The Bureaucracy - Ms. Mills' AP Governmentmillsapgovt.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/6/8/12683579/ch13.pdf · 2019-11-23 · Congressional Oversight The Appropriations Committee and ... would

The Bureaucracy

1. What happened to make the bureaucracy a “fourth branch” of American national government?

2. What are the actual size and scope of the federal bureaucracy?

3. What has been done to improve bureaucratic performance?

Enduring Questions

13

Distinctiveness of the AmericanBureaucracyThe Growth of the Bureaucracy

The Appointment of Officials • A ServiceRole • A Change in Role

The Federal Bureaucracy TodayRecruitment and Retention • PersonalAttributes • Do Bureaucrats Sabotage TheirPolitical Bosses? • Culture and Careers •Constraints • Agency Allies

Congressional OversightThe Appropriations Committee andLegislative Committees • The LegislativeVeto • Congressional Investigations

Bureaucratic “Pathologies”Reforming the Bureaucracy

There is probably not a man or woman in the UnitedStates who has not, at some time or other, com-

plained about “the bureaucracy.” Your letter was slowin getting to Aunt Minnie? The Internal RevenueService took months to send you your tax refund? TheDefense Department paid $400 for a hammer? TheOccupational Safety and Health Administration toldyou that you installed the wrong kind of portable toiletfor your farm workers? The “bureaucracy” is to blame.

For most people and politicians bureaucracy is a pejo-rative word implying waste, confusion, red tape, andrigidity. But for scholars—and for bureaucrats them-selves—bureaucracy is a word with a neutral, technicalmeaning. A bureaucracy is a large, complex organi-zation composed of appointed officials. By complex wemean that authority is divided among several man-agers; no one person is able to make all the decisions. Alarge corporation is a bureaucracy; so also are a biguniversity and a government agency. With its sizablestaff, even Congress has become, to some degree, abureaucracy.

What is it about complex organizations in general,and government agencies in particular, that leads somany people to complain about them? In part theanswer is to be found in their very size and complexity.

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Chapter 13 The Bureaucracy374

But in large measure the answer is to be found in thepolitical context within which such agencies mustoperate. If we examine that context carefully, we willdiscover that many of the problems that we blame on“the bureaucracy” are in fact the result of whatCongress, the courts, and the president do.

Distinctiveness of the American Bureaucracy

Bureaucratic government has become an obvious fea-ture of all modern societies, democratic and nondem-ocratic. In the United States, however, three aspects ofour constitutional system and political traditions giveto the bureaucracy a distinctive character. First, politi-cal authority over the bureaucracy is not in one set ofhands but is shared among several institutions. In aparliamentary regime, such as in Great Britain, theappointed officials of the national government workfor the cabinet ministers, who are in turn dominatedby the prime minister. In theory, and to a considerableextent in practice, British bureaucrats report to andtake orders from the ministers in charge of theirdepartments, do not deal directly with Parliament, andrarely give interviews to the press. In the United Statesthe Constitution permits both the president andCongress to exercise authority over the bureaucracy.Every senior appointed official has at least two masters:one in the executive branch and the other in the leg-islative. Often there are many more than two:Congress, after all, is not a single organization but acollection of committees, subcommittees, and individ-uals. This divided authority encourages bureaucrats toplay one branch of government off against the otherand to make heavy use of the media.

Second, most of the agencies of the federal govern-ment share their functions with related agencies instate and local government. Though some federalagencies deal directly with American citizens—theInternal Revenue Service collects taxes from them, theFederal Bureau of Investigation looks into crimes forthem, the Postal Service delivers mail to them—manyagencies work with other organizations at other levelsof government. For example, the Department ofEducation gives money to local school systems; theHealth Care Financing Administration in theDepartment of Health and Human Services reimburs-es states for money spent on health care for the poor;the Department of Housing and Urban Development

gives grants to cities for community development; andthe Employment and Training Administration in theDepartment of Labor supplies funds to local govern-ments so that they can run job-training programs. InFrance, by contrast, government programs dealingwith education, health, housing, and employment arecentrally run, with little or no control exercised bylocal governments.

Third, the institutions and traditions of Americanlife have contributed to the growth of what some writ-ers have described as an “adversary culture,” in whichthe definition and expansion of personal rights, andthe defense of rights and claims through lawsuits aswell as political action, are given central importance. Agovernment agency in this country operates undercloser public scrutiny and with a greater prospect ofcourt challenges to its authority than in almost anyother nation. Virtually every important decision of theOccupational Safety and Health Administration or ofthe Environmental Protection Agency is likely to bechallenged in the courts or attacked by an affectedparty; in Sweden the decisions of similar agencies golargely uncontested.

The scope as well as the style of bureaucratic gov-ernment differs. In most Western European nationsthe government owns and operates large parts of theeconomy: the French government operates the rail-roads and owns companies that make automobilesand cigarettes, and the Italian government owns manysimilar enterprises and also the nation’s oil refineries.In just about every large nation except the UnitedStates, the telephone system is owned by the govern-ment. Publicly operated enterprises account for about12 percent of all employment in France but less than 3percent in the United States.1 The U.S. government reg-ulates privately owned enterprises to a degree notfound in many other countries, however. Why weshould have preferred regulation to ownership as theproper government role is an interesting question towhich we shall return.

The Growth of theBureaucracy

The Constitution made scarcely any provision for anadministrative system other than to allow the presi-dent to appoint, with the advice and consent of theSenate, “ambassadors, other public ministers and con-suls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other offi-

The Growth of the Bureaucracy 375

cers of the United States whose appointments are notherein otherwise provided for, and which shall beestablished by law.”2 Departments and bureaus werenot mentioned.

In the first Congress, in 1789, James Madison intro-duced a bill to create a Department of State to assist thenew secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, in carryingout his duties. People appointed to this departmentwere to be nominated by the president and approved bythe Senate, but they were “to be removable by the pres-ident” alone. These six words, which would confer theright to fire government officials, occasioned six days ofdebate in the House. At stake was the locus of powerover what was to become the bureaucracy. Madison’sopponents argued that the Senate should consent tothe removal of officials as well as their appointment.Madison responded that, without the unfettered rightof removal, the president would not be able to controlhis subordinates, and without this control he wouldnot be able to discharge his constitutional obligation to“take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”3

Madison won, twenty-nine votes to twenty-two. Whenthe issue went to the Senate, another debate resulted ina tie vote, broken in favor of the president by VicePresident John Adams. The Department of State, andall cabinet departments subsequently created, wouldbe run by people removable only by the president.

That decision did not resolve the question of whowould really control the bureaucracy, however.Congress retained the right to appropriate money, toinvestigate the administration, and to shape the lawsthat would be executed by that administration—morethan ample power to challenge any president whoclaimed to have sole authority over his subordinates.And many members of Congress expected that thecabinet departments, even though headed by peopleremovable by the president, would report to Congress.

The government in Washington was at first minus-cule. The State Department started with only nineemployees; the War Department did not have eightycivilian employees until 1801. Only the TreasuryDepartment, concerned with collecting taxes and find-ing ways to pay the public debt, had much power, andonly the Post Office Department provided any signifi-cant service.

The Appointment of OfficialsSmall as the bureaucracy was, people struggled, oftenbitterly, over who would be appointed to it. FromGeorge Washington’s day to modern times, presidents

have found appointment to be one of their most impor-tant and difficult tasks. The officials that they selectaffect how the laws are interpreted (thus the politicalideology of the job holders is important), what tone theadministration will display (thus personal character isimportant), how effectively the public business is dis-charged (thus competence is important), and howstrong the political party or faction in power will be(thus party affiliation is important). Presidents tryingto balance the competing needs of ideology, character,fitness, and partisanship have rarely pleased most peo-ple. As John Adams remarked, every appointment cre-ates one ingrate and ten enemies.

Because Congress, during most of the nineteenthand twentieth centuries, was the dominant branch ofgovernment, congressional preferences often con-trolled the appointment of officials. And sinceCongress was, in turn, a collection of people who rep-resented local interests, appointments were made withan eye to rewarding the local supporters of members ofCongress or building up local party organizations.These appointments made on the basis of political con-siderations—patronage—were later to become amajor issue. They galvanized various reform effortsthat sought to purify politics and to raise the level ofcompetence of the public service. Many of the abusesthat the reformers complained about were realenough, but patronage served some useful purposes aswell. It gave the president a way to ensure that his sub-ordinates were reasonably supportive of his policies; itprovided a reward that the president could use toinduce recalcitrant members of Congress to vote forhis programs; and it enabled party organizations to bebuilt up to perform the necessary functions of nomi-nating candidates and getting out the vote.

Though at first there were not many jobs to fightover, by the middle of the nineteenth century therewere a lot. From 1816 to 1861 the number of federalemployees increased eightfold. This expansion wasnot, however, the result of the government’s taking onnew functions but simply a result of the increaseddemands on its traditional functions. The Post Officealone accounted for 86 percent of this growth.4

The Civil War was a great watershed in bureau-cratic development. Fighting the war led, naturally,to hiring many new officials and creating many newoffices. Just as important, the Civil War revealed the administrative weakness of the federal govern-ment and led to demands by the civil service reformmovement for an improvement in the quality and


organization of federal employees. And finally, thewar was followed by a period of rapid industrializa-tion and the emergence of a national economy. Theeffects of these developments could no longer bemanaged by state governments acting alone. Withthe creation of a nationwide network of railroads,commerce among the states became increasinglyimportant. The constitutional powers of the federalgovernment to regulate interstate commerce, longdormant for want of much commerce to regulate,now became an important source of controversy.

A Service RoleFrom 1861 to 1901 new agencies were created, manyto deal with particular sectors of society and the econ-omy. Over two hundred thousand new federal employ-ees were added, with only about half of this increase inthe Post Office. The rapidly growing Pension Officebegan paying benefits to Civil War veterans; theDepartment of Agriculture was created in 1862 tohelp farmers; the Department of Labor was founded in1882 to serve workers; and the Department ofCommerce was organized in 1903 to assist business-people. Many more specialized agencies, such as theNational Bureau of Standards, also came into being.

These agencies had one thing in common: their rolewas primarily to serve, not to regulate. Most didresearch, gathered statistics, dispensed federal lands,or passed out benefits. Not until the InterstateCommerce Commission (ICC) was created in 1887 didthe federal government begin to regulate the economy(other than by managing the currency) in any largeway. Even the ICC had, at first, relatively few powers.

There were several reasons why federal officials pri-marily performed a service role. The values that hadshaped the Constitution were still strong: these includ-ed a belief in limited government, the importance ofstates’ rights, and the fear of concentrated discre-tionary power. The proper role of government in theeconomy was to promote, not to regulate, and a com-mitment to laissez-faire—a freely competitive econo-my—was strongly held. But just as important, theConstitution said nothing about giving any regulatorypowers to bureaucrats. It gave to Congress the power toregulate commerce among the states. Now obviouslyCongress could not make the necessary day-to-daydecisions to regulate, for example, the rates that inter-state railroads charged to farmers and other shippers.Some agency or commission composed of appointedofficials and experts would have to be created to do

★ POLITICALLY SPEAKING ★

The spoils system is another phrase for politicalpatronage—that is, the practice of giving the fruitsof a party’s victory, such as jobs and contracts, tothe loyal members of that party.

