What makes american bureaucracy distinctive

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. 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.

Postal Service. Once a cabinet department, it was transformed into a government corporation in the early s. Another widely used government corporation is the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, which uses the trade name Amtrak. Recognizing the need to maintain a passenger rail service despite dwindling profits, the government consolidated the remaining lines and created Amtrak.

Had the U. Credit: Library of Congress. 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. Skip to main content. Such theories, both the popular and the scholarly, assign little importance to the nature of the tasks an agency performs, the constitutional framework in which it is embedded, or the preferences and attitudes of citizens and legislators.

Our approach will be quite different: Different agencies will be examined in historical perspective to discover the kinds of problems, if any, to which their operation gave rise, and how those problems were affected— perhaps determined—by the tasks which they were assigned, the political system in which they operated, and the preferences they were required to consult.

What follows will be far from a systematic treatment of such matters, and even farther from a rigorous testing of any theory of bureaucratization: Our knowledge of agency history and behavior is too sketchy to permit that. During the first half of the 19th century, the growth in the size of the federal bureaucracy can be explained, not by the assumption of new tasks by the government or by the imperialistic designs of the managers of existing tasks, but by the addition to existing bureaus of personnel performing essentially routine, repetitive tasks for which the public demand was great and unavoidable.

The principal problem facing a bureaucracy thus enlarged was how best to coordinate its activities toward given and noncontroversial ends. The increase in the size of the executive branch of the federal government at this time was almost entirely the result of the increase in the size of the Post Office. From to , federal civilian employment in the executive branch increased nearly eight fold from 4, to 36, , but 86 percent of this growth was the result of additions to the postal service.

The Post Office Department was expanding as population and commerce expanded. By there were 27, post offices scattered around the nation; by , nearly 77, In New York alone, by there were nearly 3, postal employees, the same number required to run the entire federal government at the beginning of that century. The organizational shape of the Post Office was more or less fixed in the administration of Andrew Jackson. The Postmaster General, almost always appointed because of his partisan position, was aided by three later four assistant postmaster generals dealing with appointments, mail-carrying contracts, operations, and finance.

There is no reason in theory why such an organization could not deliver the mails efficiently and honestly: The task is routine, its performance is measurable, and its value is monitored by millions of customers. Yet the Post Office, from the earliest years of the 19th century, was an organization marred by inefficiency and corruption. The reason is often thought to be found in the making of political appointments to the Post Office.

Indeed, some have argued that it was the advent of the "spoils system" under Jackson that contributed to the later inefficiencies of the public bureaucracy. The opposite is more nearly the case.

The Jacksonians did not seek to make the administrative apparatus a mere tool of the Democratic party advantage, but to purify that apparatus not only of what they took to be Federalist subversion but also of personal decadence. The government was becoming not just large, but lax. Integrity and diligence were absent, not merely from government, but from social institutions generally.

The Jacksonians were in many cases concerned about the decline in what the Founders had called "republican virtue," but what their successors were more likely to call simplicity and decency. As Matthew Crenson has recently observed in his book The Federal Machine, Jacksonian administrators wanted to "guarantee the good behavior of civil servants" as well as to cope with bigness, and to do this they sought both to place their own followers in office and—what is more important—to create a system of depersonalized, specialized bureaucratic rule.

Far from being the enemies of bureaucracy, the Jacksonians were among its principal architects. Impersonal administrative systems, like the spoils system, were "devices for strengthening the government's authority over its own civil servants"; these bureaucratic methods were, in turn, intended to "compensate for a decline in the disciplinary power of social institutions" such as the community, the professions, and business. If public servants, like men generally in a rapidly growing and diversifying society, could no longer be relied upon "to have a delicate regard for their reputations," accurate bookkeeping, close inspections, and regularized procedures would accomplish what character could not.

Amos Kendall, Postmaster General under President Jackson, set about to achieve this goal with a remarkable series of administrative innovations. To prevent corruption, Kendall embarked on two contradictory courses of action:. He sought to bring every detail of the department's affairs under his personal scrutiny and he began to reduce and divide the authority on which that scrutiny depended.

Virtually every important document and many unimportant ones had to be signed by Kendall himself. At the same time, he gave to the Treasury Department the power to audit his accounts and obtained from Congress a law requiring that the revenues of the department be paid into the Treasury rather than retained by the Post Office.

The duties of his subordinates were carefully defined and arranged so that the authority of one assistant would tend to check that of another.

