Bureaucracy in the United States

1
Bureaucracy in the United States

• A necessary component to the functioning of
  modern government and society

2
Lecture Outline (6 main items)

• What is bureaucracy and what does it do?
• Goals of the federal bureaucracy
• Who controls bureaucracy
• Characteristics of bureaucracy
• Why is American bureaucracy different by design?
  Both Skowronek and Heclo contend that our
  bureaucracy is weak because of its incoherent and
  piecemeal structure
• What are the positive and negative consequences
  of a weak bureaucracy?

3
What is bureaucracy and what does it do?

• Bureaucracy is a universal form of organization
  that improves efficiency in large organizations
  both public and private
• In the public sector, bureaucracy is an
  organizational system of public administration
  (i.e., departments, agencies, bureaus,
  commissions and other units of the executive
  branch) through which governmental policies are
  implemented
• Cabinet departments secretaries from 15
  dept.-cabinet
• Non-cabinet/independent agencies
• Government corporations
• Regulatory agencies and independent regulatory
  commissions

4
Goals of the Federal Bureaucracy

• Promote the public welfare
• More than public welfare for the poor
• Promote national security
• Control of the sources of federal government
  revenue
• Control of the conduct defined as threat to
  internal national security
• Defending American security from external
  threats
• Maintain strong economy
• While the government does not directly run the
  economy, many federal government activities are
  critical to maintaining a strong economy (i.e.,
  fiscal and monetary policies)

5
Who controls bureaucracy?

• Methods of Congressional Control
• Mandatory reports
• Public hearings and Investigations
• Committee and conference reports
• Office of Inspector General
• Communications between congressional and agency
  staffs
• The research efforts of three large agencies
• General Accounting Office (GAO)
• Congressional Research Service (CRS)
• Congressional Budget Office (CBO)

6
Methods of Presidential Control

• Presidents from FDR to George W. Bush have
  initiated ways to enhance the managerial
  presidency
• For example, Bushs privatization plan a process
  known as federal contracting.

7
Characteristics of Bureaucracy

• Division of labor
• Fixed and legally specified functions,
  responsibilities and supervision roles
  hierarchical accountability
• Employment by merit rather than by patronage job
  tenure
• Pendleton Act (1883)

8
American bureaucracy different by design

• Both Skowronek and Heclo provide reasons for our
  weak bureaucracy relative to other western
  democratic bureaucracies

9
Skowronek

• Skowronek analyzes the irregular foundation of
  the bureaucracy in the United States as opposed
  to the bureaucratic structures in Western Europe.

10
How was the bureaucratic foundation irregular?

• In the United States, 19th century political
  challenges of industrialization were addressed
  within a fragmented and localized political
  system comprised of courts and political parties
• Courts (through rule making) and political
  parties (through patronage) dominated the state
  realm and proved remarkably resistant to the
  structural changes necessitated by modernization.
  
• The entrenched positions of these institutions
  frustrated the efforts of the state-building
  vanguard striving to implement administrative
  reforms.

11
Forces of change

• By 1920, new centers of rule making had appeared
  in areas such as civil service, military
  administration and economic regulatory activity
  though these new centers remained un-integrated
  within a broader state realm.
• Conflicts between the existing institutions
  (courts and political parties) and the proponents
  of modernization (state building vanguard) were
  only partially resolved yielding an improperly
  structured, weak bureaucracy rather than a
  strong, well structured bureaucracy offering
  corporatist planning.

12
Heclo

• A major characteristic of the American
  bureaucratic system is that it is not a system at
  all. In contrast to other western bureaucracies,
  the US has not yet discovered the means of
  meshing its higher civil service with
  presidential leadership and developing a longer,
  broader, professionalized government-wide
  perspective.

13
Poorly defined governmental features

• Three features are all poorly defined in American
  national government and are subject to immense
  counter pressures. They are defined not by
  hierarchies with formal, clear career lines but
  by loose groupings of people where the lines of
  policy, politics and administration merge.
• the status of top bureaucrats,
• their role in policy making and politics,
• their relationship to the larger society

14
Key Points

• Historical anomaly
• The dual structure
• Policy and politics in the dual structure
• mix of permanent careerists
• transient appointees
• independent third party
• The hollow center
• A prologue to democratic technology

15
What are the positive and negative consequences
of a weak bureaucracy?

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of
  trying to run the government more like a
  business?
• Should efficiency be the only priority in the
  public enterprise?