Spoils became a famous word when it wasused in 1832 by Senator William Marcy of NewYork in a speech that he made defending thedecision of President Andrew Jackson to appointone of his supporters, Martin Van Buren, asambassador to Great Britain. New York politi-cians, he said, “boldly preach what they practice.. . . If they are successful, they claim, as a matterof right, the advantages of success. They seenothing wrong in the rule, that to the victorbelong the spoils of the enemy.”

In fact both the word and the practice aremuch older than Marcy and Jackson. ThomasJefferson had appointed his partisans to officewhen he won the presidency from John Adams.Though Jackson is remembered as a heavy userof spoils, in fact he only replaced about 20 per-cent of all the officeholders that he inheritedfrom his predecessor.

By the late nineteenth century the spoils sys-tem was both more extensively used and sharplycriticized. Ending the system and replacing itwith appointments based on merit was a majorgoal of the progressive movement around theturn of the century.

Today most federal appointments are based onmerit, but in many state governments there con-tinues to be a heavy reliance on patronage.

Source: From Safire’s Political Dictionary by William Safire. Copyright© 1968, 1972, 1978 by William Safire. Reprinted by permission ofRandom House, Inc. and the author.

Spoils System

The Growth of the Bureaucracy 377

that. For a long time, however, the prevailing interpre-tation of the Constitution was that no such agencycould exercise such regulatory powers unless Congressfirst set down clear standards that would govern theagency’s decisions. As late as 1935 the Supreme Courtheld that a regulatory agency could not make rules onits own; it could only apply the standards enacted byCongress.5 The Court’s view was that the legislaturemay not delegate its powers to the president or to anadministrative agency.6

These restrictions on what administrators could dowere set aside in wartime. During World War I, forexample, President Woodrow Wilson was authorizedby Congress to fix prices, operate the railroads, managethe communications system, and even control the dis-tribution of food.7 This kind of extraordinary grant ofpower usually ended with the war.

Some changes in the bureaucracy did not end withthe war. During the Civil War, World War I, World WarII, the Korean War, and the war in Vietnam, the num-ber of civilian (as well as military) employees of thegovernment rose sharply. These increases were notsimply in the number of civilians needed to help servethe war effort; many of the additional people werehired by agencies, such as the Treasury Department,not obviously connected with the war. Furthermore,the number of federal officials did not return to prewarlevels after each war. Though there was some reduc-tion, each war left the number of federal employeeslarger than before.8

It is not hard to understand how this happens.During wartime almost every government agencyargues that its activities have some relation to thewar effort, and few legislators want to be caught vot-ing against something that may help that effort.Hence in 1944 the Reindeer Service in Alaska, anagency of the Interior Department, asked for moreemployees because reindeer are “a valued asset inmilitary planning.”

A Change in RoleToday’s bureaucracy is largely a product of two events:the depression of the 1930s (and the concomitantNew Deal program of President Roosevelt) and WorldWar II. Though many agencies have been added sincethen, the basic features of the bureaucracy were setmainly as a result of changes in public attitudes and inconstitutional interpretation that occurred duringthese periods. The government was now expected toplay an active role in dealing with economic and socialproblems. In the late 1930s the Supreme Courtreversed its earlier decisions (see Chapter 14) on thequestion of delegating legislative powers to adminis-trative agencies and upheld laws by which Congressmerely instructs agencies to make decisions that serve“the public interest” in some area.9 As a result it waspossible for President Nixon to set up in 1971 a systemof price and wage controls based on a statute that sim-ply authorized the president “to issue such orders andregulations as he may deem appropriate to stabilize


prices, rents, wages, and salaries.”10 The Cost of LivingCouncil and other agencies that Nixon established tocarry out this order were run by appointed officialswho had the legal authority to make sweeping deci-sions based on general statutory language.

World War II was the first occasion during whichthe government made heavy use of federal incometaxes—on individuals and corporations—to finance itsactivities. Between 1940 and 1945 total federal taxcollections increased from about $5 billion to nearly$44 billion. The end of the war brought no substantialtax reduction: the country believed that a high level ofmilitary preparedness continued to be necessary andthat various social programs begun before the warshould enjoy the heavy funding made possible bywartime taxes. Tax receipts continued, by and large, togrow. Before 1913, when the Sixteenth Amendmentto the Constitution was passed, the federal governmentcould not collect income taxes at all (it financed itselflargely from customs duties and excise taxes). From1913 to 1940 income taxes were small (in 1940 theaverage American paid only $7 in federal incometaxes). World War II created the first great financialboom for the government, permitting the sustainedexpansion of a wide variety of programs and thusentrenching a large number of administrators inWashington.11

The Federal BureaucracyToday

No president wants to admit that he has increased thesize of the bureaucracy. He can avoid saying this bypointing out that the number of civilians working forthe federal government, excluding postal workers, hasnot increased significantly in recent years and is aboutthe same today (2 million persons) as it was in 1960,and less than it was during World War II. This expla-nation is true but misleading, for it neglects the rough-ly 13 million people who work indirectly forWashington as employees of private firms and state orlocal agencies that are largely, if not entirely, support-ed by federal funds. As Figure 13.1 shows, there arenearly three persons earning their living indirectlyfrom the federal government for every one earning itdirectly. While federal employment has remained quitestable, employment among federal contractors andconsultants and in state and local governments hasmushroomed. Indeed, most federal bureaucrats, like

most other people who work for the federal govern-ment, live outside Washington, D.C. (see Figure 13.3later in this chapter).

The power of the federal bureaucracy cannot bemeasured by the number of employees, however. Abureaucracy of five million persons would have littlepower if each employee did nothing but type letters orfile documents, whereas a bureaucracy of only onehundred persons would have awesome power if eachmember were able to make arbitrary life-and-deathdecisions affecting the rest of us. The power of thebureaucracy depends on the extent to which appoint-ed officials have discretionary authority—that is,the ability to choose courses of action and to makepolicies that are not spelled out in advance by laws. InFigure 13.2 we see how the volume of regulationsissued and the amount of money spent have risenmuch faster than the number of federal employeeswho write the regulations and spend the money.

By this test the power of the federal bureaucracyhas grown enormously. Congress has delegated sub-stantial authority to administrative agencies in threeareas: (1) paying subsidies to particular groups andorganizations in society (farmers, veterans, scientists,schools, universities, hospitals); (2) transferringmoney from the federal government to state and localgovernments (the grant-in-aid programs described inChapter 3); and (3) devising and enforcing regulationsfor various sectors of society and the economy. Some of

Source: Paul C. Light, The True Size of Government(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1999). Data for 1996.

17 MillionWorkers

On federalcontracts

5.6 m

Working under federalmandate for state or localgovernments 4.6 m

On federal grants 2.4 m

Postal workers 0.9 m

Uniformed military 1.5 m

Federal civilservants 1.9 m

Figure 13.1 The Real “Washington” Bureaucracy

The Federal Bureaucracy Today 379

these administrative functions, such as grants-in-aidto states, are closely monitored by Congress; others,such as the regulatory programs, usually operate witha greater degree of independence. These delegations ofpower, especially in the areas of paying subsidies andregulating the economy, did not become commonplaceuntil the 1930s, and then only after the SupremeCourt decided that such delegations were constitution-al. Today, by contrast, appointed officials can decide,within rather broad limits, who shall own a televisionstation, what safety features automobiles shall have,what kinds of scientific research shall be speciallyencouraged, what drugs shall appear on the market,which dissident groups shall be investigated, whatfumes an industrial smokestack may emit, which cor-porate mergers shall be allowed, what use shall bemade of national forests, and what prices crop anddairy farmers shall receive for their products.

If appointed officials have this kind of power, thenhow they use it is of paramount importance in under-standing modern government. There are, broadly, fourfactors that may explain the behavior of these officials:

1. The manner in which they are recruited andrewarded

2. Their personal attributes, such as their socioeco-nomic backgrounds and their political attitudes

3. The nature of their jobs4. The constraints that outside forces—political supe-

riors, legislators, interest groups, journalists—impose on their agencies

Recruitment and RetentionThe federal civil service system was designed to recruitqualified people on the basis of merit, not politicalpatronage, and to retain and promote employees onthe basis of performance, not political favoritism.Many appointed federal officials belong to the com-petitive service. This means that they are appointedonly after they have passed a written examinationadministered by the Office of Personnel Management(OPM) or met certain selection criteria (such as train-ing, educational attainments, or prior experience)devised by the hiring agency and approved by theOPM. Where competition for a job exists and candi-dates can be ranked by their scores or records, theagency must usually appoint one of the three top-ranking candidates.

In recent years the competitive service system hasbecome decentralized, so that each agency now hires

Per

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1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000

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REGULATIONS

EMPLOYMENT

EXPENDITURES

Figure 13.2 Federal Government: Money, People, and Regulations

Sources: Expenditures and employment: Statistical Abstract of the UnitedStates, 2000, Nos. 483 and 582; regulations: Harold W. Stanley andRichard G. Niemi, Vital Statistics on American Politics (Washington, D.C.:Congressional Quarterly Press, 1998), tables 6-12, 6-14.


its own people without an OPM referral, and examina-tions have become less common. In 1952 more than86 percent of all federal employees were civil servantshired by the competitive service; by 1996 that figurehad fallen to less than 54 percent. This decentraliza-tion and the greater use of ways other than exams tohire employees were caused by three things. First, theold OPM system was cumbersome and often not rele-vant to the complex needs of departments. Second,these agencies had a need for more professionallytrained employees—lawyers, biologists, engineers, andcomputer specialists—who could not be ranked on thebasis of some standard exam. And third, civil rightsgroups pressed Washington to make the racial compo-sition of the federal bureaucracy look more like theracial composition of the nation.

Thus it is wrong to suppose that a standardized,centralized system governs the federal service. As onerecent study concluded, today much of the “realresponsibility for recruiting, testing, and hiring hasshifted to the agencies from OPM and its central system.”12

Moreover, the kinds of workers being recruited intothe federal civil service have changed. For example,blue-collar employment fell from 26 percent of the fed-eral work force in 1973 to 16 percent in 1993.Meanwhile, the federal government’s white-collarwork force has become more diverse occupationally. Asone writer on civil service reform has noted, the “needto recruit and retain physicists, biologists, oceanogra-phers, nurses, statisticians, botanists, and epidemiolo-gists, as well as large numbers of engineers, lawyers,and accountants, now preoccupies federal personnelmanagers.”13

Employees hired outside the competitive serviceare part of the excepted service. They now make upalmost half of all workers. Though not hired by theOPM, they still are typically hired in a nonpartisanfashion. Some are hired by agencies—such as theCIA, the FBI, and the Postal Service—that have theirown selection procedures.

