Chapter15Bureaucracy2020.pptx
Chapter 15 Bureaucracy
PL-102-OL1
Instructor Walter Pearn
Chapter Objectives
Define bureaucracy and bureaucrat
Describe the evolution and growth of public administration in the United States
Identify the reasons people undertake civil service
Explain how the creation of the Civil Service Commission transformed the spoils system of the nineteenth century into a merit-based system of civil service
Understand how carefully regulated hiring and pay practices helps to maintain a merit-based civil service
Chapter Objectives
Explain the three different models' sociologists and others use to understand bureaucracies
Identify the different types of federal bureaucracies and their functional differences
Explain the way Congress, the president, bureaucrats, and citizens provide meaningful oversight over the bureaucracies
Identify the ways in which privatization has made bureaucracies both more and less efficient
Bureaucracy defined
is an administrative group of nonelected officials charged with carrying out functions connected to a series of policies and programs.
In the United States, the bureaucracy began as a very small collection of individuals. Over time, however, it grew to be a major force in political affairs. Indeed, it grew so large that politicians in modern times have ridiculed it to great political advantage.
Bureaucrats or Civil servants
Are individuals who work in the bureaucracy, fill necessary and even instrumental roles in every area of government: from high-level positions in foreign affairs and intelligence collection agencies to clerks and staff in the smallest regulatory agencies.
They are hired, or sometimes appointed, for their expertise in carrying out the functions and programs of the government.
WHAT DOES A BUREAUCRACY DO?
Modern society relies on the effective functioning of government to provide public goods, enhance quality of life, and stimulate economic growth.
The activities by which government achieves these functions include—but are not limited to—taxation, homeland security, immigration, foreign affairs, and education.
The more society grows and the need for government services expands, the more challenging bureaucratic management and public administration becomes.
Public administration is both the implementation of public policy in government bureaucracies and the academic study that prepares civil servants for work in those organizations.
WHAT DOES A BUREAUCRACY DO?
The classic version of a bureaucracy is hierarchical and can be described by an organizational chart that outlines the separation of tasks and worker specialization while also establishing a clear unity of command by assigning each employee to only one boss.
Given this definition, bureaucracy is not unique to government but is also found in the private and nonprofit sectors.
Almost all organizations are bureaucratic regardless of their scope and size; although public and private organizations differ in some important ways.
For example, while private organizations are responsible to a superior authority such as an owner, board of directors, or shareholders, federal governmental organizations answer equally to the president, Congress, the courts, and ultimately the public.
The underlying goals of private and public organizations also differ. While private organizations seek to survive by controlling costs, increasing market share, and realizing a profit, public organizations find it more difficult to measure the elusive goal of operating with efficiency and effectiveness.
THE ORIGINS OF THE U.S. BUREAUCRACY
In the early U.S. republic, the bureaucracy was quite small. This is understandable since the American Revolution was largely a revolt against executive power and the British imperial administrative order.
Nevertheless, while neither the word “bureaucracy” nor its synonyms appear in the text of the Constitution, the document does establish a few broad channels through which the emerging government could develop the necessary bureaucratic administration.
For example, Article II, Section 2, provides the president the power to appoint officers and department heads.
In the following section, the president is further empowered to see that the laws are “faithfully executed.” More specifically, Article I, Section 8, empowers Congress to establish a post office, build roads, regulate commerce, coin money, and regulate the value of money
THE ORIGINS OF THE U.S. BUREAUCRACY
Under President George Washington, the bureaucracy remained small enough to accomplish only the necessary tasks at hand.
Washington’s tenure saw the creation of the Department of State to oversee international issues, the Department of the Treasury to control coinage, and the Department of War to administer the armed forces.
The employees within these three departments, in addition to the growing postal service, constituted the major portion of the federal bureaucracy for the first three decades of the republic. Two developments, however, contributed to the growth of the bureaucracy well beyond these humble beginnings.
