individuals
- Far more competing forces than ever given access by courts
- "Issue networks": groups that regularly debate government policy on certain issues
- Contentious and partisan
- New president often recruits from networks
- Recruitment and retention
- Direct and indirect growth
- Congressional oversight
- Forms of congressional supervision
- Approval necessary for creation
- Statutes influence agency behavior (sometimes precisely)
- Authorization of money, either permanent or fixed number of years
- Appropriation of money allows spending
- Congressional oversight and "homeland security"
- Lieberman's call for Department of Homeland Defense after September 11 attack
- President Bush's creation of Office of Homeland Security
- Appointment of Governor Ridge and the blueprint for homeland security
- Congressional calls for testimony about strategies
- Need to coordinate personnel and budgets
- Proposal of a Department of Homeland Security
- Consolidation, reorganization and transformation
- Need for Congress to reorganize itself to make the bureaucracy work
- Immediate protests about committee and subcommittee jurisdiction
- Congress' historical tendency to resist streamlining
- The Appropriations Committee and legislative committees
- Appropriations Committee most powerful
- Most expenditure recommendations are approved by House
- Has power to lower agency's expenditure request
- Has power to influence an agency's policies by marking up an agency's budget
- But becoming less powerful because of
- Trust funds: Social Security
- Annual authorizations
- Meeting target spending limits
- Legislative committees are important when
- A law is first passed
- An agency is first created
- An agency is subject to annual authorization
- Informal congressional controls over agencies
- Individual members of Congress can seek privileges for constituents
- Congressional committees may seek committee clearance: right to pass on certain agency decisions
- Committee heads may ask to be consulted
- Appropriations Committee most powerful
- The legislative veto
- Declared unconstitutional by Supreme Court in Chadha (1983)
- Weakens traditional legislative oversight but Congress continues creating such vetoes
- Congressional investigations
- Power inferred from power to legislate
- Means for checking agency discretion
- Means for limiting presidential control
- Forms of congressional supervision
- Bureaucratic "pathologies"
- Red tape--complex and sometimes conflicting rules among agencies
- Conflict--agencies work at cross-purposes
- Duplication--two or more agencies seem to do the same thing
- Imperialism--tendency of agencies to grow, irrespective of benefits and costs of programs
- Waste--spending more than is necessary to buy some product or service
- Reforming the bureaucracy
- Numerous attempts to make bureaucracy work better for less money
- Eleven attempts to reform in this century alone
- National Performance Review (NPR) in 1993 designed to reinvent government
- Differs from previous reforms that sought to increase presidential control
- Emphasizes customer satisfaction by bringing citizens in contact with agencies
- NPR calls for innovation and quality consciousness by
- Less-centralized management
- More employee initiatives
- Customer satisfaction
- Bureaucratic reform always difficult to accomplish
- Most rules and red tape result from the struggle between the president and Congress.
- This struggle makes bureaucrats nervous about irritating either
- Periods of divided government exacerbate matters, especially in implementing policy.
- Republican presidents seek to increase political control (executive micromanagement)
- Democratic Congresses respond by increasing investigations and rules (legislative micromanagement)
- Numerous attempts to make bureaucracy work better for less money