What was installed was not simply a. Few subsequent postmasters were of Kendall's ability. The result was predictable. Endless details flowed to Washington for decision but no one in Washington other than the Postmaster General had the authority to decide. Meanwhile, the size of the postal establishment grew by leaps and bounds. Quickly the department began to operate on the basis of habit and local custom: Since everybody reported to Washington, in effect no one did.

As Leonard D. White was later to remark, "the system could work only because it was a vast, repetitive, fixed, and generally routine operation. But Wanamaker's own assistants in Washington were unenthusiastic about such a diminution in their authority and, in any event, Congress steadfastly refused to endorse decentralization.

Civil service reform was not strongly resisted in the Post Office; from on, the number of its employees covered by the merit system expanded. Big city postmasters were often delighted to be relieved of the burden of dealing with hundreds of place-seekers.

Employees welcomed the job protection that civil service provided. In time, the merit system came to govern Post Office personnel almost completely, yet the problems of the department became, if anything, worse.

By the midth century, slow and inadequate service, an inability technologically to cope with the mounting flood of mail, and the inequities of its pricing system became all too evident. The problem with the Post Office, however, was not omnipotence but impotence.

It was a government monopoly. Being a monopoly, it had little incentive to find the most efficient means to manage its services; being a government monopoly, it was not free to adopt such means even when found—communities, Congressmen, and special-interest groups saw to that. Not all large bureaucracies grow in response to demands for service. The Department of Defense, since the largest employer of federal civilian officials, has become, as the governmental keystone of the "military-industrial complex," the very archetype of an administrative entity that is thought to be so vast and so well-entrenched that it can virtually ignore the political branches of government, growing and even acting on the basis of its own inner imperatives.

In fact, until recently the military services were a major economic and political force only during wartime. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, America was a neutral nation with only a tiny standing army during the Civil War, over two million men served on the Union side alone and the War Department expanded enormously, but demobilization after the war was virtually complete, except for a small Indian-fighting force.

Its peacetime authorized strength was only 25, enlisted men and 2, officers, and its actual strength for the rest of the century was often less. Congress authorized the purchase and installation of over 2, coastal defense guns, but barely six percent of these were put in place. When war with Spain broke out, the army was almost totally unprepared. Over , men eventually served in that brief conflict, and though almost all were again demobilized, the War Department under Elihu Root was reorganized and put on a more professionalized basis with a greater capacity for unified central control.

Since the United States had become an imperial power with important possessions in the Caribbean and the Far East, the need for a larger military establishment was clear; even so, the average size of the army until World War I was only about , The First World War again witnessed a vast mobilization—nearly five million men in all—and again an almost complete demobilization after the war The Second World War involved over 16 million military personnel.

The demobilization that followed was less complete than after previous engagements, owing to the development of the Cold War, but it was substantial nonetheless—the Army fell in size from over eight million men to only half a million.

For the next three years it remained relatively flat. It began to rise rapidly in , partly to finance our involvement in the Korean conflict and partly to begin the construction of a military force that could counterbalance the Soviet Union, especially in Europe.

In sum, from the Revolutionary War to , a period of over years, the size and deployment of the military establishment in this country was governed entirely by decisions made by political leaders on political grounds. The military did not expand autonomously, a large standing army did not find wars to fight, and its officers did not play a significant potential role except in wartime and occasionally as presidential candidates.

No bureaucracy proved easier to control, at least insofar as its size and purposes were concerned. The argument for the existence of an autonomous, bureaucratically led military industrial complex is supported primarily by events since Not only has the United States assumed during this period worldwide commitments that necessitate a larger military establishment, but the advent of new, high-technology weapons has created a vast industrial machine with an interest in sustaining a high level of military expenditures, especially on weapons research, development, and acquisition.

This machine, so the argument goes, is allied with the Pentagon in ways that dominate the political officials nominally in charge of the armed forces. There is some truth in all this. We have become a world military force, though that decision was made by elected officials in and not dictated by a then nonexistent military-industrial complex. High cost, high technology weapons have become important and a number of industrial concerns will prosper or perish depending on how contracts for those weapons are let.

The development and purchase of weapons is sometimes made in a wasteful, even irrational, manner. And the allocation of funds among the several armed services is often dictated as much by interservice rivalry as by strategic or political decisions. But despite all this, the military has not been able to sustain itself at its preferred size, to keep its strength constant or growing, or to retain for its use a fixed or growing portion of the Gross National Product. Even during the last two decades, the period of greatest military prominence, the size of the Army has varied enormously—from over maneuver battalions in , to in , rising to at the peak of the Vietnam action in , and then declining rapidly to in Even military hardware, presumably of greater interest to the industrial side of the military-industrial complex, has often declined in quantity, even though per unit price has risen.