About 3 percent of the excepted employees areappointed on grounds other than or in addition tomerit. These legal exceptions exist to permit the presi-dent to select, for policy-making and politically sensi-tive posts, people who are in agreement with his policyviews. Such appointments are generally of three kinds:

1. Presidential appointments authorized by statute(cabinet and subcabinet officers, judges, U.S. mar-

shals and U.S. attorneys, ambassadors, and mem-bers of various boards and commissions).

2. “Schedule C” appointments to jobs that aredescribed as having a “confidential or policy-deter-mining character” below the level of cabinet orsubcabinet posts (including executive assistants,special aides, and confidential secretaries).

3. Noncareer executive assignments (NEAs) givento high-ranking members of the regular compet-itive civil service or to persons brought into thecivil service at these high levels. These people aredeeply involved in the advocacy of presidentialprograms or participate in policy-making.

These three groups of excepted appointmentsconstitute the patronage available to a president andhis administration. When President Kennedy tookoffice in 1961, he had 451 political jobs to fill. WhenPresident Clinton took office in 1993, he had more


than four times that number, including nearly fourtimes the number of top cabinet posts (see Table13.1 on page 382). Scholars disagree over whetherthis proliferation of political appointees hasimproved or worsened Washington’s performance,but one thing is clear: widespread presidentialpatronage is hardly unprecedented. In the nine-teenth century practically every federal job was apatronage job. For example, when Grover Cleveland,a Democrat, became president in 1885, he replacedsome forty thousand Republican postal employeeswith Democrats.

Ironically, two years earlier, in 1883, the passageof the Pendleton Act had begun a slow but steadytransfer of federal jobs from the patronage to themerit system. It may seem strange that a politicalparty in power (the Republicans) would be willing torelinquish its patronage in favor of a merit-basedappointment system. Two factors made it possiblefor the Republicans to pass the Pendleton Act: (1)public outrage over the abuses of the spoils system,highlighted by the assassination of President JamesGarfield by a man always described in the historybooks as a “disappointed office seeker” (lunaticwould be a more accurate term); and (2) the fearthat if the Democrats came to power on a wave ofantispoils sentiment, existing Republican officehold-ers would be fired. (The Democrats won anyway.)

The merit system spread to encompass most of thefederal bureaucracy, generally with presidential sup-port. Though presidents may have liked in theory theidea of hiring and firing subordinates at will, most feltthat the demands for patronage were impossible eitherto satisfy or to ignore. Furthermore, by increasing thecoverage of the merit system a president could “blan-ket in” patronage appointees already holding office,thus making it difficult or impossible for the nextadministration to fire them.

■ The Buddy System The actual recruitment ofcivil servants, especially in middle- and upper-leveljobs, is somewhat more complicated, and slightly morepolitical, than the laws and rules might suggest.Though many people enter the federal bureaucracy bylearning of a job, filling out an application, perhapstaking a test, and being hired, many also enter on a“name-request” basis. A name-request job is onethat is filled by a person whom an agency has alreadyidentified. In this respect the federal government is notso different from private business. A person learns of ajob from somebody who already has one, or the head ofa bureau decides in advance whom he or she wishes tohire. The agency must still send a form describing thejob to the OPM, but it also names the person whom theagency wants to appoint. Sometimes the job is evendescribed in such a way that the person named is the

A Day in the Life of a BureaucratHere is how the commissioner of the Social SecurityAdministration (SSA), a high-level bureaucrat, spenta typical day:

5:45 A.M. Arise.6:50 A.M. Leave for the office.7:30 A.M. Read newspapers.8:00 A.M. Meet with deputy commissioner.8:30 A.M. Brief cabinet secretary on Social Security data.*9:45 A.M. Decide how to respond to press criticisms.10:05 A.M. Leave for meeting in another building.11:30 A.M. Meet with top staff.1:00 P.M. Meet with bureau chiefs on half a dozen

issues.2:45 P.M. Meet with a deputy to discuss next year’s budget.3:30 P.M. Meet with business executive about use of

computers in SSA.

4:30 P.M. Meet with deputy in charge of Medicare to discuss plan for national health insurance.

5:10 P.M. Catch up on phone calls; meet withcommittee concerned with drug abuse.

6:10 P.M. Leave for home. Get out of attending a dinner meeting in Washington.

As is obvious, high-level bureaucrats spend mostof their time discussing things in meetings. It is insuch meetings that government policy is made.

*SSA was part of the Department of Health and Human Services butno longer is.

Source: Adapted from “A Day in the Life of a Government Executive,”in Inside the System, ed. Charles Peters and Nicholas Leamann, 4thed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), 205–213.

HOW THINGS WORK


only one who can qualify for it. Occasionally this tailor-made, name-request job is offered to a person at theinsistence of a member of Congress who wants a polit-

ical supporter taken care of; more often it is made avail-able because the bureaucracy itself knows whom itwishes to hire and wants to circumvent an elaboratesearch. This is the “buddy system.”

The buddy system does not necessarily producepoor employees. Indeed, it is frequently a way of hir-ing people known to the agency as being capable ofhandling the position. It also opens up the possibili-ty of hiring people whose policy views are congenialto those already in office. Such networking is basedon shared policy views, not (as once was the case) onnarrow partisan affiliations. For example, bureau-crats in consumer protection agencies recruit newstaff from private groups with an interest in con-sumer protection, such as the various organizationsassociated with Ralph Nader, or from academicswho have a proconsumer inclination.

There has always been an informal “old boys’ net-work” among those who move in and out of high-level government posts; with the increasing appoint-ment of women to these jobs, there has begun to

Administration

Kennedy Clinton

Top cabinet postsSecretary 10 14Deputy secretary 6 21Undersecretary 14 32Assistant secretary 81 212Deputy assistant secretary 77 507Deputy administrator 52 190

Total top cabinet posts 240 976Total top political jobs 451 2,393

Source: Paul C. Light, Thickening Government (Washington,D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995).

Table 13.1 The Rise in Top Political Jobs


emerge an old girls’ network as well.14 In a later sec-tion we will consider whether, or in what ways, theserecruitment patterns make a difference.

■ Firing a Bureaucrat The great majority of bu-reaucrats who are part of the civil service and who donot hold presidential appointments have jobs that are,for all practical purposes, beyond reach. An executivemust go through elaborate steps to fire, demote, or sus-pend a civil servant. Realistically this means that noone is fired or demoted unless his or her superior is pre-pared to invest a great deal of time and effort in theattempt. In 1987 about 2,600 employees who hadcompleted their probationary period were fired for mis-conduct or poor performance. That is about one-tenthof 1 percent of all federal employees. It is hard tobelieve that a large private company would fire onlyone-tenth of 1 percent of its workers in a given year.It’s also impossible to believe that, as is often the case inWashington, it would take a year to fire anyone. Tocope with this problem, federal executives have deviseda number of stratagems for bypassing or forcing outcivil servants with whom they cannot work—denyingthem promotions, transferring them to undesirablelocations, or assigning them to meaningless work.

With the passage of the Civil Service Reform Act of1978 Congress recognized that many high-level posi-tions in the civil service have important policy-making responsibilities and that the president and hiscabinet officers ought to have more flexibility in recruiting, assigning, and paying such people.

Accordingly, the act created the Senior ExecutiveService (SES), about eight thousand top federal man-agers who can (in theory) be hired, fired, and trans-ferred more easily than ordinary civil servants.Moreover, the act stipulated that members of the SESwould be eligible for substantial cash bonuses if theyperformed their duties well. (To protect the rights ofSES members, anyone who is removed from the SES isguaranteed a job elsewhere in the government.)

Things did not work out quite as the sponsors of theSES had hoped. Though most eligible civil servantsjoined it, there was only a modest increase in the pro-portion of higher-ranking positions in agencies thatwere filled by transfer from another agency; the cashbonuses did not prove to be an important incentive(perhaps because the base salaries of top bureaucratsdid not keep up with inflation); and hardly any mem-ber of the SES was actually fired. Two years after theSES was created, less than one-half of 1 percent of itsmembers had received an unsatisfactory rating, andnone had been fired. Nor does the SES give the presi-dent a large opportunity to make political appoint-ments: only 10 percent of the SES can be selected fromoutside the existing civil service. And no SES membercan be transferred involuntarily.

■ The Agency’s Point of View When one realizesthat most agencies are staffed by people who wererecruited by those agencies, sometimes on a name-request basis, and who are virtually immune from dis-missal, it becomes clear that the recruitment and

Firing a BureaucratTo fire or demote a member of the competitive civilservice, these procedures must be followed:

1. The employee must be given written notice atleast thirty days in advance that he or she is to befired or demoted for incompetence or misconduct.

2. The written notice must contain a statement ofreasons, including specific examples of unaccept-able performance.

3. The employee has the right to an attorney and toreply, orally or in writing, to the charges.

4. The employee has the right to appeal any adverseaction to the Merit Systems Protection Board(MSPB), a three-person, bipartisan body appointedby the president with the consent of the Senate.

5. The MSPB must grant the employee a hearing, atwhich the employee has the right to have anattorney present.

6. The employee has the right to appeal the MSPBdecision to a U.S. court of appeals, which can holdnew hearings.

HOW THINGS WORK


retention policies of the civil service work to ensurethat most bureaucrats will have an “agency” point ofview. Even with the encouragement for transfers creat-ed by the SES, most government agencies are dominat-ed by people who have not served in any other agencyand who have been in government service most oftheir lives. This fact has some advantages: it meansthat most top-tier bureaucrats are experts in the proce-dures and policies of their agencies and that there willbe a substantial degree of continuity in agency behav-ior no matter which political party happens to be inpower.

But the agency point of view has its costs as well. Apolitical executive entering an agency with responsi-bility for shaping its direction will discover that he orshe must carefully win the support of career subordi-nates. A subordinate has an infinite capacity for dis-creet sabotage and can make life miserable for a politi-cal superior by delaying action, withholding informa-tion, following the rule book with literal exactness, ormaking an “end run” around a superior to mobilizemembers of Congress who are sympathetic to thebureaucrat’s point of view. For instance, when onepolitical executive wanted to downgrade a bureau inhis department, he found, naturally, that the bureauchief was opposed. The bureau chief spoke to somefriendly lobbyists and a key member of Congress.When the political executive asked the congressmanwhether he had any problem with the contemplatedreorganization, the congressman replied, “No, youhave the problem, because if you touch that bureau,I’ll cut your job out of the budget.”15

Personal AttributesA second factor that might shape the way bureaucratsuse their power is their personal attributes. Theseinclude their social class, education, and personalpolitical beliefs. The federal civil service as a wholelooks very much like a cross section of American society in the education, sex, race, and social origins ofits members (see Figure 13.3). But as with many otheremployers, African Americans and other minoritiesare most likely to be heavily represented in the lowestgrade levels and tend to be underrepresented at theexecutive level (see Table 13.2). At the higher-rankinglevels, where the most power is found—say, in thesupergrade ranks of GS 16 through GS 18—the typi-cal civil servant is a middle-aged white male with a col-lege degree whose father was somewhat more advan-taged than the average citizen. In the great majority of

cases this individual is in fact very different from thetypical American in both background and personalbeliefs.

