Policies passed by authoritative decision makers are interpreted and implemented by executive agencies and departments. Created by elected officeholders, bureaucratic organizations exist to perform essential public functions both on a day-to-day basis and, especially, at times of national emergencies. What is the political status of the federal bureaucracy? What is its power? How does the public view it? What essential functions do bureaucratic agencies and departments perform?
He maintains that a good civil servant must realize he or she will need to be in the thick of things to provide preeminent service without actually being seen as merely a bureaucrat. Put differently, a bureaucrat walks a fine line between standing up for elected officials and their respective policies—the dog—and at the same time acting in the best interest of the public—the fireplug.
In what ways is the problem identified by author Kenneth Ashworth a consequence of the merit-based civil service? Bureaucrats must implement and administer a wide range of policies and programs as established by congressional acts or presidential orders. Bureaucrats are government officials subject to legislative regulations and procedural guidelines.
Because they play a vital role in modern society, they hold managerial and functional positions in government; they form the core of most administrative agencies. Although many top administrators are far removed from the masses, many interact with citizens on a regular basis. Given the power bureaucrats have to adopt and enforce public policy, they must follow several legislative regulations and procedural guidelines. A regulation is a rule that permits government to restrict or prohibit certain behaviors among individuals and corporations.
Bureaucratic rulemaking is a complex process that will be covered in more detail in the following section, but the rulemaking process typically creates procedural guidelines , or more formally, standard operating procedures. These are the rules that lower-level bureaucrats must abide by regardless of the situations they face. Elected officials are regularly frustrated when bureaucrats seem not follow the path they intended.
As a result, the bureaucratic process becomes inundated with red tape. This is the name for the procedures and rules that must be followed to get something done. Citizens frequently criticize the seemingly endless networks of red tape they must navigate in order to effectively utilize bureaucratic services, although these devices are really meant to ensure the bureaucracies function as intended. To understand why some bureaucracies act the way they do, sociologists have developed a handful of models.
With the exception of the ideal bureaucracy described by Max Weber, these models see bureaucracies as self-serving. Harnessing self-serving instincts to make the bureaucracy work the way it was intended is a constant task for elected officials. One of the ways elected officials have tried to grapple with this problem is by designing different types of bureaucracies with different functions. These types include cabinet departments, independent regulatory agencies, independent executive agencies, and government corporations.
Congress tends to create government corporations to perform services that respond to market forces but are too important to the public to be allowed to fail. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Module The Bureaucracy. Search for:. Understanding Bureaucracies and their Types Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Explain the three different models sociologists and others use to understand bureaucracies Identify the different types of federal bureaucracies and their functional differences.
Created in by President Franklin D. Dogs and Fireplugs In Caught between the Dog and the Fireplug, or How to Survive Public Service , author Kenneth Ashworth provides practical advice for individuals pursuing a career in civil service.
Practice Questions Briefly explain why government might create a government corporation. Show Answer 1. Show Glossary government corporation a corporation that fulfills an important public interest and is therefore overseen by government authorities to a much larger degree than private businesses red tape the mechanisms, procedures, and rules that must be followed to get something done. Susan J. Polity 16 No. Schechter Poultry Corp.
United States , U. Amtrak: the history and politics of a national railroad. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Licenses and Attributions. CC licensed content, Shared previously. Oversees the U. Oversees the many elements of the U. Oversees the promotion of public health by providing essential human services and enforcing food and drug laws. Oversees matters related to U. Business output can be measured by profits, revenues, market share, and other metrics.
But government output—the quantity and the quality—is more difficult to measure. That makes it hard for Congress and the public to judge performance, or to set goals for agencies, managers, and employees. The missions of federal agencies are often multifaceted and vague.
And agencies tend to describe their activities in opaque language with lots of buzz words, which makes it difficult to hold officials accountable for results.
Monitoring and Transparency. Businesses produce audited financial statements, and their products are usually in the public realm for everyone to see. Shareholders, creditors, and other players in capital markets monitor companies, as do consumers and competitors in the marketplace. Ironically, private organizations are often more transparent and easier to monitor than public ones.
With Britain's privatization program in the s, for example, hidden financial troubles of government companies were exposed when companies were floated on the stock exchange. The agency provides to the public few details about the budgets of its individual parks. A report by Sen. Tom Coburn in noted that the NPS produced a 2,page study on dog-walking options in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, yet the same park provides the public virtually no information about its budget.
The Mount Vernon Ladies Association publishes detailed and audited financial statements for the estate showing how money is raised and spent on each of its activities. Without transparency and outside monitoring, organizations will receive less feedback, and that will make them more likely to fail. Rigid Compensation. Federal employee compensation is based on standardized scales generally tied to longevity, not performance. The rigid salary and benefits structure makes it hard to encourage improved employee efforts or to reward outstanding achievements.
Rigid pay scales reduce morale among the best workers because they see the poor workers being rewarded equally. With rigid pay scales, the best workers have the most incentive to leave, while the poor workers will stay, decade after decade. But attempts to introduce greater pay-for-performance in the federal government have not worked very well either. A recent effort to give bonuses to outstanding employees in the senior executive service has led to the great majority of them being judged "outstanding.
Lack of Firing. Disciplining federal workers is difficult. They have strong civil service protections, and about one-third of them are represented by unions. Recent data show that just 0. That rate is just one-sixth the private-sector firing rate.
Federal agencies and programs are loaded with rules and regulations, which generally reduce operational efficiency. For example, people have complained for years about the heavy paperwork involved in federal recruiting, but this problem never seems to get fixed. One reason for all the federal rules is to prevent corruption and fraud, which are big concerns because the government hands out so many contracts and subsidies.
Government has enormous power, and so layers of rules are needed to safeguard against abuse. In the government, headquarters will monitor a regional office by seeing whether it handed in all its paperwork.
Finally, government workers themselves have reasons to favor red tape: if they follow detailed written rules, they can "cover their behinds" and shield themselves from criticism. Bureaucratic Layering. American businesses have become leaner in recent decades, with flatter management structures. Research has found that the average number of executives reporting directly to corporate CEOs has increased substantially in recent decades, while the number of management layers in major corporations has fallen.
Political Priorities. The federal executive branch is headed by an elected president who appoints about 3, people to top positions across the bureaucracy. Political appointees think that they know all the answers, so they do not bother learning the lessons from past efforts, and they repeat mistakes. As each administration yanks agencies in new directions, past investments are thrown down the drain. One of the reasons for the failed response to Hurricane Katrina in was that many executives in the Department of Homeland Security were inexperienced party loyalists.
Today, for example, many U. The ticket to the top for this official appears to have been a decade of media relations jobs for members of Congress and the White House. Federal agencies get influenced or "captured" by special interests, such as businesses.
Interest groups may gain influence by providing gifts or benefits to federal employees, or by using their relationships with legislators who oversee the agencies. Lobbyist influence also stems from the power of the revolving door, meaning the possibility of officials gaining lucrative private-sector jobs after leaving government. Another power that interest groups often have is control over information and expertise that a federal agency needs.
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