Chapter 12 The BureaucracyChapter Study OutlineThe paradox of the bureaucracy is that the same organization that does so many amazing things also does things that are inefficient and wasteful. Many bureaucratic failures can be explained by the bureaucracy’s procedures, including the complexity of tasks it undertakes, and by the political conflicts that ensue when elected officials and interest groups attempt to control bureaucrat’s actions. What Is the Federal Bureaucracy?. What Do Bureaucrats Do?The task of the bureaucracy is to implement policies established by congressional acts or presidential decisions. Generally, legislation determines only the guidelines for meeting governmental goals, allowing bureaucrats to develop specific policies and programs.
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Ludwig von Mises on the Nature of Bureaucracy. The evidence is persuasive that government bureaucracy is inherently inefficient precisely because it is not faced with any of the forces which make private business management its opposite. This point has been made frequently.
The bureaucracy includes a wide range of activities, from regulating the behavior of individuals and corporations to buying everything from pencils to jet fighters for the government. A regulation is a rule that allows the government to exercise control over individuals and corporations by restricting certain behaviors. Regulations are developed in a process known as the notice and comment procedure, in which proposed rules are published in the Federal Register and made available for debate by the general public.
The process of devising or modifying regulations is extremely political. Bureaucrats respond to the politics of the situation because:. The bureaucrat’s policy-making power may have been created by a statute that members of Congress could overturn if they disapprove of how bureaucrats use such power.
Bureaucrats need congressional support to protect their budget. Bureaucrats handle government purchases. They may develop purchasing criteria or work to abide by the criteria already set out in a mandate. Street-level bureaucrats are agency employees who directly provide services to the public, such as those who provide job training services.
Research and development are conducted by government scientists. Some bureaucrats spend time managing and directing actions taken by people outside government. Bureaucratic Expertise and Its Consequences. State capacity refers to the knowledge, personnel, and institutions that the government requires to effectively implement policies. A bureaucracy of experts is one component of the state capacity.
Many critics of the modern bureaucracy cite the abundance of red tape, which refers to the unnecessarily complex procedures, or standard operating procedures, which are the rules that lower-level bureaucrats must follow when implementing policies, regardless of whether they are applicable to the situation at hand. The problem of control refers to the difficulty faced by elected officials in ensuring that when bureaucrats implement policies, they follow these officials’ intentions but still have enough discretion to use their own expertise. Red tape exists as a mechanism to control bureaucrats. The problem of control is a classic example of the principal–agent relationship, which describes the interaction between a principal (like the president or Congress), who needs something done, and an agent (like a bureaucrat), who is responsible for carrying out the principal’s orders. Each principal faces the challenge of motivating the agents to act in the principal’s interests.
Because the agent is an expert at the task he has been given, he has private information inaccessible to the principal.