THE ORIGINS OF THE U.S. BUREAUCRACY
This was the beginning of the spoils system, in which political appointments were transformed into political patronage doled out by the president on the basis of party loyalty.
Political patronage is the use of state resources to reward individuals for their political support.
The term “spoils” here refers to paid positions in the U.S. government.
As the saying goes, “to the victor,” in this case the incoming president, “go the spoils.” It was assumed that government would work far more efficiently if the key federal posts were occupied by those already supportive of the president and his policies.
THE FALL OF POLITICAL PATRONAGE
Clients who wanted positions in the civil service pledged their political loyalty to a particular patron who then provided them with their desired positions.
These arrangements directed the power and resources of government toward perpetuating the reward system.
They replaced the system that early presidents like Thomas Jefferson had fostered, in which the country’s intellectual and economic elite rose to the highest levels of the federal bureaucracy based on their relative merit.
Criticism of the spoils system grew, especially in the mid-1870s, after numerous scandals rocked the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant.
THE FALL OF POLITICAL PATRONAGE
As the negative aspects of political patronage continued to infect bureaucracy in the late nineteenth century, calls for civil service reform grew louder.
Those supporting the patronage system held that their positions were well earned; those who condemned it argued that federal legislation was needed to ensure jobs were awarded on the basis of merit.
Eventually, after President James Garfield had been assassinated by a disappointed office seeker, Congress responded to cries for reform with the Pendleton Act, also called the Civil Service Reform Act of 1883.
The act established the Civil Service Commission, a centralized agency charged with ensuring that the federal government’s selection, retention, and promotion practices were based on open, competitive examinations in a merit system.
THE CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION
The Pendleton Act of 1883 was not merely an important piece of reform legislation; it also established the foundations for the merit-based system that emerged in the decades that followed.
It accomplished this through a number of important changes, although three elements stand out as especially significant.
First, the law attempted to reduce the impact of politics on the civil service sector by making it illegal to fire or otherwise punish government workers for strictly political reasons.
Second, the law raised the qualifications for employment in civil service positions by requiring applicants to pass exams designed to test their competence in a number of important skill and knowledge areas.
Third, it allowed for the creation of the United States Civil Service Commission (CSC), which was charged with enforcing the elements of the law.
THE CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION
The CSC, as created by the Pendleton Act, was to be made up of three commissioners, only two of whom could be from the same political party.
Responsible of developing and applying the competitive examinations for civil service positions, ensuring that the civil service appointments were apportioned among the several states based on population, and seeing to it that no person in the public service is obligated to contribute to any political cause.
The CSC was also charged with ensuring that all civil servants wait for a probationary period before being appointed and that no appointee uses his or her official authority to affect political changes either through coercion or influence..
THE CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION
In the late 1970s as the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal prompted the public to a fever pitch of skepticism about government itself.
Congress and the president responded with the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which abolished the Civil Service Commission.
In its place, the law created two new federal agencies: the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB).
The OPM has responsibility for recruiting, interviewing, and testing potential government employees in order to choose those who should be hired.
The MSPB is responsible for investigating charges of agency wrongdoing and hearing appeals when corrective actions are ordered. Together these new federal agencies were intended to correct perceived and real problems with the merit system, protect employees from managerial abuse, and generally make the bureaucracy more efficient.
MERIT-BASED SELECTION
The general trend from the 1880s to today has been toward a civil service system that is increasingly based on merit.
In this system, the large majority of jobs in individual bureaucracies are tied to the needs of the organization rather than to the political needs of the party bosses or political leaders.
A general civil service position announcement will describe the government agency or office seeking an employee, an explanation of what the agency or office does, an explanation of what the position requires, and a list of the knowledge, skills, and abilities, commonly referred to as KSAs, deemed especially important for fulfilling the role.
