8

Bureaucracy: The Fourth Branch

of Government

The United States Constitution provides for three branches of government.

This chapter examines an unmentioned fourth: the Executive Branch's
burea ucracy .
Separation of powers combined with Federalism renders bureaucracy
complicated, dispersed and decentralized (both within Washington and
throughout the country) and its accountability to representative politicians
problematic. The Federal bureaucracy's key organizational units are usually
not Departments but the semi-autonomous agencies or bureaux within them.
As islands of separately-authorized functional power, agencies are subject to
political pressures from the Presidency, from Congress, and from clients
seeking to influence bureaucrats' decision-making, both during the forma-
tion and the implementation of policy. Presidents attempt to enforce leader-
ship over bureaucrats by making political appointments to the upper reaches
of departments and agencies of people loyal to them (at the risk of losing
experience and expertise), as well as by establishing their own political and
bureaucratic resources within the Executive Office of the President. Reliance
upon civil service neutrality, standard in British government practice, offers
no solution to American Presidents, who have to compete for influence in a
separated and Federal system without a powerful central State over which to
preside. It is in the space between the general intent of Presidency and
Congress, and its detailed implementation in the forms of administrative
decisions and rule-making, that politicians and lobbyists contend with the
expertise, experience and longevity of bureaucrats for influence over the
implementation of policy.
There is in the United States Federal government no durably dominant
centre of power, and no sense of a "State". The Federal government is
permanently divided by constitutional separation and by staggered elections
to representative posts of different-sized constituencies and often divided
further by split-party control of Congress and the Executive. Elected and
unelected officials therefore often have compelling incentives to compete
openly against one another. Federal executive departments are not ideal

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N. Bowles, Government and Politics of the United States
© Nigel Bowles 1998
 Bureaucracy 251

types of hierarchical Weberian rationality but are shells within which multi-
ple, semi-autonomous, agencies are placed, each of them separately created
by Congress. Each agency's programmes are authorized and re-authorized,
funded and overseen by Congressional Committees and Subcommittees. The
internal organization of the Federal bureaucracy is tightly and continuously
integrated politically with that of Congress in Committees and Subcommit-
tees. Each agency is shadowed by Congressional Subcommittees which, since
they created and sustain them, are sometimes refered to as their Congres-
sional "parents". Two consequences flow from these arrangements: first,
little collective authority inheres in the Federal government; and second,
public administration is thoroughly politicized.
The variation among bureaucratic forms in the Federal government is
wide. The major determinants of agencies' design are the political choices of
those who establish, sustain, and modify it; this was apparent from the first
years of the Republic, when Congress granted to the President much greater
leeway in determining the policies to be followed by the Departments of State
and War, than it did in the case of the Treasury, where Congressional
prerogatives were greater. As Seidman and Gilmour (1986, p. 149) have
observed:

Choices are influenced by a complex of tangible and intangible factors

reflecting divergent views about the proper sphere of government activity,
politics, institutional folklore, program importance and status, visibility,
political and administrative autonomy, and, most important, who should
exercise control.

The Federal Civil Service

The Federal government acquired a civil service after most advanced
European countries had done so. Well before their industrialization, Ger-
many and France had established public bureaucracies. In France, Napo-
leon's taxation reforms in the early years of the nineteenth century required
the services of a large bureaucracy for their enforcement, although the
Napoleonic State was little more than a development of the Jacobin
structure. By contrast, the United States lacked the apparatus of a State
just as it lacked the popular conception or sense of one. In continental
Europe the modern democratic form was established by the institutions of
representation being added to a bureaucratic order. In America, the sequence
was reversed.
The first act of Presidents from Andrew Jackson onwards was to dismiss
all office-holders in the Executive Branch, replacing them with those of
proven loyalty, or those whose cases were advanced by supporters to whom
they owed political debts. As Senator William March of New York put it,
"To the victors belong the spoils" (from which the phrase "spoils system"