Bureaucracy often makes far-reaching political decisions. It enacts laws through rules, enforces the law by enforcing it, and decides by dealing with individual cases in adversarial environments with the defense and the prosecution. The agencies are constantly looking for political support to ensure an adequate budget and strengthen their independence. They are under the control of the president, but also influence him, who proposes their budgets, creates new agencies and appoints their leaders. Agencies are also subject to congressional scrutiny, which funds their programs and determines their scope. How can public servants prove that they are doing their job? In everyday life, it is difficult to show that vague political objectives are achieved. Instead, they show that the agency follows agreed-upon routines for case handling – standard operating procedures (SOPs)Recurring routines for managing specific cases. (Lindblom, 1959). As a result, it`s hard for agencies to “think outside the box”: take a step back and look at what they`re doing and why. The news media`s lack of daily interest in the vast majority of agencies only further hampers attention to the bigger picture. Sometimes only serious crises bring agencies out of their inertia. For example, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) decided to revive old-fashioned forms of human intelligence, such as planting spies in terrorist camps and increasing the number of Arabic speakers, when it became clear that its standard practice for using high-tech forms of intelligence, such as satellite imagery and eavesdropping, was insufficient to predict attacks. Not to mention preventing.
Presidents make strategic appointments. Agency staff are open to change when new people take up their duties. Presidents may appoint ideologues loyal to the cabinet who become prominent in the news, resist the influence of the public service, and deflect criticism of the president (Ellis, 1994). After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush allowed Attorney General John Ashcroft to take the lead—and the anti-aircraft fight—of aggressive law enforcement policies that many saw as a threat to civil liberties (Purdum, 2001). How are departments and agencies organized? What types of departments and agencies are there? How do their functions and political environments differ? While not all specified goals are equally easy to pursue, agencies tend to be the easiest to implement. OSHA was supported by labor organizations that viewed workplace health risks as a more important issue than safety. However, OSHA`s rule-making was more about safety than health. The short-term costs and benefits of safety risks are easier to calculate than the long-term costs and benefits of health risks: for example, it is easier to install protective guardrails than to reduce exposure to potentially carcinogenic chemicals (Wilson, 1989). Presidents who don`t like an agency`s programs may choose not to replace departing employees. Early in his term, George W. Bush (the first president to graduate from a business school) made few appointments to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the stock market; it only strengthened its workforce after the financial scandals that shook Wall Street in 2002 (Labaton, 2002). What is the political status of the federal bureaucracy? What is its power? How does the public see this? What are the core functions of bureaucratic bodies and departments? Presidents are tempted to follow up on implementation by agencies to achieve policy goals thwarted by Congress.
Political scientist Richard Nathan`s term for the tactics presidents use with the bureaucracy to implement policy goals blocked by Congress. These include agency creation, strategic appointments, internal reorganization, and budget cuts (Nathan, 1975). Congress enacts laws that determine the functions, responsibilities, and objectives of agencies. It lays down the budgets of the agencies and the conditions for the use of the funds. It may downgrade, amalgamate or abolish any body it considers deficient; Longevity does not guarantee survival (Lewis, 2002). The challenge for any authority is to find ways to avoid such sanctions. The National Endowment for the Arts has continued to operate by moving from controversial art projects attributed to lesbian and gay performance artists like Karen Finley to safer and more widespread community arts organizations. In the first round, the Office interprets the applicable law and gives reasons for its preliminary decision. Next, it invites feedback: holding hearings or soliciting written comments from the public, Congress and other members of the executive branch.
It then issues a final rule that litigation may follow; The provision may be struck down if the courts find that the Agency has not given sufficient reasons. For example, in March 2009, a federal judge ordered the Food and Drug Administration to lower the minimum age at which women could receive the Plan B contraceptive pill without a prescription from eighteen to seventeen. He ruled that the agency had inappropriately yielded to pressure from the Bush administration when it set the limit at eighteen. The agencies are part of the executive. Presidents select heads of agencies and appoint many other political officers to direct and control them. But political commissars have a short career in power; they last on average just over two years (Aberbach and Rockman, 2000). The long careers of public servants within a single organization can easily outlive any politically appointed person who skimps with them (Aberbach and Rockman, 2000). The appointment of presidents, especially cabinet secretaries, is a means of controlling bureaucracy. But cabinet secretaries have several loyalties.
The Senate`s power to approve nominees means that appointees must answer to both Congress and the president. In office, each secretary is not stationed in the White House, but in a particular agency “in the midst of a framework of established relationships, predetermined goals, forces that have long been set in motion, in an impersonal bureaucratic structure resistant to change” (Fenno, Jr., 1959). Some cabinet secretaries place more importance on their independence and individuality than on the president`s agenda. Treasury secretaries often come to Washington directly after succeeding as corporate CEOs. In 2001, Paul O`Neill left Alcoa to become George W. Bush`s first Secretary of the Treasury. O`Neill was unprepared for the test that his frank and spontaneous public comments would entail. Contrary to the Bush administration`s approach to public relations, and sometimes not in line with presidential statements, O`Neill was marginalized and eventually fired in late 2002. O`Neill retaliated by providing inside information about President Bush for his 2004 memoir “Kiss and Tell.” The administrative presidency does not work if the presidents and their political representatives do not make clear from the outset what they want to achieve. Bureaucrats cannot respond to mixed or confusing signals from political appointees. Clear communication with a widely dispersed executive branch is one of the main reasons why presidents are determined to establish a “daily line” and spread it across the executive branch.
Ambiguous objectives also pose problems for agencies. When the Social Security Administration (SSA) was established in the 1930s, it created an effective way to develop eligibility standards (such as age and length of service) for pension benefits. In the 1970s, Congress assigned the SSA the task of determining eligibility for supplemental security income and disability insurance. It was much more complex to determine who was sufficiently disabled to qualify than to determine the eligibility criteria for retirement. Caught up in controversy, the SSA lost public support (Wilson, 1989; Derthick, 1990). Agencies also gain political support by changing their policies when new political participants question their standard approach (Mazmanian & Nienaber, 1979; Brehm and Gates, 1997). For example, in the 1970s, the Army Corps of Engineers moved away from a rigid development position when environmental groups emerged and lobbied for legislation requiring the Corps to issue environmental impact statements. Agencies “are not passive and powerless pawns in the political game, because it affects their lives; they are active, energetic and persistent participants” (Kaufman, 1976).
They work to create and maintain political support from the president, Congress, and the public. Positive media coverage is crucial to garnering this political support. Congress oversees agency activities through congressional oversightThe process by which Congress oversees the activities of government agencies: Members gather information about agency performance and communicate to agencies how good or, more often, bad they are (Foreman Jr., 1988). Oversight ranges from the intervention of a single legislator, to a belated audit of a voter`s social security, to high-profile investigations and committee hearings. It is neither centralized nor systematic. Instead of relying on a “police patrol” style of surveillance – conscientiously seeking information about what agencies are doing – Congress uses a “fire alarm” approach: advocacy groups and citizens alert members to an agency`s problems, often through news reports (McCubbins and Schwartz, 1984).