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Bureaucratic Power Bureaucracy was defined by German sociologist Max Weber as a "rational" way for society to organize itself that has the following characteristics:
There are several reasons for the growth of bureaucratic power over time. These include advances in technology; increases in the size and complexity of society; limited time, energy, and expertise to handle the details of policy making; vague laws that require bureaucratic development of rules and regulations; built-in incentives to expand the size and power of budgets and agencies; and popular demand for governmental assistance in everything from stimulating the economy to developing communities. Bureaucracies are not constitutionally given power to set policy, but it does because it has to, given its role in making the necessary day-to-day rulings and decisions inherent in implementing policy at a practical level. Implementation is the development of procedures and activities to carry out policies legislated by Congress. Regulation involves the development of formal rules for implementing legislation. The bureaucracy is routinely charged with developing these formal rules. The Federal Register publishes some 60,000 pages of such rules annually. The Administrative Procedures Act of 1946 and its amendments require agencies to announce new regulations, hold hearings, report on economic and environmental impacts, solicit public comments, and consult with the Office of Management and Budget, among other steps. Adjudication involves bureaucratic decisions about individual cases. The bureaucracy routinely has to make judicial-like decisions. This is particularly true of regulatory agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Much of the work of the bureaucrats is administrative routine. However, bureaucrats almost always have some administrative discretion in performing these tasks. In even the most routine tasks, there is some administrative leeway in decision making. For instance, IRS audit agents have some discretion in deciding which rules to apply to a taxpayer's form. Budget maximization, or expanding the agency's budget, staff, and authority as much as possible, often becomes a driving force in government bureaucracies. Bureaucrats believe in their programs and seek to maximize their budgets in general, and when possible, to maximize the percentage of their budget which is in discretionary funds that give bureaucrats more decision-making power. The Federal Bureaucracy Some 2.8 million civilians work for the federal government, and another 1.4 million in the armed forces. They are organized into 14 cabinet departments, 60 independent agencies, and a large Executive Office of the President. Together with the 50 state governments and some 86,000 local governments, their collective budget of $3.0 trillion is about 30 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). Of this, the federal share is about two-thirds. Due to the expansion of the U.S. economy in the 1990s, combined with slower growth in federal spending, the governmental expenditures as a percentage of the GDP have actually been reduced over the last decade. The Cabinet departments such as the Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) employ 60 percent of all federal workers. They are headed by a secretary (attorney general in the case of the Justice Department) who is appointed by and reports to the president. Cabinet status gives prominence to an issue, as Woodrow Wilson did in creating the Department of Labor in 1913 or Lyndon Johnson did in creating the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1965. Outside the departments are independent regulatory commissions which regulate a given area, such as the Federal Communications Commission. A few regulatory commissions remain inside a department, like the Food and Drug Administration inside HHS. Government corporations such as the U.S. Post Office are another form of governmental organization. Independent Agencies are located outside of any cabinet departments. The Federal Reserve Board, created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, holds a unique place as the most independent and influential of the independent agencies, responsible for setting monetary policy by setting the federal discount (interest) rate, buying and selling Treasury bonds, and changing the money supply by altering the reserve ratio (the percent of deposits which must be held and not lent out). Bureaucracy and Democracy The spoils system associated with the administration of Andrew Jackson epitomized the selection of government employees on the basis of party loyalty, electoral support, and political influence. The Pendleton Act of 1883 created the Civil Service Commission (now the Merit Systems Protection Board, MSPB) and established the merit system for 10 percent of government employees. As each new president "blanketed in" his appointments into the merit system, to protect his appointments from being replaced by a successor, the proportion covered by the civil service gradually grew to around 90 percent by the 1970s. While today the bureaucracy reflects minorities and women overall, these groups are under-represented in the higher ranks of the federal bureaucracy. While reducing spoils and favoritism, the civil service system has created problems of responsiveness (getting bureaucrats to be accountable to the president) and productivity (creating performance-based rewards). Jimmy Carter's Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 replaced the Civil Service Commission with the Office of Personnel Management and the MSPB in order to separate out its merit systems and productivity functions. The act also created the Senior Executive Service (SES), an attempt to give more discretion of assignment and rewards to top administrators. Nonetheless, rates of dismissal of bureaucrats, favoritism in giving bonuses, and other indicators seem to show little effect of the reform. In 1939 Congress passed the Hatch Act to prohibit use of federal employees as political campaign workers, candidates, or fundraisers. This effort to insulate the bureaucracy from politics effectively prevented millions of Americans from normally participating in political life simply because they were federal employees. In 1993 major portions of the Hatch Act were repealed, again allowing civil servants to hold party positions and raise funds, but still not to run for office or solicit funds from subordinates or contractors. Bureaucratic Politics The president retains direct control over the appointment of some 3,000 positions, including Cabinet officers, diplomats, and federal judges. For these "plums," political loyalty is balanced against competence. Congress has tried to increase its influence with the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, protecting those who report policy and administrative abuses. Over time, however, every bureaucracy tends to develop its own agency culture which is difficult to control. Likewise, few get federal jobs solely through the formal