Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Chapter 7 The Bureaucracy.

Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc.

Chapter 7The Bureaucracy


The Bureaucracy


Constitutional Background

Topic Overview• While the Constitution did not specifically mention the bureaucracy, its provisions nevertheless have helped to shape the formal context within which the administrative branch developed.



Reading• Peter Woll, Constitutional Democracy and Bureaucratic Power



Theme• The theme of this reading is that in the final analysis, we are left with a bureaucratic system that has been fragmented by the Constitution and in which administrative discretion is inevitable.• The bureaucracy reflects the general fragmentation of our political system.• It is often the battleground for the three branches of government and for outside pressure groups that seek to control it for their own purposes.



The original conception of administration at the time of the framing of the Constitution• Federalist 72 stated that administration consisted of the mere execution of executive details.• Those who were charged with performing administrative functions were to be under the control of the president.• Administration in 1789 was not thought of as the exercise of quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial functions, a major role of the bureaucracy today.



Constitutional powers that Congress has over the bureaucracy• Congress often shares the appointive power because the president must appoint public ministers, ambassadors, and other officers Congress designates with the advice and consent of the Senate.• Congress possesses the organic power, that is, the power to create administrative agencies.



Constitutional powers that Congress has over the bureaucracy• Agencies are created on the basis of the Article 1 powers of Congress, such as the commerce clause, and the power to tax and provide for the general welfare.• Virtually no administrative agencies have been created by executive order, and where they have, the executive order has been based upon prior statutory authority.



Constitutional powers that Congress has over the bureaucracy• The Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency were established by executive order.• Congress creates agencies and determines their organization, although the president has generally in the past been given reorganization authority, which was reinstated in 1977.• Congress also determines the extent of judicial review over administrative decisions.



The basis for the claim that the president is chief administrator• This is a derivative from the Constitution, from the clause providing that the president is to see that the laws are faithfully executed.• Virtually all of the powers that the president possesses over the bureaucracy are those that have been given to him by Congress.



The basis for the claim that the president is chief administrator• His only constitutional authority derives from the commander-in-chief clause, his general power as chief executive, and his authority to appoint ambassadors and other public ministers.• But even Congress has come to recognize in the twenty-first century the importance of establishing the president as chief administrator in many areas.



Administrative branch poses problems to the maintenance of our constitutional democracy• The bureaucracy combines within itself, although not necessarily in the same hands, executive, legislative, and judicial functions.



Significance• Under the terms of the Constitution, the bureaucracy is not mentioned.• Alexander Hamilton stated in Federalist 72 that administrators ought to be directly under the control of the president.• It was clear that Hamilton felt the president would be responsible for administrative action as long as he was in office.



Significance• Under the Constitution, both Congress and the president have important powers over the bureaucracy.• The separation of powers gives Congress the incentive to place the bureaucracy outside of the control of the president.• Administrative responsibility refers to making administrative agencies act in accordance with constitutional and democratic principles.



Significance• The reading points out that (1) the founding fathers had little to say about the nature or function of the executive branch of the new government, (2) the Constitution provided for presidential appointment of executive officers but was silent on the issue of how far the president’s removal power would extend over executive branch officials, and (3) under the Constitution it is conceivable that the administrative departments might have become legal dependencies of the legislature.


The Political Roots and Consequences of Bureaucracy

Topic Overview• With the exception of those executive departments that all governments need, such as State, Treasury, and Defense, private-sector political demands have led to the creation of American bureaucracy.• In response to those demands, Congress has, over the years, created more and more executive departments and problems.



Reading• James Q. Wilson, The Rise of the Bureaucratic State



Theme• It is important to realize that the bureaucracy is not, as many of its critics have suggested, a conspiracy by government officials to increase their power.• Wilson’s article traces the rise of the administrative state and particularly notes how political pluralism has affected the bureaucracy’s character by dividing it into clientele sectors.



The bureaucracy problem• Red tape, delay, inefficiency, and administrative despotism have all been defined as part of the bureaucracy problem.• Wilson observes that Max Weber, after all, warned us that in capitalist and socialist societies alike, bureaucracy was likely to acquire an overpowering power position.• Conservatives have always feared bureaucracy, save perhaps the police.



The bureaucracy problem• Humane socialists have frequently been embarrassed by their inability to reconcile a desire for public control of the economy with the suspicion that a public bureaucracy may be as immune to democratic control as a private one.• Liberals have equivocated.



Ways that political power may be gathered undesirably into bureaucratic hands• By the growth of an administrative apparatus so large as to be immune from popular control• By placing power over a governmental bureaucracy of any size in private rather than public hands• By vesting discretionary authority in the hands of a public agency so that the exercise of that power is not responsive to the public good



Threat of large bureaucracy to constitutional foundations of our government• Wilson is careful to point out that the sizable bureaucracy that had been created by the end of the nineteenth century did not constitute a serious threat to the constitutional separation-of-powers system.

• The Post Office, which accounted for most of the increase in the size of government bureaucracy in the nineteenth century, performed routine tasks and posed no threat to constitutional government.



Threat of large bureaucracy to constitutional foundations of our government• The large military bureaucracy that became a permanent government fixture after World War II was a temporary phenomenon in the nineteenth century.• And the dominant nineteenth-century Congress closely supervised the relatively few discretionary agencies it had created.



Threat of large bureaucracy to constitutional foundations of our government• However, the twentieth-century administrative state was a different matter, as client-serving agencies expanded in number and powers.• The bureaucracy became in many respects a semiautonomous fourth branch of the government in the twentieth century.



Threat of large bureaucracy to constitutional foundations of our government• Wilson concludes that all democratic regimes tend to shift resources from the private to the public sector and to enlarge the size of the administrative component of government.• The particularistic and localistic nature of American democracy has created a particularistic and client-serving administration.



Threat of large bureaucracy to constitutional foundations of our government• If our bureaucracy often serves special interests and is subject to no central direction, it is because our legislature often services special interests and is subject to no central leadership.• For Congress to complain of what it has created and maintains is, to be charitable, misleading.• Congress could change what it has devised, but there is little reason to suppose it will.



Significance• During the nineteenth century, the largest executive department was the Post Office.

• The reading points out that (1) conservatives have always feared government bureaucracy, (2) many socialists have suspected a public bureaucracy may be as immune to democratic control as a private one, and (3) Max Weber warned that bureaucracy was likely to acquire an overpowering power position in both capitalist and socialist societies.



Significance• An examination of American bureaucracy makes it clear that many administrative departments and agencies are client-oriented, controlled by special interests, and closely allied with Congress.

Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Chapter 7 The Bureaucracy.

Documents

Transcript of Copyright © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Chapter 7 The Bureaucracy.