Because political appointees and career bureau-crats are unrepresentative of the average American,and because of their supposed occupational self-interest, some critics have speculated that the peopleholding these jobs think about politics and governmentin ways very different from the public at large. Theresults of a 1998 survey would seem to prove themright: 57 percent of average citizens, versus 76 percentof career bureaucrats and 88 percent of Clintonadministration appointees, described themselves asprogovernment; 60 percent of all Americans, com-pared to just 4 percent of all career bureaucrats andClinton appointees, agreed that most popular criti-cisms of the federal government were justified; about athird of the public, but under a fifth of the career andappointed public servants, described themselves asconservative; and only 13 or 14 percent of those ingovernment agreed that the public knew enoughabout the issues to form wise opinions on policy.16

It is important, however, not to overgeneralizefrom such differences. For example, whereas Clintonappointees (virtually all of them strong Democrats)were more liberal than average citizens, Reaganappointees (virtually all of them loyal Republicans)were undoubtedly more conservative than averagecitizens. Likewise, career civil servants are more pro-government than the public at large, but on mostspecific policy questions, federal bureaucrats do nothave extreme positions. They don’t, for example,

Percentage of Total

Grade Black Hispanic Black Hispanic

GS 1–4 26,895 8,526 29.7% 9.4%GS 5–8 99,937 31,703 27.0 8.6GS 9–12 82,809 36,813 16.0 7.0GS 13–15 31,494 12,869 10.3 4.2SES 1,180 547 7.3 3.4Total 298,701 115,247 17.0 6.7

Note: GS stands for “General Service.” The higher the number, thehigher the rank of people with that number.

Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2001, 482.

Table 13.2 Minority Employment in the FederalBureaucracy by Rank, 2000


think that the government should take over the bigcorporations, they support some amount of businessderegulation, and a majority (by a slim margin)don’t think that the goal of U.S. foreign policy hasbeen to protect business.17

We can also see, however, that the kind of agencyfor which a bureaucrat works makes a difference.Those employed in “activist” agencies, such as theFederal Trade Commission, Environmental ProtectionAgency, and Food and Drug Administration, havemuch more liberal views than those who work for themore “traditional” agencies, such as the departmentsof Agriculture, Commerce, and the Treasury.

This association between attitudes and kind ofagency has been confirmed by other studies. Evenwhen the bureaucrats come from roughly the samesocial backgrounds, their policy views seem to reflectthe type of government work that they do. For exam-ple, people holding foreign service jobs in the StateDepartment tended to be more liberal than those com-

ing from similar family backgrounds and performingsimilar tasks (such as working on foreign affairs) in theDefense Department.18 It is not clear whether these dif-ferences in attitudes were produced by the jobs thatthey held or whether certain jobs attract people withcertain beliefs. Probably both forces were at work.

Whatever the mechanism involved, there seems lit-tle doubt that different agencies display different politi-cal ideologies. A study done in 1976 revealed thatDemocrats and people with liberal views tended to beoverrepresented in social service agencies, whereasRepublicans and people with conservative views tendto be overrepresented in defense agencies.19

Do Bureaucrats Sabotage Their Political Bosses?Because it is so hard to fire career bureaucrats, it isoften said that these people will sabotage any actionsby their political superiors with which they disagree.And since civil servants tend to have liberal views, it

Sex

Race

EmployingAgency

Total number of employees

Location

1960

1999

1960 White/Minority data for 1960 unavailable

Male 75% Female 25%

Male 55.1%

White 69.6%

All other 33%Postal Service 23%Defense Department 44%

All other 22.7%Postal Service 47.9%Defense Department 29.3%

Elsewhere 89%

Elsewhere 89%

11%

11%

Minority* 30.4%

Female 44.9%

1999

1960

1999

1960

1999

In Washington area

*Blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Pacific Islanders

1960

1999

2.2 million

2.1 million

Sources: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1961, 392–394; Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2000, Nos. 450, 482, 500,595, 1118.

Figure 13.3 Characteristics of Federal Civilian Employees, 1960 and 1999


has been conservative presidents and cabinet secre-taries who have usually expressed this worry.

There is no doubt that some bureaucrats will dragtheir heels if they don’t like their bosses, and a few willblock actions they oppose. However, most bureaucratstry to carry out the policies of their superiors evenwhen they personally disagree with them. WhenDavid Stockman was director of the OMB, he set out tomake sharp cuts in government spending programs inaccordance with the wishes of his boss, PresidentReagan. He later published a book complaining aboutall the people in the White House and Congress whoworked against him.20 But nowhere in the book is thereany major criticism of the civil servants at the OMB. Itappears that whatever these people thought aboutStockman and Reagan, they loyally tried to carry outStockman’s policies.

Bureaucrats tend to be loyal to political superiorswho deal with them cooperatively and constructive-ly. An agency head who tries to ignore or discredit them can be in for a tough time, however. The pow-ers of obstruction available to aggrieved bureaucratsare formidable. Such people can leak embarrassingstories to Congress or to the media, help interestgroups mobilize against the agency head, and dis-cover a thousand procedural reasons why a newcourse of action won’t work.

The exercise of some of those bureaucratic pow-ers is protected by the Whistle Blower ProtectionAct. Passed in 1989, the law created the Office ofSpecial Counsel, charged with investigating com-plaints from bureaucrats that they were punishedafter reporting to Congress about waste, fraud, orabuse in their agencies.

It may seem odd that bureaucrats, who have greatjob security, would not always act in accordance withtheir personal beliefs instead of in accordance with thewishes of their bosses. Bureaucratic sabotage, in thisview, ought to be very common. But bureaucraticcooperation with superiors is not odd, once you takeinto account the nature of a bureaucrat’s job.

If you are a voter at the polls, your beliefs will clear-ly affect how you vote (see Chapter 5). But if you arethe second baseman for the Boston Red Sox, your polit-ical beliefs, social background, and education will havenothing to do with how you field ground balls.Sociologists like to call the different things that peopledo in their lives “roles” and to distinguish betweenroles that are loosely structured (such as the role ofvoter) and those that are highly structured (such as

that of second baseman). Personal attitudes greatlyaffect loosely structured roles and only slightly affecthighly structured ones. Applied to the federal bureau-cracy, this suggests that civil servants performing tasksthat are routinized (such as filling out forms), tasksthat are closely defined by laws and rules (such as issu-ing welfare checks), or tasks that are closely monitoredby others (supervisors, special-interest groups, themedia) will probably perform them in ways that canonly partially be explained, if at all, by their personalattitudes. Civil servants performing complex, looselydefined tasks that are not closely monitored may carryout their work in ways powerfully influenced by theirattitudes.

Among the loosely defined tasks are those per-formed by professionals, and so the values of thesepeople may influence how they behave. An increas-ing number of lawyers, economists, engineers, andphysicians are hired to work in federal agencies.These men and women have received extensive train-ing that produces not only a set of skills but also a setof attitudes as to what is important and valuable. Forexample, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC),charged with preventing unfair methods of competi-tion among businesses, employs two kinds of profes-sionals—lawyers, organized into a Bureau ofCompetition, and economists, organized into aBureau of Economics. Lawyers are trained to drawup briefs and argue cases in court and are taught thelegal standards by which they will know whetherthey have a chance of winning a case or not.Economists are trained to analyze how a competitiveeconomy works and what costs consumers must bearif the goods and services are produced by a monopoly(one firm controlling the market) or an oligopoly (asmall number of firms dominating the market).

Because of their training and attitudes, lawyers inthe FTC prefer to bring cases against a business firmthat has done something clearly illegal, such as attend-ing secret meetings with competitors to rig the pricesthat will be charged to a purchaser. These cases appealto lawyers because there is usually a victim (the pur-chaser or a rival company) who complains to the gov-ernment, the illegal behavior can be proved in a courtof law, and the case can be completed rather quickly.

Economists, on the other hand, are trained tomeasure the value of a case not by how quickly itcan be proved in court but by whether the illegalpractice imposes large or small costs on the con-sumer. FTC economists often dislike the cases that

T•R•I•V•I•A


appeal to lawyers. The economists feel that theamount of money that such cases save the con-sumer is often small and that the cases are a distrac-tion from the major issues—such as whether IBMunfairly dominates the computer business orwhether General Motors is too large to be efficient.Lawyers, in turn, are leery of big cases, because thefacts are hard to prove and they may take forever todecide (one blockbuster case can drag through thecourts for ten years). In many federal agencies diver-gent professional values such as these help explainhow power is used.

Culture and CareersUnlike the lawyers and economists working in theFTC, the government bureaucrats in a typicalagency don’t have a lot of freedom to choose acourse of action. Their jobs are spelled out not onlyby the laws, rules, and routines of their agency butalso by the informal understandings among fellowemployees as to how they are supposed to act. Theseunderstandings are the culture of the agency.21

If you belong to the air force, you can do a lot ofthings, but only one thing really counts: flying airplanes, especially advanced jet fighters andbombers. The culture of the air force is a pilots’ cul-ture. If you belong to the navy, you have more choic-es: fly jet aircraft or operate nuclear submarines.Both jobs provide status and a chance for promotionto the highest ranks. By contrast, sailing minesweep-ers or transport ships (or worse, having a desk joband not sailing anything at all) is not a very reward-ing job. The culture of the CIA emphasizes workingoverseas as a clandestine agent; staying inWashington as a report writer is not as good for yourcareer. The culture of the State Department rewardsskill in political negotiations; being an expert oninternational economics or embassy security ismuch less rewarding.

You can usually tell what kind of culture anagency has by asking an employee, “If you want toget ahead here, what sort of jobs should you take?”The jobs that are career enhancing are part of theculture; the jobs that are not career enhancing (NCEin bureaucratic lingo) are not part of it.

Being part of a strong culture is good—up to apoint. It motivates employees to work hard in orderto win the respect of their coworkers as well as theapproval of their bosses. But a strong culture alsomakes it hard to change an agency. FBI agents formany years resisted getting involved in civil rights or

organized crime cases, and diplomats in the StateDepartment didn’t pay much attention to embassysecurity. These important jobs were not a career-enhancing part of the culture.

ConstraintsThe biggest difference between a governmentagency and a private organization is the vastlygreater number of constraints on the agency. Unlikea business firm, the typical government bureau can-not hire, fire, build, or sell without going throughprocedures set down in laws. How much money itpays its members is determined by statute, not by themarket. Not only the goals of an agency but often itsexact procedures are spelled out by Congress.

At one time the Soil Conservation Service wasrequired by law to employ at least 14,177 full-timeworkers. The State Department is forbidden by law

Famous BureaucratsThe federal government has employed as bureaucrats people who werelater to become famous in other careers.