A budget analyst position, for example, would include KSAs such as experience with automated financial systems, knowledge of budgetary regulations and policies, the ability to communicate orally, and demonstrated skills in budget administration, planning, and formulation. The merit system requires that a person be evaluated based on his or her ability to demonstrate KSAs that match those described or better. The individual who is hired should have better KSAs than the other applicants.
MODELS OF BUREAUCRACY
Bureaucracies are complex institutions designed to accomplish specific tasks.
This complexity, and the fact that they are organizations composed of human beings, can make it challenging for us to understand how bureaucracies work.
Sociologists, however, have developed a number of models for understanding the process.
Each model highlights specific traits that help explain the organizational behavior of governing bodies and associated functions.
The Weberian Model
The classic model of bureaucracy is typically called the ideal Weberian model, and it was developed by Max Weber, an early German sociologist.
Weber argued that the increasing complexity of life would simultaneously increase the demands of citizens for government services.
Therefore, the ideal type of bureaucracy, the Weberian model, was one in which agencies are apolitical, hierarchically organized, and governed by formal procedures.
Furthermore, specialized bureaucrats would be better able to solve problems through logical reasoning.
Such efforts would eliminate entrenched patronage, stop problematic decision-making by those in charge, provide a system for managing and performing repetitive tasks that required little or no discretion, impose order and efficiency, create a clear understanding of the service provided, reduce arbitrariness, ensure accountability, and limit discretion.
The Acquisitive Model
The acquisitive model proposes that bureaucracies are naturally competitive and power-hungry.
This means bureaucrats, especially at the highest levels, recognize that limited resources are available to feed bureaucracies, so they will work to enhance the status of their own bureaucracy to the detriment of others.
This effort can sometimes take the form of merely emphasizing to Congress the value of their bureaucratic task, but it also means the bureaucracy will attempt to maximize its budget by depleting all its allotted resources each year.
This ploy makes it more difficult for legislators to cut the bureaucracy’s future budget, a strategy that succeeds at the expense of thrift. In this way, the bureaucracy will eventually grow far beyond what is necessary and create bureaucratic waste that would otherwise be spent more efficiently among the other bureaucracies.
The Monopolistic Model
Monopolistic model recognize the similarities between a bureaucracy like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and a private monopoly like a regional power company or internet service provider that has no competitors.
Such organizations are frequently criticized for waste, poor service, and a low level of client responsiveness. Consider, for example, the Bureau of Consular Affairs (BCA), the federal bureaucracy charged with issuing passports to citizens.
There is no other organization from which a U.S. citizen can legitimately request and receive a passport, a process that normally takes several weeks. Thus there is no reason for the BCA to become more efficient or more responsive or to issue passports any faster.
There are rare bureaucratic exceptions that typically compete for presidential favor, most notably organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the intelligence agencies in the Department of Defense.
These bureaucracies have little reason to become more efficient or responsive, nor are they often penalized for chronic inefficiency or ineffectiveness. Therefore, there is little reason for them to adopt cost-saving or performance measurement systems. While some economists argue that the problems of government could be easily solved if certain functions are privatized to reduce this prevailing incompetence, bureaucrats are not as easily swayed.
TYPES OF BUREAUCRATIC ORGANIZATIONS
Cabinet departments are major executive offices that are directly accountable to the president.
They include the Departments of State, Defense, Education, Treasury, and several others.
Occasionally, a department will be eliminated when government officials decide its tasks no longer need direct presidential and congressional oversight, such as happened to the Post Office Department in 1970.
Each cabinet department has a head called a secretary, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
These secretaries report directly to the president, and they oversee a huge network of offices and agencies that make up the department.
Within these large bureaucratic networks are a number of undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, deputy secretaries, and many others.
The Department of Justice is the one department that is structured somewhat differently. Rather than a secretary and undersecretaries, it has an attorney general, an associate attorney general, and a host of different bureau and division heads
Independent Executive Agencies and Regulatory Agencies
Like cabinet departments, independent executive agencies report directly to the president, with heads appointed by the president.
