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Below is the hand-out due by Friday midnight. Please send your responses to

Federal bureaucrats exercise a great deal of power, especially when operating under discretionary authority. It is therefore important to understand what influences bureaucratic conduct. In general, four factors explain the behavior of governmental officials:

1. Recruitment and reward. Once hired, a federal bureaucrat normally serves a one year trial period before being granted tenure. A tenured bureaucrat is extremely difficult to fire, with the average termination process (including appeals) lasting about two years. Thus, in practice, almost no one is ever fired and executives develop informal strategies for dealing with incompetent employees.

The Senior Executive Service (SES) was created in 1978 to provide presidents with a core group of neutral, professional managers in the upper grades of the bureaucracy. To ensure competence, members of the SES-who join on a voluntary basis-are subject to easier transfer and firing procedures as well as to pay increases determined by performance. The SES has not worked out as intended; almost no member of the group has been fired, and salary raises have been fairly automatic.

In spite of the merit system, hiring in federal agencies remains political, especially at the middle and upper levels. An agency can hire a particular individual on a name-request basis, giving rise to the buddy system. This practice allows the maintenance of issue networks based on shared policy views; bureaucrats in consumer-protection agencies, for example, may hire people from Naderite groups. The end-product of the recruitment and reward structure is that most bureaucrats become quite comfortable in their position and defensive about their agency, adopting an agency point of view.

2. Personal attributes. Bureaucrats at the middle and upper levels of government are not representative of the American public. They tend to be highly educated, middle-aged white males. But none of these factors explains much about the attitudes bureaucrats hold. Surveys have found top-level bureaucrats to be slightly more liberal than the average voter but not as liberal as members of the media. Yet even this generalization is a bit misleading. Attitudes tend to vary depending on the agency for which a bureaucrat works. Those employed by activist agencies (FTC, EPA) are much more liberal than those who work in traditional agencies (Commerce).

While attitudes differ, they do not necessarily influence bureaucratic behavior because much of bureaucratic work is governed by standardized rules and procedures. It is only where roles are loosely structured that a civil servant’s attitudes come into play.

3. The nature of the job. Some agencies have a sense of mission, a clear doctrine that is shared by its members. Such agencies (the Forest Service, the FBI, and the Public Health Service) are easy to manage and have high morale but are hard to change and are resistant to political direction. To be sure, a sense of mission probably infiltrates most agencies to some degree; a survey by Kenneth Meier and Lloyd Nigro revealed that federal bureaucrats believe in the importance of their agency’s work. Thus the mission of the agency may become synonymous with the public interest in the minds of many bureaucrats. An agency’s mission, however, must be accomplished within an array of laws, rules, and regulations-dealing with hiring and firing, freedom of information, accounting for money spent, affirmative action, environmental impact, and administrative procedures. Agencies also have overlapping and even conflicting missions. These characteristics make controlling the bureaucracy difficult, no matter which party occupies the White House.

4. External forces. All government bureaus must cope with seven external forces: executive branch superiors, the president’s staff, congressional committees, interest groups, the media, the courts, and other government agencies. All federal agencies are nominally subordinate to the president. In practice, agencies that distribute benefits among significant, discrete groups, regions, or localities within the United States (such as HUD, Agriculture, and Interior) tend to be closely overseen by Congress. Others (such as State, Treasury, or justice) are more under the control of the president. Bureaucrats, like people generally, desire autonomy-to be left alone, free of bureaucratic rivals and close political supervision. They may obtain autonomy through the skillful use of publicity to build public support, as did the FBI and NASA. A less risky strategy is to develop strong allies in the private sector that will provide political support in Congress. However, this limits the freedom of the agency; it must serve the interests of its clients. Thus the Maritime Administration supports high subsidies for the shipping industry, and the Department of Labor could never recommend a decrease in the minimum wage.

External forces influence agency decisions in the form of the so-called iron triangle-the informal policy network involving an agency, an interest group, and a congressional committee. Often, though, an agency will be faced with conflicting interest group demands. The National Farmers Union favors high subsidies to farmers, whereas the American Farm Bureau Federation takes a free-market position. Organized labor favors strict enforcement by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, whereas business is opposed. In these instances, issue networks emerge. These are an array of groups and individuals, often contentious, and split along ideological, partisan, and economic lines.

Congress has a formidable array of powers to deal with the bureaucracy. First, congressional statutes establish the existence of an agency and occasionally specify in detail how agencies should behave. Lately, however, Congress has given broad discretion to agencies. Second, money must be authorized and then appropriated by Congress. The agency is thus beholden to the legislative committee that authorizes funds and to the Appropriations Committee of the House.

For many decades, Congress made increasing use of the legislative veto to control bureaucratic or presidential actions by vetoing a particular decision within a thirty- to ninety-day period. However, in June 1983, the Supreme Court declared the legislative veto unconstitutional (the Chadha case). This decision’s exact effect on congressional oversight of the bureaucracy is still uncertain. Finally, congressional investigations are the most visible and dramatic form of oversight.

Discussion Questions

1. The text defines bureaucracy as “a large, complex organization composed of appointed officials.” What does this mean? Does a large organization also have to be complex? It is possible to have a simple administrative structure in an organization that has hundreds–or even thousands-of employees?

2. The text’s definition of bureaucracy includes the phrase “appointed officials.” Why do the large, complex organizations in our society not have elected rather than appointed officials? Wouldn’t electing officials be more democratic? Should we elect the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), for example? Would this make these officials more responsive to public opinion? What about an Assistant Secretary of Defense? Would the president be more or less able to control the bureaucracy if these officials were independently elected? Would concerted, consistent action be more or less likely if many more officials were elected?

3. The Pendleton Act has had both beneficial and harmful effects. On the one hand, it has lessened the fear of job loss among civil servants, making the bureaucracy sometimes resistant to presidential direction. On the other hand, bureaucrats should have some immunity to resist improper orders from politically motivated superiors. How can these twin goals of competence and political neutrality be balanced more perfectly than they are today?

4. One of the criticisms of the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans is that the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Michael Brown, was a presidential appointee with limited experience in emergency management. Is it important for agency directors to have direct experience or expertise in a field that correlates with their agency position? On the other hand, should general leadership and managerial skills be sufficient for this type of high-level position? If external standards are imposed in addition to the president’s usual political criteria, how might this hurt his ability to fill bureaucratic positions? (See the “What Would You Do” feature to review the challenges that presidents already face in their search for qualified bureaucratic managers.)

5. How much oversight should Congress have over the functioning of bureaucracies? Is it realistic to expect Congress to review major decisions made by every government agency? Should a separate organizational structure be established to provide that governmental oversight?