Unit 5: The President, the Bureaucracy and the Judiciaryppt. 6

How Bureaucracies are Organized

• In general, there are four types of bureaucracies• Cabinet departments• Regulatory agencies• Government corporations• Independent executive agencies

Cabinet Departments• 15 cabinets; headed by a secretary except the Department of

Justice, which is headed by the Attorney General.• Each department manages specific policy areas, and each has

its own budget and staff.• Real work is done in the bureaus.• 1970s-1995: Department of Health and Human Services was

the largest federal department in dollars spent.• Social Security Administration became independent in 1995,

spending 1/3 of the federal budget.

Regulatory Agencies• Each independent regulatory agency has responsibility for

some sector of the economy, making and enforcing rules designed to protect the public interest.

• Alphabet Soup of American government: • ICC• FRB• NLRB• FCC• FTC• SEC

Continued…• Each of the agencies is governed by a small commission,

appointed by the president for fixed terms of office and confirmed by the Senate; regulatory commission members cannot be fired by the president.

The Government Corporations• Provide a service that could be handled by the private sector.• Typically charge for their services, though often cheaper than

the consumer would pay a private sector producer.• Examples include:• Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)• Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)• US Postal Service

Independent Executive Agencies• Are not part of the cabinet departments and generally do not

have regulatory functions; they usually perform specialized functions.

• Their administrators are typically appointed by the president and serve at his discretion.

• Examples:• NASA• NSF (National Science Foundation)• GSA (General Services Administration)

Bureaucracies as Implementors• Bureaucrats play three keys roles:• Policy Implementors• Administer public policy• Regulators

Implementation• Carries out decisions of Congress• Rarely self-executing: bureaucrats translate legislative policy

goals into programs• Congress typically announces the goals in broad terms, sets up

the administrative apparatus and leaves the bureaucracy the task of working out the details of the plan.

• Three elements of implementation:• Creation of a new agency or assignment of responsibility to an

old one.• Translation of policy goals into operational rules of thumb and

guidelines• Coordination of resources and personnel to achieve the intended

goals.

Reasons implementation breaks down• Faulty program design – program defective in basic theoretical

conception• Lack of clarity – if laws are unclear, implementation becomes

complex (Congress can create loopholes)• Lack of resources – lacks staff (along with training, funding,

supplies and equipment)• Administrative routine – SOP (standard operating procedures)

– this is where the “red tape” comes in• Administrator’s dispositions – administrative discretion –

authority of administrative actors to select among various responses to a given problem

• Street-level bureaucrats have the most discretion (police officers, social workers, etc)

Continued…• Fragmentation – responsibility for a policy is sometimes

dispersed among several units within a bureaucracy • Diffusion of responsibility makes the coordination of policies

time-consuming and difficult.

Voting Rights Act of 1965• Successfully implemented because the goal was clear: to

register African-Americans to vote in the southern counties where their voting rights had been denied for years.• The act singled out 6 states in the Deep South in which the

number of African-American registered voters was minuscule.• The Justice Department was ordered to send federal registrars to

each county in those states to register qualified voters.• Congress outlawed literacy tests and other tests previously used

to discriminate against African-American registrants.• Implementation of this act helped bring the vote to some

300,000 African-Americans in less than a year.