Clara Barton, founder of the Clerk in the U.S. Patent Office,American Red Cross 1854–1861

Alexander Graham Bell, Special agent of the U.S.inventor of the telephone Census Bureau, 1890

Nathaniel Hawthorne, author Weigher in the Boston Custom House, 1839–1841, and surveyor of the Port of Salem,Massachusetts, 1845–1849

Washington Irving, author U.S. foreign service

Abraham Lincoln, president Postmaster of New Salem,Illinois, 1833–1836

Knute Rockne, football coach Clerk in Chicago Post Office,1907–1910

James Thurber, humorist Code clerk in State Department

James Whistler, painter Draftsman, U.S. Coast Survey,1854–1855

Walt Whitman, poet Clerk, U.S. Department of the Interior, 1865


from opening a diplomatic post in Antigua orBarbuda but forbidden from closing a post anywhereelse. The Agency for International Development(which administers our foreign-aid program) hasbeen given by Congress 33 objectives and 75 priori-ties and must send to Congress 288 reports eachyear. When it buys military supplies, the DefenseDepartment must give a “fair proportion” of its con-tracts to small businesses, especially those operatedby “socially and economically disadvantaged indi-viduals,” and must buy from American firms even if,in some cases, buying abroad would be cheaper.

Some of the more general constraints include thefollowing:

• Administrative Procedure Act (1946). Before adopt-ing a new rule or policy, an agency must give notice,solicit comments, and (often) hold hearings.

• Freedom of Information Act (1966). Citizens havethe right to inspect all government records exceptthose containing military, intelligence, or tradesecrets or revealing private personnel actions.

• National Environmental Policy Act (1969). Beforeundertaking any major action affecting the envi-ronment, an agency must issue an environmentalimpact statement.

• Privacy Act (1974). Government files about indi-viduals, such as Social Security and tax records,must be kept confidential.

• Open Meeting Law (1976). Every part of everyagency meeting must be open to the public unlesscertain matters (for example, military or tradesecrets) are being discussed.

One of the biggest constraints on bureaucraticaction is that Congress rarely gives any job to a singleagency. Stopping drug trafficking is the task of theCustoms Service, the FBI, the Drug EnforcementAdministration, the Border Patrol, and the DefenseDepartment (among others). Disposing of the assetsof failed savings-and-loan associations is the job ofthe Resolution Funding Corporation, ResolutionTrust Corporation, Federal Housing Finance Board,Office of Thrift Supervision in the TreasuryDepartment, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation,Federal Reserve Board, and Justice Department(among others).

The effects of these constraints on agency behaviorare not surprising.

• The government will often act slowly. (The moreconstraints that must be satisfied, the longer it willtake to get anything done.)

• The government will sometimes act inconsistently.(What is done to meet one constraint—for exam-ple, freedom of information—may endangeranother constraint—for example, privacy.)

• It will be easier to block action than to take action.(The constraints ensure that lots of voices will beheard; the more voices that are heard, the morethey may cancel each other out.)

• Lower-ranking employees will be reluctant to make decisions on their own. (Having manyconstraints means having many ways to get into

How to Get Rid of a Career CivilServant Without Going Through the SystemThe frontal assault Tell him that he is no longerwanted and that if he quits, he will get a nice letterof recommendation and a farewell luncheon. If hewon’t quit but later wants to leave for a better job,he will get a nasty letter of recommendation.

The transfer technique Find out where in thecountry the civil servant does not want to live andthreaten to transfer her there. Send Bostonians toTexas and Texans to Maine.

The special-assignment technique Useful for afamily person who does not like to travel. Tell himthat to keep his job he must inspect all the agency’soffices in cities with a population under twentythousand and stay in bad motels. Even if he doesn’tquit, at least you will have him out of the office.

The layering technique Put loyal subordinates incharge of disloyal ones, or put the objectionablecivil servant into an out-of-the-way post where youcan ignore her.

Source: Adapted from “Federal Political Personnel Manual,”printed in “Presidential Campaign Activities of 1972,”Hearings Before the Select Committee on PresidentialCampaign Activities, Ninety-third Congress, 2nd Session, vol.19 (1974). This manual was produced by members of the Nixonadministration, but in some version its principles have beenapplied by all administrations.

of PoliticsThe “Rules”


trouble; to avoid trouble, let your boss make thedecision.)

• Citizens will complain of red tape. (The more con-straints to serve, the more forms to fill out.)

These constraints do not mean that governmentbureaucracy is powerless, only that, however great itspower, it tends to be clumsy. That clumsiness arises notfrom the fact that the people who work for agencies aredull or incompetent but from the complicated politicalenvironment in which that work must be done.

The moral of the story: the next time you get mad ata bureaucrat, ask yourself, Why would a rational,intelligent person behave that way? Chances are youwill discover that there are good reasons for thataction. You would probably behave the same way ifyou were working for the same organization.

■ Why So Many Constraints? Government agen-cies behave as they do in large part because of themany different goals they must pursue and the complex rules they must follow. Where does all this redtape come from?

From us. From us, the people.Every goal, every constraint, every bit of red tape,

was put in place by Congress, the courts, the WhiteHouse, or the agency itself responding to the demandsof some influential faction. Civil rights groups wantevery agency to hire and buy from women and minori-ties. Environmental groups want every agency to fileenvironmental impact statements. Industries beingregulated want every new agency policy to be formu-lated only after a lengthy public hearing with lots oflawyers present. Labor unions also want those hear-ings so that they can argue against industry lawyers.

Learning BureaucrateseA few simple rules, if remembered, will enable youto speak and write in the style of a government official.

• Use nouns as if they were verbs. Don’t say, “We must set priorities”; say instead, “We mustprioritize.”

• Use adjectives as if they were verbs. Don’t say,“We put the report in final form”; say instead,“We finalized the report.”

• Use several words where one word woulddo. Don’t say, “now”; say instead, “at this pointin time.”


• Never use ordinary words where unusual ones canbe found. Don’t say that you “made a choice”; saythat you “selected an option.”

• No matter what subject you are discussing,employ the language of sports and war. Neversay, “progress”; say, “breakthrough.” Never speakof a “compromise”; instead consider “adopting afallback position.”

• Avoid active verbs. Never say, “Study the prob-lem”; say instead, “It is felt that the problemshould be subjected to further study.”


Everybody who sells something to the governmentwants a “fair chance” to make the sale, and so every-body insists that government contracts be awardedonly after complex procedures are followed. A lot ofpeople don’t trust the government, and so they insist

that everything it does be done in the sunshine—nosecrets, no closed meetings, no hidden files.

If we wanted agencies to pursue their main goalwith more vigor and less encumbering red tape, wewould have to ask Congress, the courts, or the WhiteHouse to repeal some of these constraints. In otherwords, we would have to be willing to give up some-thing we want in order to get something else wewant even more. But politics does not encouragepeople to make these trade-offs; instead it encour-ages us to expect to get everything—efficiency, fair-ness, help for minorities—all at once.

Agency AlliesDespite these constraints, government bureaucra-cies are not powerless. In fact some of them activelyseek certain constraints. They do so because it is away of cementing a useful relationship with a con-gressional committee or an interest group.

At one time scholars described the relationshipbetween an agency, a committee, and an interestgroup as an iron triangle. For example, theDepartment of Veterans Affairs, the House andSenate committees on veterans’ affairs, and veter-ans’ organizations (such as the American Legion)would form a tight, mutually advantageous alliance.The department would do what the committeeswanted and in return get political support and budg-et appropriations; the committee members would dowhat the veterans’ groups wanted and in return getvotes and campaign contributions. Iron triangles areexamples of what are called client politics.

Many agencies still have important allies inCongress and the private sector, especially thosebureaus that serve the needs of specific sectors of theeconomy or regions of the country. The Departmentof Agriculture works closely with farm organizations,the Department of the Interior with groups interestedin obtaining low-cost irrigation or grazing rights, andthe Department of Housing and Urban Developmentwith mayors and real-estate developers.

Sometimes these allies are so strong that they candefeat a popular president. For years PresidentReagan tried to abolish the Small BusinessAdministration (SBA), arguing that its program ofloans to small firms was wasteful and ridden withfavoritism. But Congress, reacting to pressures fromsmall-business groups, rallied to the SBA’s defense.As a result Reagan had to oversee an agency that hedidn’t want.

“Laws” of Bureaucratic Procedure

Acheson’s Rule A memorandum is written not toinform the reader but to protect the writer.

Boren’s LawsWhen in doubt, mumble.When in trouble, delegate.When in charge, ponder.

Chapman’s Rules of CommitteesNever arrive on time, or you will be stamped a

beginner.Don’t say anything until the meeting is half over;

this stamps you as being wise.Be as vague as possible; this prevents irritating

others.When in doubt, suggest that a subcommittee be

appointed.

Meskimen’s Law There’s never time to do it rightbut always time to do it over.

Murphy’s Law If anything can go wrong, it will.

O’Toole’s Corollary to Murphy’s Law Murphy wasan optimist.

Parkinson’s First Law Work expands to fill the timeavailable for its completion.

Parkinson’s Second Law Expenditure rises to meetincome.

Peter Principle In every hierarchy, each employeetends to rise to his level of incompetence; thus,every post tends to be filled by an incompetentemployee.

Robertson’s Rule The more directives you issue tosolve a problem, the worse it gets.

Smith’s Principle Never do anything for the first time.


Congressional Oversight 391

But iron triangles are much less common todaythan once was the case. Politics of late has become farmore complicated. For one thing, the number and vari-ety of interest groups have increased so much in recentyears that there is scarcely any agency that is not sub-ject to pressures from several competing interestsinstead of only from one powerful interest. For anoth-er, the growth of subcommittees in Congress hasmeant that most agencies are subject to control bymany different legislative groups, often with very dif-ferent concerns. Finally, the courts have made it mucheasier for all kinds of individuals and interests to inter-vene in agency affairs.

As a result, nowadays government agencies facea bewildering variety of competing groups and leg-islative subcommittees that constitute not a loyalgroup of allies but a fiercely contentious collection ofcritics. The Environmental Protection Agency iscaught between the demands of environmentalistsand those of industry organizations, the Occupa-tional Safety and Health Administration betweenthe pressures of labor and those of business, and theFederal Communications Commission between thedesires of broadcasters and those of cable televisioncompanies. Even the Department of Agriculturefaces not a unified group of farmers but many differ-ent farmers split into rival groups, depending on thecrops they raise, the regions in which they live, andthe attitudes they have toward the relative merits offarm subsidies or free markets.

Political scientist Hugh Heclo has described the typ-ical government agency today as being embedded notin an iron triangle but in an issue network.22 Theseissue networks consist of people in Washington-basedinterest groups, on congressional staffs, in universitiesand think tanks, and in the mass media, who regular-ly debate government policy on a certain subject—say,health care or auto safety. The networks are con-tentious, split along political, ideological, and econom-ic lines. When a president takes office, he often recruitskey agency officials from those members of the issuenetwork who are most sympathetic to his views.

When Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, became presi-dent, he appointed to key posts in consumer agenciespeople who were from that part of the consumer issuenetwork associated with Ralph Nader. Ronald Reagan,a conservative Republican, filled these same jobs withpeople who were from that part of the issue networkholding free market or antiregulation views. WhenGeorge Bush the elder, a more centrist Republican,

took office, he filled these posts with more centristmembers of the issue network. Bill Clinton broughtback the consumer activists.

Congressional Oversight

The main reason why some interest groups are impor-tant to agencies is that they are important to Congress.Not every interest group in the country has substantialaccess to Congress, but those that do and that aretaken seriously by the relevant committees or subcom-mittees must also be taken seriously by the agency.Furthermore, even apart from interest groups, mem-bers of Congress have constitutional powers overagencies and policy interests in how agencies function.

Congressional supervision of the bureaucracytakes several forms. First, no agency may exist (exceptfor a few presidential offices and commissions) withoutcongressional approval. Congress influences—andsometimes determines precisely—agency behavior bythe statutes it enacts.

Second, no money may be spent unless it has firstbeen authorized by Congress. Authorization legis-lation originates in a legislative committee (such asAgriculture, Education and Labor, or Public Works)and states the maximum amount of money that anagency may spend on a given program. This author-ization may be permanent, it may be for a fixed num-ber of years, or it may be annual (that is, it must be


renewed each year, or the program or agency goesout of business).

Third, even funds that have been authorized byCongress cannot be spent unless (in most cases) theyare also appropriated. Appropriations are usuallymade annually, and they originate not with the

legislative committees but with the HouseAppropriations Committee and its various (andinfluential) subcommittees. An appropriation(money formally set aside for a specific use) may be,and often is, for less than the amount authorized.The Appropriations Committee’s action thus tends

Congressional Oversight and Homeland SecurityShortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attackon the United States, Senator Joseph Liebermancalled for the creation of a new “Department ofHomeland Defense.” What Lieberman had in mindwas a large new cabinet department that wouldbring many federal agencies under one administra-tive roof. The director of the new department, heargued, should be a cabinet official subject to Senateconfirmation.

Instead, by executive order, President George W.Bush created a new Office of Homeland Securitywithin the Executive Office of the President. Heappointed his friend, former Republican governor ofPennsylvania Tom Ridge, to head the office as anassistant to the president. Within a few months,Ridge’s office released a homeland security blueprintspecifying the critical tasks necessary to secure thesafety of the United States.

But who, in which federal, state, or local publicagencies, was to perform these critical tasks, withwhat government monies, and under whose ultimateadministrative authority? By spring 2002, the newhomeland security office was plagued by two issues.First, congressional leaders insisted that Ridge testifybefore Congress about the Bush administration’shomeland security strategy. The Bush administrationrefused, citing Ridge’s status as an assistant to thepresident, not a Senate-confirmed appointee. Second,to administer its strategy, Ridge’s office would need tocoordinate personnel and budgets across scores ofagencies (see Figure 13.4 on page 393).

On June 6, 2002, the Bush administration pro-posed the creation of a Department of HomelandSecurity that would consolidate twenty-two federalagencies into one umbrella cabinet-level bureaucra-cy with nearly 170,000 federal employees (thirdbehind Defense and Veterans Affairs) and a total ofabout $40 billion in budgets (fourth behind Defense,Health and Human Services, and Education). Theplan called for organizing the new department into

four divisions: border and transportation security;emergency preparedness and response; chemical,biological, radiological, and nuclear counter-meas-ures; and information analysis and infrastructureprotection (see Figure 13.4). The secretary of thenew department would require Senate approval.Ridge’s EOP unit, with about 100 White Houseemployees, would continue to exist as an advisorybody to the president.

Regardless of how the new Department ofHomeland Security is organized, one thing is certain:Congress will need to restructure itself to make thenew bureaucracy work. Because of committee-cen-tered congressional decision-making, over the lastseveral decades the federal bureaucracy has evolvedthrough agency-by-agency, procedure-by-proce-dure, program-by-program responses to problems asthey appeared. Thus, excluding the Department ofDefense, the State Department, the Federal Bureau ofInvestigation (FBI), and the Central IntelligenceAgency (CIA), some seventy separate federal agen-cies are authorized by Congress to spend money oncounterterrorist activities.

A law creating the new Department of Home-land Security was passed late in 2002, but howCongress will oversee it will take years to learn.The day after the Bush plan was announced, con-gressional committee chairmen in both partiesissued public statements strongly supporting theidea of creating a new homeland security depart-ment, but opposing any efforts to “tamper” withtheir respective committees’ or subcommittees’jurisdiction over given federal agencies or “strip”them of oversight of those agencies.

History also counsels against assuming thatCongress will streamline itself as it creates and over-sees a new homeland security department. Over thepast half-century, Congress has created many bignew agencies. Never, however, has Congress recastits own structures or procedures to ensure that a new

Congressional Oversight 393

to have a budget-cutting effect. There are somefunds that can be spent without an appropriation,but in virtually every part of the bureaucracy eachagency is keenly sensitive to congressional concernsat the time that the annual appropriations process isgoing on.

The Appropriations Committee andLegislative Committees

The fact that an agency budget must be both author-ized and appropriated means that each agency servesnot one congressional master but several, and that

Secretary*Deputy Secretary

State, Local, and PrivateSector Coordination

Secret Service

Border andTransportation

Security

Coast Guard

TransportationSecurity

BorderSecurity

Procurement

Finance

InformationTechnology

HumanCapital

Recovery

Response

Mitigation

Preparedness

Management

ImmigrationServices

Biological/Agricultural

Chemical

Science andTechnology

Development

Radiological/Nuclear

Telecommuni-cations and

Cybersecurity

PhysicalAssets

InfrastructureProtection

Threat Analysis

VisaProcessing

Chemical, Biological,Radiological, and Nuclear

Countermeasures

EmergencyPreparedness and

Response

Information Analysisand Infrastructure

Protection

*Legal/Congressional/Public Affairs included in Office of the Secretary

bureaucracy functions well or that its leaders are notrequired to spend much of their time giving the sametestimony and answering the same questions beforemultiple committees or subcommittees. Whethercongressional oversight of homeland security willprove an exception remains to be seen.Sources: Ivo H. Daalder, Statement before the Committee onGovernmental Affairs, United States Senate, October 12, 2001;

John J. Dilulio, Jr., “Homeland Insecurity,” The Weekly Standard(April 22, 2002) 15–17; Joseph Curl, “Bush Wants New CabinetPost,” The Washington Times, (June 7, 2002): A1; AdrielBettelheim and Jill Barshay, “Bush’s Swift, Sweeping Plan Is WorkOrder for Congress,” Congressional Quarterly Weekly (June 8,2002): 1498–1504; Adriel Bettelheim, “Security Plan Gets SolidBacking But No Rubber Stamps on Hill,” Congressional QuarterlyWeekly (June 15, 2002): 1577–1580; Bob Williams and DavidNather, “Homeland Security Debate: Balancing Swift and Sure,”Congressional Quarterly Weekly (June 22, 2002): 1642–1647.

Source: White House Office of Homeland Security.

Figure 13.4 Department of Homeland Security as Proposed by President George W. Bush, June 6, 2002


these masters may be in conflict. The real power overan agency’s budget is exercised by the AppropriationsCommittee; the legislative committees are especiallyimportant when a substantive law is first passed or anagency is first created, or when an agency is subject toannual authorization.

In the past the power of the AppropriationsCommittee was rarely challenged: from 1947 through1962, fully 90 percent of the House AppropriationsCommittee’s recommendations on expenditures wereapproved by the full House without change.23

Furthermore, the Appropriations Committee tends torecommend less money than an agency requests(though some specially favored agencies, such as theFBI, the Soil Conservation Service, and the ForestService, have tended to get almost everything that theyhave asked for). Finally, the process of “marking up”(revising, amending, and approving) an agency’sbudget request gives to the Appropriations Committee,or one of its subcommittees, substantial influence overthe policies that the agency follows.

Of late the appropriations committees have lostsome of their great power over government agencies.This has happened in three ways:

First, Congress has created trust funds to pay forthe benefits many people receive. The Social Securitytrust fund is the largest of these. In 1990 it took inabout $260 billion in Social Security taxes and paidout about $220 billion in old-age benefits. There areseveral other trust funds as well. Trust funds oper-ate outside the regular government budget, and theappropriations committees have no control overthese expenditures. They are automatic.

Second, Congress has changed the authorization ofmany programs from permanent or multiyear toannual authorizations. This means that every yearthe legislative committees, as part of the reauthoriza-tion process, get to set limits on what these agenciescan spend. This limits the ability of the appropriationscommittees to determine the spending limits. Before1959 most authorizations were permanent or multi-year. Now a long list of agencies must be reauthorizedevery year—the State Department, NASA, militaryprocurement programs of the Defense Department,the Justice Department, the Energy Department, andparts or all of many other agencies.

Third, the existence of huge budget deficits duringthe 1980s and early 1990s has meant that much ofCongress’s time has been taken up with trying (usual-ly not very successfully) to keep spending down. As a

result there has rarely been much time to discuss themerits of various programs or how much ought to bespent on them; instead attention has been focused onmeeting a target spending limit. In 1981 the budgetresolution passed by Congress mandated cuts in sever-al programs before the appropriations committees hadeven completed their work.24

In addition to the power of the purse, there areinformal ways by which Congress can control thebureaucracy. An individual member of Congress cancall an agency head on behalf of a constituent. Mostsuch calls merely seek information, but some result in,or attempt to second, special privileges for particularpeople. Congressional committees may also obtain theright to pass on certain agency decisions. This is calledcommittee clearance, and though it is usually notlegally binding on the agency, few agency heads willignore the expressed wish of a committee chair that heor she be consulted before certain actions (such astransferring funds) are taken.

The Legislative VetoFor many decades Congress made frequent use of thelegislative veto to control bureaucratic or presidentialactions. A legislative veto is a requirement that anexecutive decision must lie before Congress for a speci-fied period (usually thirty or ninety days) before it takeseffect. Congress could then veto the decision if a reso-lution of disapproval was passed by either house (a“one-house veto”) or both houses (a “two-houseveto”). Unlike laws, such resolutions were not signedby the president. Between 1932 and 1980 about twohundred laws were passed providing for a legislativeveto, many of them involving presidential proposals tosell arms abroad.

But in June 1983 the Supreme Court declared thelegislative veto to be unconstitutional. In the Chadhacase the Court held that the Constitution clearlyrequires in Article I that “every order, resolution, orvote to which the concurrence of the Senate andHouse of Representatives may be necessary” (with cer-tain minor exceptions) “shall be presented to thePresident of the United States,” who must eitherapprove it or return it with his veto attached. In shortCongress cannot take any action that has the force oflaw unless the president concurs in that action.25 At astroke of the pen parts of some two hundred laws sud-denly became invalid.

At least that happened in theory. In fact since theChadha decision Congress has passed a number of laws

Bureaucratic “Pathologies” 395

that contain legislative vetoes, despite the SupremeCourt’s having ruled against them! (Someone will haveto go to court to test the constitutionality of these newprovisions.)

Opponents of the legislative veto hope that futureCongresses will have to pass laws that state much moreclearly than before what an agency may or may not do.But it is just as likely that Congress will continue topass laws stated in general terms and require thatagencies implementing those laws report their plans toCongress so that it will have a chance to enact andsend to the president a regular bill disapproving theproposed action. Or Congress may rely on informal(but scarcely weak) means of persuasion, includingthreats to reduce the appropriations of an agency thatdoes not abide by congressional preferences.

Congressional InvestigationsPerhaps the most visible and dramatic form ofcongressional supervision of an agency is the investi-gation. Since 1792, when Congress investigated anarmy defeat by a Native American tribe, congressionalinvestigations of the bureaucracy have been a regular feature—sometimes constructive, sometimes destruc-tive—of legislative-executive relations. The investiga-tive power is not mentioned in the Constitution but hasbeen inferred from the power to legislate. The SupremeCourt has consistently upheld this interpretation,though it has also said that such investigations shouldnot be solely for the purpose of exposing the purelypersonal affairs of private individuals and must notoperate to deprive citizens of their basic rights.26

Congress may compel a person to attend an investiga-tion by issuing a subpoena; anyone who ignores thesubpoena may be punished for contempt. Congresscan vote to send the person to jail or can refer the mat-ter to a court for further action. As explained inChapter 12, the president and his principal subordi-nates have refused to answer certain congressionalinquiries on grounds of “executive privilege.”

Although many areas of congressional oversight—budgetary review, personnel controls, investigations—are designed to control the exercise of bureaucraticdiscretion, other areas are intended to ensure the free-dom of certain agencies from effective control, espe-cially by the president. In dozens of cases Congress hasauthorized department heads and bureau chiefs tooperate independent of presidential preferences.Congress has resisted, for example, presidential effortsto ensure that policies to regulate pollution do not

impose excessive costs on the economy, and interestgroups have brought suit to prevent presidential coor-dination of various regulatory agencies. If the bureau-cracy sometimes works at cross-purposes, it is usuallybecause Congress—or competing committees inCongress—wants it that way.

Bureaucratic “Pathologies”

Everyone complains about bureaucracy in general(though rarely about bureaucratic agencies thateveryone believes are desirable). This chapter shouldpersuade you that it is difficult to say anything aboutbureaucracy “in general”; there are too many differentkinds of agencies, kinds of bureaucrats, and kinds ofprograms to label the entire enterprise with some sin-gle adjective. Nevertheless, many people who recog-nize the enormous variety among government agen-cies still believe that they all have some general featuresin common and suffer from certain shared problems orpathologies.

This is true enough, but the reasons for it—andthe solutions, if any—are not often understood.There are five major (or at least frequently men-tioned) problems with bureaucracies: red tape, con-flict, duplication, imperialism, and waste. Red taperefers to the complex rules and procedures that mustbe followed to get something done. Conflict existsbecause some agencies seem to be working at cross-purposes with other agencies. (For example, theAgricultural Research Service tells farmers how togrow crops more efficiently, while the AgriculturalStabilization and Conservation Service pays farmersto grow fewer crops or to produce less.) Duplication(usually called “wasteful duplication”) occurs whentwo government agencies seem to be doing the samething, as when the Customs Service and the DrugEnforcement Administration both attempt to inter-cept illegal drugs being smuggled into the country.Imperialism refers to the tendency of agencies togrow without regard to the benefits that their pro-grams confer or the costs that they entail. Wastemeans spending more than is necessary to buy someproduct or service.

These problems all exist, but they do not neces-sarily exist because bureaucrats are incompetent orpower-hungry. Most exist because of the very nature of government itself. Take red tape: partly we encounter cumbersome rules and procedures


because any large organization, governmental ornot, must have some way of ensuring that one partof the organization does not operate out of step withanother. Business corporations have red tape also; itis to a certain extent a consequence of bigness. But agreat amount of governmental red tape is also theresult of the need to satisfy legal and politicalrequirements. Government agencies must hire onthe basis of “merit,” must observe strict accountingrules, must supply Congress with detailed informa-tion on their programs, and must allow for citizenaccess in countless ways. Meeting each needrequires rules; enforcing the rules requires forms.

Or take conflict and duplication: they do notoccur because bureaucrats enjoy conflict or duplica-tion. (Quite the contrary!) They exist becauseCongress, in setting up agencies and programs, oftenwants to achieve a number of different, partiallyinconsistent goals or finds that it cannot decidewhich goal it values the most. Congress has 535members and little strong leadership; it should notbe surprising that 535 people will want differentthings and will sometimes succeed in getting them.

Imperialism results in large measure from gov-ernment agencies’ seeking goals that are so vagueand so difficult to measure that it is hard to tell whenthey have been attained. When Congress is unclearas to exactly what an agency is supposed to do, the

agency will often convert that legislative vaguenessinto bureaucratic imperialism by taking the largestpossible view of its powers. It may do this on its own;more often it does so because interest groups andjudges rush in to fill the vacuum left by Congress. Aswe saw in Chapter 3, the 1973 Rehabilitation Actwas passed with a provision barring discriminationagainst people with disabilities in any programreceiving federal aid. Under pressure from peoplewith disabilities, that lofty but vague goal was con-verted by the Department of Transportation into arequirement that virtually every big-city bus have adevice installed to lift people in wheelchairs onboard.

Waste is probably the biggest criticism that peoplehave of the bureaucracy. Everybody has heard sto-ries of the Pentagon’s paying $91 for screws thatcost 3 cents in the hardware store. PresidentReagan’s “Private Sector Survey on Cost Control,”generally known as the Grace Commission (after itschairman, J. Peter Grace), publicized these and othertales in a 1984 report.

No doubt there is waste in government. After all,unlike a business firm worried about maximizingprofits, in a government agency there are only weakincentives to keep costs down. If a business employ-ee cuts costs, he or she often receives a bonus orraise, and the firm gets to add the savings to its prof-its. If a government official cuts costs, he or shereceives no reward, and the agency cannot keep thesavings—they go back to the Treasury.

But many of the horror stories are either exagger-ations or unusual occurrences.27 Most of the screws,hammers, and light bulbs purchased by the govern-ment are obtained at low cost by means of competi-tive bidding among several suppliers. When the gov-ernment does pay outlandish amounts, the reasontypically is that it is purchasing a new or one-of-a-kind item not available at your neighborhood hard-ware store—for example, a new bomber or missile.

Even when the government is not overcharged, itstill may spend more money than a private firm inbuying what it needs. The reason is red tape—therules and procedures designed to ensure that whenthe government buys something, it will do so in away that serves the interests of many groups. Forexample, it must often buy from American ratherthan foreign suppliers, even if the latter charge alower price; it must make use of contractors thatemploy minorities; it must hire only union laborers

Reforming the Bureaucracy 397

and pay them the “prevailing” (that is, the highest)wage; it must allow public inspection of its records;it frequently is required to choose contractorsfavored by influential members of Congress; and soon. Private firms do not have to comply with all theserules and thus can buy for less.

From this discussion it should be easy to see whythese five basic bureaucratic problems are so hard tocorrect. To end conflicts and duplication Congresswould have to make some policy choices and setsome clear priorities, but with all the competingdemands that it faces, Congress finds it difficult to dothat. You make more friends by helping people thanby hurting them, and so Congress is more inclined toadd new programs than to cut old ones, whether ornot the new programs are in conflict with existingones. To check imperialism some way would have tobe found to measure the benefits of government, butthat is often impossible; government exists in part toachieve precisely those goals—such as nationaldefense—that are least measurable. Furthermore,what might be done to remedy some problems wouldmake other problems worse: if you simplify rules andprocedures to cut red tape, you are also likely toreduce the coordination among agencies and thus toincrease the extent to which there is duplication orconflict. If you want to reduce waste, you will haveto have more rules and inspectors—in short, morered tape. The problem of bureaucracy is inseparablefrom the problem of government generally.

Just as people are likely to say that they dislikeCongress but like their own member of Congress, theyare inclined to express hostility toward “the bureau-cracy” but goodwill for that part of the bureaucracywith which they have dealt personally. In 1973 a sur-vey of Americans found that over half had had somecontact with one or more kinds of government agen-cies, most of which were either run directly or fundedindirectly by the federal government. The great major-ity of people were satisfied with these contacts and feltthat they had been treated fairly and given usefulassistance. When these people were asked their feel-ings about government officials in general, however,they expressed much less favorable attitudes. Whereasabout 80 percent liked the officials with whom theyhad dealt, only 42 percent liked officials in general.28

This finding helps explain why government agenciesare rarely reduced in size or budget: whatever the pop-ular feelings about the bureaucracy, any given agencytends to have many friends.

Reforming the Bureaucracy

The history of American bureaucracy has beenpunctuated with countless efforts to make it workbetter and cost less. There were eleven majorattempts in the twentieth century alone. The latestwas the National Performance Review (NPR)—pop-ularly called the plan to “reinvent government”—ledby Vice President Al Gore. The results of the reviewwere published in 1993.

The NPR differed from many of the precedingreform efforts in one important way. Most of the earli-er ones suggested ways of increasing central (that is,presidential) control of government agencies: theBrownlow Commission (1936–1937) recommendedgiving the president more assistants, the First Hoover

★ POLITICALLY SPEAKING ★

As early as the seventh century, legal and govern-ment documents in England were bound togeth-er with a tape of pinkish red color. In the 1850shistorian Thomas Carlyle described a Britishpolitician as “little other than a red tape TalkingMachine,” and later the American writerWashington Irving said of an American figurethat “his brain was little better than red tape andparchment.”

Since then red tape has come to mean “bureau-cratic delay or confusion,” especially that accom-panied by unnecessary paperwork.

Source: From Safire’s Political Dictionary by William Safire. Copyright© 1968, 1972, 1978 by William Safire. Reprinted by permission ofRandom House, Inc. and the author.

Red Tape


Commission (1947–1949) suggested ways of improv-ing top-level management, and the Ash Council(1969–1971) called for consolidating existing agen-cies into a few big “super departments.” The intent wasto make it easier for the president and his cabinet sec-retaries to run the bureaucracy. The key ideas were effi-ciency, accountability, and consistent policies.

