⇒ The Federal Bureaucracy is the unelected, administrative body in the Executive Branch. It is the back bone of the US Government.
⇒ It is arranged into departments, agencies and commissions.
⇒ The main function of the Federal Bureaucracy, is to carry out the policy and work on the finer details of the bills passed by Congress
⇒ The bureaucracy has 2.7 million employees, has a $13.8 billion payroll, and is divided into roughly 900 departments. Of all the employees in Washing DC, 11% of the them will work for the Federal Bureaucracy.
⇒ 1. Clientelism - Agencies tend to serve the interests of those they are supposed to oversee, protecting them at the expense of the broader public interest
⇒ 2. Imperialism - Agencies invariably seek to expand their power and responsibilities at the expense of other agencies and programmes, notwithstanding the issue of how public needs are best met
⇒ 3. Parochialism - bureaucracies tend to focus narrowly on their own goals rather than the 'big picture' of government or the national interest as a whole
⇒ 4. Incrementalism - Most bureaucratic agencies are not renowned for creative or imaginative operations, instead acting slowly and cautiously, generally resisting major changes
⇒ 5. Arbitrariness - in applying abstract rules to concrete cases, agencies often ignore the concerns or specific merits of those affected by the rules
⇒ 6. Waste - given their size and routinised procedures and them not being driven by the profit motive, bureaucracies tend to use resources less efficiently than private sector organisations
⇒ Three reasons to doubt whether bureaucratic obstructionism, when it occurs, derives from overt partisan or ideological motivations
⇒ Also see our notes on: