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The Bureaucrats
•Who They Are and How They Got There
- •Most demographically representative part of government.
- •Diversity of jobs mirrors the private sector.
- •Civil Service: From Patronage to Protection.
- (- Patronage: Job given for political reasons.)
- - Civil Service: System of hiring and promotion based on merit and nonpartisanship.
- - Merit Principle: Entrance exams and promotion ratings to find people with talent and skill.
- - Office of Personnel Management: The federal office in charge of most of the government's hiring.
- •The Other Route to Federal Jobs: Recruiting from the Plum Book
- - Published by Congress.
- - Lists the very top jobs available for Presidential appointment.
- - Presidents work to find capable people to fill the positions.
- - Some plum jobs (ambassadorships) are patronage.
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Some Theories of Bureaucracy
•The Weberian Model.
•The Acquisitive, Monopolistic Bureaucracy
•Garbage Cans and Bureaucracies.
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The Weberian Model.
- •Hierarchical authority structure
- •Uses task specialization
- •Operate on the merit principle
- •Behave with impersonality
- •A well-organized machine with lots of working parts.
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The Acquisitive, Monopolistic Bureaucracy
- •Bureaucracies seek to maximize their budgets
- •Work to expand their powers and programs, even joining with Congress to expand their functions
- •Often operate under monopolistic conditions
- •Privatization could cut back on the monopolistic attitudes of the bureaucracies
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Garbage Cans and Bureaucracies.
- •Operate by trial and error
- •Typically loosely run
- •Bureaucracies aren’t necessarily trying to find solutions to problems, sometimes the solutions are in search of problems.
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How Bureaucracies Are Organized
- •The Cabinet Departments
- - 15 Cabinet departments headed by a secretary
- (Department of Justice headed by Attorney General)
- - Each has its own budget, staff and policy areas
- - Republicans have been trying to eliminate several departments
- •The Government Corporations
- - Business like-provide a service like private companies and typically charges for its services.
- - Ex. Postal Service, Amtrak
- •Independent Executive Agencies
- - The agencies that don’t fit in anywhere else.
- - Ex. NASA
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Bureaucracies as Implementers:
What Implementation Means
- •It involves translating the goals and objectives of a policy into an operating, ongoing program.
- •It includes:
- - Creating / assigning an agency the policy
- - Turning policy into rules, regulations and forms.
- - Coordinating resources to achieve the goals.
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Bureaucracies as Implementers:
Why the Best-Laid Plans Sometimes Flunk the Implementation Test
- •Program Design.
- •Lack of Clarity.
- - Congressional laws are ambiguous and imprecise.
- - Sometimes the laws conflict with each other.
- •Lack of Resources.
- - Agencies may be big, but not in the right areas.
- - Many different types of resources are needed: personnel, training, supplies & equipment.
- - May also lack the authority to act.
- •Administrative Routine.
- - SOPs bring uniformity to complex organizations.
- - It is often difficult to change the routines.
- •Administrator’s Dispositions.
- - Ability to select among various responses.
- - Street-level bureaucrats have the most discretion.
- •Fragmentation.
- - Some policies are spread among several agencies.
- - Some agencies have different rules for the same policy.
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Bureaucracies as Regulators:
Regulation in the Economy and in Everyday Life
•Regulation: Use of governmental authority to control or change some practice in the private sector.
- •A Full Day of Regulation.
- - Federal agencies check, verify and inspect many of the products and services we take for granted.
- - Federal and state agencies provide many services.
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Bureaucracies as Regulators:
Regulation: How It Grew, How It Works
- •Command-and-Control Policy: Government tells business how to reach certain goals, checks the
- progress and punishes offenders.
•Incentive System: Market-like strategies are used to manage public policy.
•Some agencies are proactive, some are reactive.
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Bureaucracies as Regulators:
Toward Deregulation
•Deregulation: The lifting of restrictions on business, industry and professional activities.
- •Regulatory problems:
- - Raises prices
- - Hurts U.S.’s competitive position abroad
- - Does not always work well
•But some argue regulation is needed.
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Bureaucracy and Democracy
- •Presidents Try to Control the Bureaucracy
- - Appoint the right people.
- - Issue executive orders.
- - Tinker with the agency’s budget.
- - Reorganize an agency.
- •Congress Tries to Control the Bureaucracy
- - Influence presidential appointments.
- - Tinker with the agency’s budget.
- - Hold hearings.
- - Rewrite the legislation or make it more detailed.
- •Iron Triangles and Issue Networks
- - A mutually dependent relationship between bureaucratic agencies, interest groups, and congressional committees or subcommittees.
- - Exist independently of each other.
- - They are tough, but not impossible, to get rid of.
- - Some argue they are being replaced by wider issue networks that focus on more policies.
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Bureaucracy and the Scope of Government
- •Many state that this is an example of a government out of control.
- •But, the size of the bureaucracy has shrunk.
- •Some agencies don’t have enough resources to do what they are expected to do.
- •Only carry out the policies, Congress and the president decide what needs to be done.
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