The Navy had over 1, ships in ; it has only today. The Air Force had nearly 24, aircraft in ; it has fewer than 14, today. This is not to say the combat strength of the military is substantially less than it once was, and there is greater firepower now at the disposal of each military unit, and there are various missile systems now in place, for which no earlier counterparts existed. But the total budget, and thus the total force level, of the military has been decided primarily by the President and not in any serious sense forced upon him by subordinates.

For example, President Truman decided to allocate one third of the federal budget to defense, President Eisenhower chose to spend no more than 10 percent of the Gross National Product on it, and President Kennedy strongly supported Robert McNamara's radical and controversial budget revisions. The principal source of growth in the military budget in recent years has arisen from congressionally determined pay provisions.

The legislature has voted for more or less automatic pay increases for military personnel with the result that the military budget has gone up even when the number of personnel in the military establishment has gone down. The bureaucratic problems associated with the military establishment arise mostly from its internal management and are functions of its complexity, the uncertainty surrounding its future deployment, conflicts among its constituent services over mission and role, and the need to purchase expensive equipment without the benefit of a market economy that can control costs.

Complexity, uncertainty, rivalry, and monopsony are inherent and frustrating aspects of the military as a bureaucracy, but they are very different problems from those typically associated with the phrase "the military-industrial complex. If the Founding Fathers were to return to review their handiwork, they would no doubt be staggered by the size of both the Post Office and the Defense Department, and in the case of the latter, be worried about the implications of our commitments to various foreign powers.

They surely would be amazed at the technological accomplishments but depressed by the cost and inefficiency of both departments; but they would not, I suspect, think that our Constitutional arrangements for managing these enterprises have proved defective or that there had occurred, as a result of the creation of these vast bureaus, an important shift in the locus of political authority. They would observe that there have continued to operate strong localistic pressures in both systems—offices are operated, often uneconomically, in some small communities because small communities have influential congressmen; military bases are maintained in many states because states have powerful senators.

Most workers in the federal bureaucracy are civil-service employees who are organized under a merit system. Use the following table to take notes as you read the section. It both regulates and enforces activities of both people and businesses.

Max Weber states that it was a "rational" way for a modern society to conduct its business. The Modern Bureaucracy-The government exists for public good, not to make money like a business-Governments can learn from business and recently have tried to apply business things to make government work better and cost less A. By Mr. While you read. These questions begin with a brief paragraph about a given topic, such as the balance between federal and state powers.

The changes would mean government taking back control from bodies such as Public Health England. Enterprising students use this website to learn AP class material, study for class quizzes and tests, and to brush up on course material before the big exam day. Bureaucracies are found at the federal, state, county, and municipal levels of government, and even large private corporations may be bureaucratically organized.

Policies passed by authoritative decision makers are interpreted and implemented by executive agencies and departments. In this lesson, you will investigate which departments and agencies make up the federal bureaucracy, and how they function, and examples of This file contains all the notes needed to cover the three branches of government as well as the bureaucracy, for Advanced Placement US Government.

The task of tracking deaths for the federal bureaucracy is an enormous one; about 2. Understanding the Federal Bureaucracy Framers wanted an administrative system that protected the REpublic from domestic and foreign threats A. AP Government Mr. American bureaucracy is complex because Naim AP Government Chapter 15 American bureaucracy is complex because a. The decree approved early Tuesday also is intended to further digitize government services and to incentivize environmentally sustainable business development.

Job Specialization People are experts in particular fields. Often, policies are not clearly defined, and bureaucrats must interpret the meaning of the law. Test review materials, practice tests, and answer keys for all 5 units.

A bureaucracy is a large, complex organization composed of appointed officials. The United States Bureaucracy Bureaucracy : a large, complex organization composed of appointed officials Political authority over the bureaucracy is shared by president and Congress Federal agencies share functions with related state and local government agencies.

The idea is that government agencies grow, without taking into account whether their growth confers any added benefit. The term, "bureaucratic imperialism," is used to describe the belief that government agencies will always and inevitably grow in size and cost.

Advanced Placement United States Government Monterey Institute of Technology and Education This course explores the principals, philosophies, practices, and institutions that comprise the United States system of government. The Government accountability office or the congressional budget office is used to conduct an investigation of a particular program. Agencies also have overlapping and even conflicting missions.

These characteristics make controlling the bureaucracy difficult, no matter which party occupies the White House. 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. 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. Organized labor favors strict enforcement by the Occupational Safety and Health Adn-dnistration, 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 forn-ddable 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 , 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.