1. Woll views the bureaucracy as the center of governmental power because agencies exercise legislative, judicial, and executive functions, and because of how strongly administration and politics are intertwined. Woll argues that contrary to popular thought, the President and Congress have infrequent control over the administrative process. Agencies make definite decisions that carry out vague policy initiated in Congress or by the President. Agencies also offer expert advice and are receptive to interested pressure groups. Not only do agencies determine the policies that the legislative and executive branches recommend, but the agencies affect the policy-making process through the decisions they make.
2. The bureaucracy is often viewed as the informal fourth branch of government. The United States operates within the framework of a constitutional democracy, which enforces a checks and balances system, as well as a separation of powers. There are no clear constitutional limits to limit the power of the bureaucracy. Although the bureaucracy dominates Congress and exercises powerful influence on the president, it is only occasionally subject to review by the courts. The Constitution has no mention of the bureaucracy, excluding the mention of the establishment of a postal service.
3. The Founding Fathers established the bureaucracy through incorporating the administrative process into the constitutional system under “The Executive Branch”. Although the Constitution does not
At first Congress reestablished three departments that are known as the Department of Treasury, the Department of Foreign Affairs, and the Department of War. As read in chapter seven the President of the United States is allowed to appoint Supreme Court Justices, heads of departments, and other senior executive branch officials, as long as the Senate gave their consent. Throughout the history of the United States Congress has been creating executive branch agencies, and these agencies needed leaders that the Presidents would appoint. In the years 1889 and 1903 clientele agencies such as the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Commerce were created. Over time Bureaucracy had become bigger and stronger, and now no one truly is able to control the
Throughout the rigmarole of political history of the United States of America, the growth of the “fourth branch of government”, the Bureaucracy, has been a prominent, controversial topic. Peter Woll, in his article “Constitutional Democracy and Bureaucratic Power”, and James Q. Wilson, in his article “The Rise of the Bureaucratic State”, discuss this developing administrative branch. The Constitution has no written mention of an “administrative branch”, and today’s Bureaucracy is often tedious, corrupt, and even undemocratic. But such a branch’s development and expansion is necessary in order to keep par with an evolving and changing society.
To sum things up – when it comes to the bureaucracy, some of the controls that the president has the authority to use are: appoint and remove agency heads, reorganize the bureaucracy, make changes in budget proposals, reduce an agency's budget, ignore initiatives from the bureaucracy, and issue executive orders. Nonetheless, even with all of the powers and controls that the president possesses, taking into account the sheer magnitude and breadth of the bureaucracy, having complete control over it is not even feasible. In addition, even though the president is delegated the responsibility of managing the bureaucracy, when throwing the influences of Congress,
Like nature, the United States government has evolved to meet the demands of an ever growing population, the increasing terrorist threat, and a new state of mind in terms of what government should look like. Each branch of the federal system plays a key role in controlling the populace. The Executive branch handles day-to-day maintenance of the federal government, makes sure laws are enforced and carried out, as well as represents the U.S. to foreign interests. The Legislative branch passes laws and allocates funds for use in running the federal government and providing assistance to the states. The Judicial branch hears cases that involve disputes between interpretations of the laws or those that challenge them. A delicate balance
The federal bureaucracy is the group of government organizations that implement policy. The federal bureaucrats belong, for the most part, to the group of government agencies led by the president’s cabinet (the collection of appointed officials tasked with leading various federal government departments such as the State Department, Department of Homeland Security etc.) (Geer et al.). These department heads, known as cabinet secretaries, are appointed by each new president. The federal bureaucracy is responsible for writing regulations that implement the laws. In this, the federal bureaucracy’s importance cannot be understated. Congress passes laws, the president signs them, but it is the responsibility of the bureaucracy to actually implement them in the most effective, unburdening way.
For the common American citizen a major concern, as suggested by a recent Gallup poll, centers around the idea that the President, as Chief Executive of the nation, has too much power and influence in the shaping of the United States (Americans' Belief). In particular, there exist a strong belief that the bureaucracy is directly managed by presidential preference (Roff). In contrast, it is a rarely suggested opinion that the President does not have enough power, control, or influence over the bureaucracy. With these two opinions in mind, to what extent does the President have control of the bureaucracy?
Important Terms: Be sure to include an explanation of these terms in the appropriate sections of your outline.
PA can be seen as a as a dense twist of organizations and branches of government which need to relate to each other in order to serve the public needs of the society. Bureaucracy, as a result, is the internal engine of each public branch of government which coordinate and organize through rules and in a hierarchical way, all the administrators, as to provide an efficient system which is able to satisfy all the public demand of goods and services. However, most of the time it is subject to ridicule and condemnation by the citizens and the whole society for several reasons. Firstly, because of the overcrowded staff which permeate the entire bureaucratic system. This is a crucial problem which many of the governmental organizations are
The text describes a bureaucracy as a large, complex organization composed of appointed officials. The departments and agencies of the US government make up the federal bureaucracy. The federal bureaucracy has 15 federal cabinet departments with about 2 million full-time employees. (Wilson et al, 290)
The fifth narrative “Street-Level Bureaucracy: The Critical Role of Street-Level Bureaucrats written by Michael Lipsky in 1980 whose ideas can be observed in the Reforming the Government School of though. The reading analyzed the significance of the actions of public workers to determine discretionary judgement when delivering services to the public. Government workers are the face of the government and the representation of the conditions of policy to the people. The problem that government workers face is the constant changed in policies and procedures that tend to directly affect the demands of citizens and services. Lipsky argued, “They are constantly torn by the demands of service recipients to improve effectiveness and responsiveness to improve effectiveness and responsiveness and by the demands of citizen groups to improve the efficacy and efficiency of government services” (p. 402). The function of government workers is usually questioned by citizens since they feel that any decision of street-level bureaucrats scan affect the stability of the people’s lives. In addition to the problems in relationships with clients, the increased in administrative cost for the government’s services was questioned and placed under scrutiny.
Besides the president having too much power another thing that has the American people buzzing is bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a hierarchical authority structure, in which power flows from the top down and responsibility flows from the bottom up; it uses task specialization so that experts instead of amateurs perform technical jobs; and it develops extensive rules, which may seem extreme at times but which allow similar cases to be handled similarly instead of capriciously (Edwards, Wattenberg, & Lineberry, 2008).
Bureaucrat is a dirty word to some people in modern society, so how can a bureaucracy be a good thing? Many Public Administration theorist, argue that bureaucracy is essential to the growth and expansion of the United States. Most of the criticism of the bureaucracy within the government is based on myth versus reality. Federal agencies play a critical and a valuable role within society and are indispensable to the operations of the federal government. Bureaucracy can be simply defined as the system in which decision are made by Public Administrators rather than elected officials (legislator) within the government. However, when the average citizen of just says the single word bureaucracy thoughts and images of evoked over how negative
Bureaucracies function is to divide complex task amongst staffs comprised of experts that would be potentially more knowledgeable than the average congressman on a particular subject, enabling the government to function more efficiently. The three main utilities of bureaucracies are the implementation of laws written by congress, in addition to the delegation and enforcement of their own rules, and to settle disputes through administrative adjudication; which is function similar to that of a court. There is some controversy to bureaucracies’ abilities to create enforceable regulations as part of the executive branch, when typically such task would be left to the legislative branch. The process by which bureaucracies create these regulations
Bureaucracies are technically encompassed under the executive branch of government. The executive branch, however, does not have control over a lot of the things that the agencies do. Congress tries to control agencies by influencing the
The federal bureaucracy consists of the Cabinet departments, independent agencies, government corporations, and independent regulatory commissions.