The NPR, by contrast, emphasized customer satis-faction (the “customers” in this case being the citizenswho come into contact with federal agencies). To theauthors of the NPR report, the main problem with thebureaucracy was that it had become too centralized,too rule-bound, too little concerned with making pro-grams work, and too much concerned with avoidingscandal. The NPR report contained many horror sto-ries about useless red tape, excessive regulations, andcumbersome procurement systems that make it nextto impossible for agencies to do what they were createdto do. (For example, before it could buy an ashtray, theGeneral Services Administration issued a nine-pagedocument that described an ashtray and specified howmany pieces it must break into should it be hit with ahammer.)29 To solve these problems the NPR called forless centralized management and more employee ini-tiative, fewer detailed rules and more emphasis on cus-tomer satisfaction. It sought to create a new kind oforganizational culture in government agencies, onemore like that found in the more innovative, quality-conscious American corporations. The NPR was rein-forced legislatively by the Government Performanceand Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, which requiredagencies “to set goals, measure performance, andreport on the results.”

But making these changes is easier said thandone. Most of the rules and red tape that make ithard for agency heads to do a good job are the resulteither of the struggle between the White House andCongress for control over the agencies or of theagencies’ desire to avoid irritating influential voters.Silly as the rules for ashtrays may sound, they werewritten so that the government could say it had an“objective” standard for buying ashtrays. If it simplywent out and bought ashtrays at a department storethe way ordinary people do, it would risk beingaccused by the Acme Ashtray Company of buyingtrays from its competitor, the A-1 Ashtray Company,because of political favoritism.

The rivalry between the president and Congress forcontrol of the bureaucracy makes bureaucrats nerv-ous about irritating either branch, and so they issue

rules designed to avoid getting into trouble, even ifthese rules make it hard to do their job. Mattersbecome even worse during periods of divided govern-ment when different parties control the White Houseand Congress. As we saw in Chapter 12, divided gov-ernment may not have much effect on making policy,but it can have a big effect on implementing it.Presidents of one party have tried to increase politicalcontrol over the bureaucracy (“executive microman-agement”), and Congresses of another party haveresponded by increasing the number of investigationsand detailed rule-making (“legislative micromanage-ment”). Divided government intensifies the cross-firebetween the executive and legislative branches, mak-ing bureaucrats dig into even deeper layers of red tapeto avoid getting hurt.

This does not mean that reform is impossible, onlythat it is very difficult. For example, despite a lack ofclear-cut successes in other areas, the NPR’s procure-ment reforms stuck: government agencies can nowbuy things costing as much as $100,000 without fol-lowing any complex regulations.

It might be easier to make desirable changes if thebureaucracy were accountable to only one master—say, the president—instead of to several. But that situ-ation, which exists in many parliamentary demo-cracies, creates its own problems. When the bureau-cracy has but one master, it often ends up havingnone: it becomes so powerful that it controls the primeminister and no longer listens to citizen complaints. Aweak, divided bureaucracy, such as exists in theUnited States, may strike us as inefficient, but thatvery inefficiency may help protect our liberties.

MEMORANDUM

To: Dr. Robert Smith, president ofCybersystems EngineeringFrom: James Logan, secretary of defenseSubject: Becoming an assistant secretary ofdefense

As both secretary and a dear old collegebuddy of yours, I write again to express myhope that you will accept the president’s call

to service. We all desperately want you aboard. Yes, conflict-of-interest laws willrequire you to sell your stock in your present company and drop out of its generouspension plan. No, the government won’t even pay moving costs. And once you leaveoffice, you will be barred for life from lobbying the executive branch on matters inwhich you were directly involved while in office, and you will be barred for twoyears from lobbying on matters that were under your general official authority. Yourother concerns have teeth, too, but let me help you weigh your options.

Arguments for:

1. I hate to preach, but it is one’s duty to serve one’s country when called. Yoursacrifice would honor your family and benefit your fellow Americans for years tocome.2. As an accomplished professional and the head of a company that has donebusiness with the government, you could help the president succeed in reforming thedepartment so that it works better and costs less.3. Despite the restrictions, you could resume your career once your public service wascomplete.

Arguments against:

1. Since you will have to be confirmed by the Senate, your life will be put under amicroscope, and everything (even some of our old college mischief together) willbe fair game for congressional staffers and reporters.2. You will face hundreds of rules telling you what you can’t do and scores ofcongressmen telling you what you should do. Old friends will get mad at you fornot doing them favors. The president will demand loyalty. The press will pounce onyour every mistake, real or imagined.3. Given the federal limits on whom in the government you can deal with after youleave office, your job at Cybersystems may well suffer.

Your decision:Accept position Reject position

New Administration Strugglingto Fill Top Posts

Cabinet Secretaries Say “The President Needs Help!”

May 20WASHINGTON

Four months into the new administration, hundredsof assistant secretary and deputy assistant secretarypositions remain unfilled. In 1960 the total number ofpresidential political appointees was just 450. Today thetotal is over 2,400, but sheer growth is not the wholestory. Rather, say experts on federal bureaucracy, plumpublic service posts go unfilled because the jobs havebecome so unrewarding, even punishing . . .


Reconsidering the Enduring Questions

1. What happened to make bureaucracy a “fourthbranch” of American national government?

The Constitution made no provision for an admin-istrative system other than to allow the presidentto appoint, with the advice and consent of theSenate, ambassadors, Supreme Court judges, and“all other officers . . . which shall be provided bylaw.” By the early twentieth century, however,Washington’s role in making, administering, andfunding public policies had already grown farbeyond what the Framers had contemplated. Twoworld wars, the New Deal, and the Great Societyeach left the government with expanded powersand requiring new batteries of administrativeagencies to exercise them. Today, the federalbureaucracy is as vast as most people’s expecta-tions about Washington’s responsibility for everypublic concern one can name. It is the appointedofficials—the bureaucrats—not the elected offi-cials or policymakers, who command the troops,deliver the mail, audit the tax returns, run the fed-eral prisons, decide who qualifies for public assis-tance, and do countless other tasks. Unavoidably,many bureaucrats exercise discretion in decidingwhat public laws and regulations mean and how

to apply them. Still, the president, cabinet secre-taries, and thousands of political appointees areultimately their bosses. Congress and the courtshave ample, if imperfect, means of checking and balancing even the biggest bureaucracy, old or new.

2. What are the actual size and scope of the federalbureaucracy?

A few million civil servants work directly for thefederal government, but over five times as manypeople work indirectly for Washington as employ-ees of business firms or of nonprofit organizationsthat receive federal grants or contracts, or as state and local government employees workingunder federal mandates. For example, the U.S.Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)has about 65,000 employees, runs over 300 differ-ent programs, and makes over 60,000 grants ayear. But millions more people work indirectly forthe HHS—as state and local government employ-ees whose entire jobs involve the administration ofone or more HHS programs (for exampleMedicaid), and as people who work for communi-ty-serving nonprofit organizations that receiveHHS grants to administer social services.

Bureaucracy is characteristic of almost all aspects of modern life, not simply the government.

Government bureaucracies, however, pose specialproblems because they are subject to competingsources of political authority, must function in a con-stitutional system of divided powers and federalism,have vague goals, and lack incentive systems that willencourage efficiency. The power of a bureaucracyshould be measured by its discretionary authority, notby the number of its employees or the size of its budget.

War and depression have been the principalsources of bureaucratic growth, aided by importantchanges in constitutional interpretation in the1930s that permitted Congress to delegate broadgrants of authority to administrative agencies. Withonly partial success Congress seeks to check or recov-

er those grants by controlling budgets, personnel,and policy decisions and by the exercise of legislativevetoes. The uses to which bureaucrats put theirauthority can be explained in part by their recruit-ment and security (they have an agency orienta-tion), their personal political views, and the natureof the tasks that their agencies are performing.

Many of the popular solutions for the prob-lems of bureaucratic rule—red tape, duplication,conflict, agency imperialism, and waste—fail to takeinto account that these problems are to a degreeinherent in any government that serves competinggoals and is supervised by rival elected officials.Nevertheless, some reform efforts have succeeded inmaking government work better and cost less tooperate.

Summary

Suggested Readings 401

World Wide Web Resources

• For addresses and reports of various cabinetdepartments

Web addresses: www.whitehouse.gov/Documents and bulletin boards: www.fedworld.govNational Performance Review: www.npr.gov

• A few specific web sites of federal agenciesDepartment of Defense: www.defenselink.milDepartment of Education: www.ed.govDepartment of Health and Human Services:www.dhhs.govDepartment of State: www.state.govFederal Bureau of Investigation: www.fbi.govDepartment of Labor: www.dol.gov

bureaucracy p. 373spoils system p. 376laissez-faire p. 376discretionary authority p. 378competitive service p. 379

name-request job p. 381iron triangle p. 390issue network p. 391authorization legislation p. 391appropriation p. 392

trust funds p. 394annual authorizations p. 394committee clearance p. 394legislative veto p. 394red tape p. 395

Key Terms

Burke, John P. Bureaucratic Responsibility. Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1986. Examines the problem of individualresponsibility—for example, when to be a whistle blower—in gov-ernment agencies.

DiIulio, John J., Gerald Garvey, and Donald F. Kettl. ImprovingGovernment Performance: An Owner’s Manual. Washington, D.C.:Brookings Institution, 1993. A concise overview of the history offederal bureaucracy and ideas about how to reform it.

Downs, Anthony. Inside Bureaucracy. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. Aneconomist’s explanation of why bureaucrats and bureaus behaveas they do.

Halperin, Morton H. Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy.Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1974. Insightfulaccount of the strategies by which diplomatic and militarybureaucracies defend their interests.

Heclo, Hugh. A Government of Strangers. Washington, D.C.: BrookingsInstitution, 1977. Analyzes how political appointees attempt togain control of the Washington bureaucracy and how bureau-crats resist those efforts.

Johnson, Ronald L., and Gary Libecap. The Federal Civil Service Systemand the Problem of Bureaucracy. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1994. Two economists analyze how federal bureaucratsacquire positions and salaries.

Light, Paul C. The True Size of Government. Washington, D.C.:Brookings Institution, 1999. A revealing explanation of why thefederal government is a lot bigger than is suggested by simplycounting employees.

Moore, Mark H. Creating Public Value: Strategic Management inGovernment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Athoughtful account of how wise bureaucrats can make govern-ment work better.

Parkinson, C. Northcote. Parkinson’s Law. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1957. Half-serious, half-joking explanation of why governmentagencies tend to grow.

Wilson, James Q. Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and WhyThey Do It. New York: Basic Books, 1989. A comprehensive reviewof what we know about bureaucratic behavior in the UnitedStates.

Suggested Readings

3. What has been done to improve bureaucratic performance?There have been numerous efforts to make thebureaucracy work better and cost less, includingeleven presidential or other major commissions inthe twentieth century. The latest was the NationalPerformance Review (NPR), popularly called theplan to “reinvent government.” Vice President Goreled the NPR during the two terms of the Clintonadministration. The NPR was predicated on the viewthat bureaucracy had become too centralized, too

rule-bound, too little concerned with programresults, and too much concerned with avoiding scan-dal. In the end, the NPR produced certain money-saving changes in the federal procurement process(how government purchases goods and services fromprivate contractors), and it also streamlined parts ofthe federal personnel process (how Washington hirescareer employees). Most experts, however, gave theNPR mixed grades and concluded that it had fallenfar short of its ambitious goals of improving govern-ment performance.

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