Unlike the larger cabinet departments, however, independent agencies are assigned far more focused tasks.
These agencies are considered independent because they are not subject to the regulatory authority of any specific department.
They perform vital functions and are a major part of the bureaucratic landscape of the United States.
Some prominent independent agencies are the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which collects and manages intelligence vital to national interests, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), charged with developing technological innovation for the purposes of space exploration, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which enforces laws aimed at protecting environmental sustainability.
Government Coperations
They exist because the services they provide are partly subject to market forces and tend to generate enough profit to be self-sustaining, but they also fulfill a vital service the government has an interest in maintaining.
Unlike a private corporation, a government corporation does not have stockholders. Instead, it has a board of directors and managers.
This distinction is important because whereas a private corporation’s profits are distributed as dividends, a government corporation’s profits are dedicated to perpetuating the enterprise.
Unlike private businesses, which pay taxes to the federal government on their profits, government corporations are exempt from taxes.
The most widely used government corporation is the U.S. Postal Service.
Amtrak was the government’s response to the decline in passenger rail travel in the 1950s and 1960s as the automobile came to dominate.
BUREAUCRATIC RULEMAKING
Once the particulars of implementation have been spelled out in the legislation authorizing a new program, bureaucracies move to enact it.
When they encounter grey areas, many follow the federal negotiated rulemaking process to propose a solution, that is, detailing how particular new federal polices, regulations, and/or programs will be implemented in the agencies.
Congress cannot possibly legislate on that level of detail, so the experts in the bureaucracy do so.
BUREAUCRATIC RULEMAKING
Before it was adopted, bureaucracies used a procedure called notice-and-comment rulemaking.
This practice required that agencies attempting to adopt rules publish their proposal in the Federal Register, the official publication for all federal rules and proposed rules.
By publishing the proposal, the bureaucracy was fulfilling its obligation to allow the public time to comment.
Rather than encouraging the productive interchange of ideas, the comment period had the effect of creating an adversarial environment in which different groups tended to make extreme arguments for rules that would support their interests.
As a result, administrative rulemaking became too lengthy, too contentious, and too likely to provoke litigation in the courts.
GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRATIC OVERSIGHT
The ability for bureaucracies to develop their own rules and in many ways control their own budgets has often been a matter of great concern for elected leaders.
As a result, elected leaders have employed a number of strategies and devices to control public administrators in the bureaucracy.
Congress is particularly empowered to apply oversight of the federal bureaucracy because of its power to control funding and approve presidential appointments.
Occasionally, however, when a particular bureaucracy has committed or contributed to a blunder of some magnitude, the hearings can become quite animated and testy.
CITIZEN BUREAUCRATIC OVERSIGHT
The two most important laws are the Freedom of Information Act of 1966 and the Government in Sunshine Act of 1976.
Freedom of Information Act of 1966 (FOIA), provides journalists and the general public the right to request records from various federal agencies. These agencies are required by law to release that information unless it qualifies for one of nine exemptions. These exceptions cite sensitive issues related to national security or foreign policy, internal personnel rules, trade secrets, violations of personnel privacy rights, law enforcement information, and oil well data.
CITIZEN BUREAUCRATIC OVERSIGHT
Sunshine Act of 1976 is different from FOIA in that it requires all multi-headed federal agencies to hold their meetings in a public forum on a regular basis.
The name “Sunshine Act” is derived from the old adage that “sunlight is the best disinfectant”—the implication being that governmental and bureaucratic corruption thrive in secrecy but shrink when exposed to the light of public scrutiny.
The act defines a meeting as any gathering of agency members in person or by phone, whether in a formal or informal manner.
Sunshine Act allows for exceptions including meetings where classified information is discussed, proprietary data has been submitted for review, employee privacy matters are discussed, criminal matters are brought up, and information would prove financially harmful to companies were it released.
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