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Chapter 12 |
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The bureaucracy not only implements governmental policies but also helps to shape them. The bureaucracy is a major base of power that can be difficult to control. Max Weber described the bureaucracy as a "rational" way for society to organize itself; they are found not only in government but throughout society. Weber believed that bureaucracies shared certain characteristics:
Advances in technology and the increasing size and complexity of society has contributed to the growth of bureaucratic power. In addition, the Congress and the president do not typically have the time, energy and expertise to handle the details of policymaking. Technical experts or "technocrats" actually implement the desires of Congress and the president. Often the laws passed are deliberately vague and ambiguous so that the bureaucracy must develop the specific rules and regulations. The bureaucracy has become its own source of power and seek to expand their size and influence. Some experts believe that big government is simply the result of the demands of society.
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.
Federal Bureaucracy
The federal bureaucracy consists of 2.7 million civilian employees divided into fifteen cabinet departments, over 60 independent agencies, and the Executive Office of the President. They spend more than $3.0 trillion or about 30% of the nation's GDP.
Sixty percent of the bureaucracy is employed by the cabinet departments who are headed by president-appointed secretaries (with the exception of the Justice Department which is headed by the Attorney General). Cabinet level positioning implies importance and provides prestige to issues. The most important departments are also among the first created -- State, Treasury, Defense and Justice. All department heads must be approved by the Senate; this process has become more partisan over the past twenty years.
Independent regulatory commissions regulate a sector of society and are empowered by Congress to make and enforce rules. The commissions have a quasi-judicial function. Usually, these commissions are headed not by a single secretary but rather a group of five to ten individuals who vote on major policy decisions. The members of the commission are appointed by the president with approval of the Senate for fixed terms of office and cannot be removed by the president. Most of these commissions exist outside of the cabinet departments but a few, such as the Food and Drug Administration, remain inside the departments.
Congress has also created independent agencies that are outside of cabinet departments. They are typically headed by a single individual who is appointed by the president with the approval of the Senate. Unlike the commissions, however, these administrators serve at the whim of the president who can dismiss them. They report directly to the president. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is one of the most powerful of these independent agencies. The most independent of all the federal agencies is the Federal Reserve System, which regulates the supply of money. Its Board of Governors are appointed for 14 year terms, and while the chairman serves a 4 year term, his position overlaps that of the President.
Government corporations lead independent commercial enterprises and resemble private corporations. They are headed by a board of directors and a chief executive officer. Usually, these government corporations perform services that are not being adequately provided in the private sector. Franklin Roosevelt created the first government corporation, the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933. In 1971 the Post Office was turned into a government corporation.
Nearly one-fifth of all government spending goes to private contractors and consultants. Most contracts and grants are awarded without competitive bidding to favored firms or groups who provide unique services.
Bureaucracy and Democracy
Government employment has been caught up in the argument over partisanship versus competence. Traditionally, employment was based up on the spoils system of awarding jobs based upon party loyalty. Andrew Jackson believed the spoils system was more democratic than the earliest methods of hiring based upon kin and class levels. However, by the late nineteenth century government jobs became a hotbed of corruption with the bartering and sale of jobs. The merit system, which awarded jobs based upon competence, first appeared in the Pendleton Act of 1883. A Civil Service Commission was created to select personnel based upon merit as determined through testing. Originally, only ten percent of federal jobs were covered under civil service, but over time more and more jobs were added to the civil service rolls.
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. Problems still abound in the lack of ability to punish poor performances; once hired it is extremely difficult to fire even the most unproductive civil service employees.
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
While the Constitution places the president as head of the executive branch with the power to appoint a variety of government officers, it is difficult to determine if his appointees actually make policy as the president desires. Of the 3,000 federal jobs appointed by the president, approximately 700 are considered policy-making positions or "plums." The incoming president spends months filling all of the positions. Applicants are chosen based upon their campaign work, friendships and congressional sponsors. Cabinet departments have grown increasingly top heavy with the addition of more layers at the top levels.
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. Presidents have created almost 40 percent of all new agencies through executive order; Congress, however, has the last word on the continued existence of these agencies through its control of the budget.
The Budgetary Process
The budget is the single most important policy statement of government and the battles of who gets what is at the heart of the political 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
A good bureaucratic politician cultivates a base of support for requests among the public and among people served by his/her agency; develops interest, enthusiasm, and support for his/her program among top political and congressional leaders; wins favorable media coverage for his agency and uses strategies that exploit opportunities.
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 bureaucracies regulate almost all aspects of American life. The Federal Reserve controls interest rates; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insures bank deposits and the Food and Drug Administration determines what drugs that doctors can prescribe. Federal regulators issue thousands of pages of rules and regulations, conduct inspections and investigations of complaints, hold hearings, require submission of forms, and levy fines and penalties. Economists believe that these regulations stymie innovation and productivity while driving up the cost of living.
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-a-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 re-regulation 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
Each year the federal bureaucracy adds nearly 4,00 new rules to American life. The Environmental Protection Agency is the leader in making new rules, followed by the Internal Revenue Service. The new rules and regulations must be published in the Federal Register and interest groups must be allowed time to comment upon them. Thus, the size of the Federal Register is often used to measure the size of the bureaucracy. All regulations currently in effect are published in the Code of Federal Regulations.
Regulations cost money but these are hard to determine. Regulations are used by politicians to address the nation's problems and it allows them to shift government costs to the private sector. Regulations impose costs on Americans through the direct costs of compliance and the indirect economic costs from devoting resources to compliance; this may add up to $1 trillion per year.
Congressional Constraints on the Bureaucracy
Congress has placed a number of constraints on the federal bureaucracy:
1. The Administrative Procedures Act of 1946 (APA) required agencies to post proposed rules in the Federal Register, solicit comments, and hold hearings.
2. The Freedom of Information Act of 1966 (FOIA) gave citizens a formal route for forcing agencies to divulge information, with some broad exceptions.
3. The Privacy Act of 1974 required agencies to keep confidential the personal records of individuals, especially Social Security and Internal Revenue Service files.
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
Bureaucratic decisions are subject to review by the federal courts who can also issue injunctions to an executive agency before it issues a regulation. The courts typically have stepped in when agencies have violated the laws of Congress, when they have exceeded the authority given them, when their actions have been judged as "arbitrary and unreasonable," and when they have failed in their legal duties. Judicial oversight tends to focus upon whether or not agencies are acting beyond the authority granted them by Congress and whether or not they are abiding by rules of fairness. Bureaucratic agencies have been very successful in defending themselves in court. They succeed because they have elaborate administrative process to protect their decisions, and they have large numbers of attorneys who specialize in administrative law.
Chapter Objectives
After mastering the concepts in this chapter, you will be able to
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