merit system of exams. Rather, people inside an agency contact their friends and associates when a position becomes vacant and applicants are able to apply through the OPM well before formal lists of vacancies are printed. Networks develop around shifting career lines among federal, state and local, and private and non-profit organizations in the same field. During the Clinton administration, the "Reinventing Government" initiative was a major effort to exert presidential control over the bureaucracy. Spearheaded by Vice President Al Gore, this initiative involved hundreds of specific recommendations to reduce red tape and achieve efficiencies. It is credited with being one factor behind the decline in federal employment from 3.1 to only 2.8 million employees. The Budgetary Process In January, almost two years before the start of the federal fiscal year on October 1, the Office of Management and Budget presents long-range forecasts of revenues and expenditures to the president. The president and the OMB develop guidelines for all federal agencies, which prepare and submit budget requests by July. The OMB reviews agency requests and holds budget hearings in August through September of the year before. In November and December, the OMB presents a revised budget to the president and a budget message is prepared and presented to Congress in January of the year in which the fiscal year starts. From February through May the Congressional Budget Office reviews the budget and reports to the House and Senate budget committees. From May through June these committees establish the "first concurrent resolution," which sets the overall total for budget outlays in major categories. From July through September, appropriations committees and subcommittees draw up detailed appropriations and submit them to the congressional budget committees for the "second concurrent resolution." The full House and Senate pass the second concurrent resolution, reconciling the overall budget targets of the House and Senate. In September and October the House and Senate pass the actual appropriations bills funding the departments and agencies of government. Since the fiscal year begins October 1, Congress often must pass "continuing resolutions" to fund government in the interim until the appropriations bills are passed. The Politics of Budgeting Budgeting is incremental, accepting as legitimate the previous year's expenditures and focusing instead on requested changes. Reformers have proposed such schemes as zero-based budgeting and sunset laws to try to force Congress to consider base expenditures and whether agencies should be renewed at all, but Congress is taxed to the limit simply to consider requested changes. Decision-making is further hampered because submitted budgets are nonprogrammatic—that is, budget requests are usually grouped into generic categories like "personnel" and "supplies," cutting across policy programs. Seemingly, program budgeting would remedy this, but this is difficult to implement for a variety of reasons (bureaucratic resistance due to added paperwork or perceived loss of power, difficulty in assigning overhead expenses to specific programs, and overlap of program functions served by the same resource). Regulatory Battles Federal regulations are pervasive, from enforcing auto safety by the National Transportation Safety Board, to monitoring bank accounts by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, to banning tobacco advertisements by the Federal Communications Commission. The capture theory of regulation warns that some regulatory commissions may come to represent the industries they are supposed to regulate rather than the public interest. The Federal Communications Commission has been accused of this vis-à-vis the television industry, for instance. Activist agencies created by Congress are least likely to be captured, partly because their functions extend across many industries. Examples are the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Deregulation became a popular movement during the Reagan era in the 1980s, though credit for first abolishing a major regulatory agency goes to Jimmy Carter, who ended the Civil Aeronautics Board over industry objections in 1978. The nation's first regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission, established in 1887 amid the populist movement, was stripped of most of its power in the 1980s and was abolished in 1995, leading to reductions in freight services. Today there are counter currents, calling for reregulation of the airline industry in the face of congestion and air travel delays, and for tighter control over the financial industry following the $200 billion "bail out" of savings and loans. Regulating America Some 50 federal agencies issue about 4,000 new rules each year. The Code of Federal Regulations is now 155,000 pages in 205 volumes. In the 1996–2001 period, it is estimated that 21,653 new final rules were issued; 335 of these new rules were listed as "major rules." One estimate of the costs of compliance places the percentage of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) devoted to regulatory compliance at 8 percent-some $700 billion. Examples of costs include adding pollution control devices, making buildings accessible to the handicapped, testing food and drugs for safety, maintaining aircraft to meet safety standards, and much more, including the cost of accountants and lawyers both to fight and support the regulatory system.
Congressional Constraints on the Bureaucracy Congress has placed a number of constraints on the federal bureaucracy:
Other congressional constraints come in the form of Senate confirmation of federal appointments, committee hearings on federal programs, congressional investigations, and the appropriations process itself. Also, members of Congress engage in casework, boosting their popularity in their districts by aiding constituents with their problems in dealing with the bureaucracy.
Interest Groups and Bureaucratic Decision Making Interest groups scrutinize federal agencies even more closely than Congress, bringing good and bad points to the attention of Congress and the press. For instance, the Sierra Club is one of several groups which monitors the Environmental Protection Agency. Agencies, in turn, may owe much to interest groups which lobby Congress on their behalf at appropriations time (the EEOC owes its existence to civil rights groups, for example). Interest groups also testify at hearings, hold press conferences, undertake advertising campaigns, solicit media support, and mobilize grass-roots followers. Judicial Constraints on the Bureaucracy The courts routinely hear cases dealing with alleged bureaucratic overstepping of authority. They may even issue injunctions against agency actions before they happen. Usually, however, agencies have been successful in defending themselves in court, partly because of their superior legal resources. Chapter Objectives After mastering the concepts in this chapter, you will be able to
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