Bureaucracy - AP Government and Politics

A bill of attainder could only be issued by the legislative branch of the United States government. A bill of attainder is a legislative act that declares a person, or group of people, as having committed an illegal act. It’s purpose was to render an individual or a group ineffectual by declaring them guilty without a trial. It is now seen as a violation of civil rights and is illegal in U.S. government.

Deficit spending is generally defined as the government practice of spending more money in a given year than has been actively collected in revenue. It is a continuous policy of the U.S. Government in this era and is a large reason why the growing national debt remains a controversial issue.

The United States census takes place every ten years. The first census was in 1790. The primary aims of the census, aside from collecting information and statistics about the population, are to determine the representatives that each state will be granted and to acquire data for taxation purposes.

The United States census is collected every ten years to determine, among other things, the population of each of state, so that their representation in the House can be fairly allocated. Reapportionment is the name given to the reordering of seats in the House, after the census count has been determined.

"Patronage" is the name given to the system of government appointment where officials are given jobs based on whether or not they supported the victorious political party. It may be seen as contrary to meritocracy, where jobs are awarded solely on the basis of merit.

The constitution stipulates that presidential appointees to cabinet positions must be confirmed by the Senate. The supreme court has no jurisdiction over appointments of any kind.

Excessive Presidential interference is not a typical obstruction when it comes to bureaucratic implementation plans. Examination of the historic record shows that most policy implementation failures occur for several key reasons, including poor program design and insufficient resources. Generally, it is up to Congress to provide a bureaucratic agency with a particular policy goal and the resources necessary to see that goal successfully implemented, but this is not always the case. Sometimes, Congress has difficulty resolving some problem within the plan’s design, so it simply passes the policy off to the appropriate agency, with the expectation that the bureaucrats will somehow resolve the issue on their own. On other occasions, Congress fails to adequately estimate the amount of resources a particular policy needs or the Legislative Branch simply does not have enough funds at the time to fully support a policy. Congress is also sometimes guilty of issuing bureaucrats with confusing, unclear, and/or contradictory instructions, so that the civil servants are left floundering, indecisive and prone to failures. Fragmentation also plays an important role in ensuring policy disaster; oftentimes, resources, information, and authority are divided up amongst various agencies, who have little opportunity or willingness to share these materials. Inefficient routines, cumbersome standard operating procedures, and too much administrative discretion have also been proven to play a decisive role in some implementation failures.

All implementation programs, regardless of policy content, require three basic ingredients: resources (both money and staffers) must be gathered, an agency must be either created or assigned to administer the program, and each program’s guidelines and goals must be developed. Implementation is an essential bureaucratic task, especially because Congress quite frequently declines to formulate details for its policy ideas, in the hopes that the bureaucrats (who are after all experts in their fields) will take up the structural mantle. While standard operating procedures (SOPs) are indeed vital to bureaucratic functioning, these procedures come much further along in the process, once implementation has already been undertaken and the agency itself is up and running. Once implementation has been successfully achieved, SOPs are used as rulebooks by bureaucrats to determine how best to do their individual jobs within each agency.

As the final bureaucratic authority, the President has several powerful tools which can be used to curb the influence of or chastise an unruly bureaucracy. However, the sole power of budget alteration is not among them – while the President can put pressure upon the Office of Management and Budget to threaten cuts to an agency’s funding, final budgetary control resides with Congress. Congress is the sole allocator of all bureaucratic funds and so while the President can exert some influence in this realm, she/he by no means has the final say. Perhaps the most well-known amongst those control mechanisms which the President does have is the executive order: an order issued directly from the President, with the intention of implementing various Constitutional provisions, and bearing the full weight of any other law or piece of legislation. The President also is endowed with the right to appoint individuals of his choice to vacant high-level bureaucratic positions (although Senate confirmation is sometimes required). As a general rule, Presidents are typically quite selective about their appointments, preferring those individuals who have a proven track record of loyalty to the President and who have demonstrated agreement with the President’s policy goals. The President is also able to reorganize or even entirely eliminate agencies, although this seldom occurs, mainly due to the sheer difficulty, controversy, and administrative chaos that such a move often generates.

The Hatch Act bars all current federal employees (bureaucrats chief amongst them) from participating in partisan politics while on active duty. The Act also extends this ban even further on those employees who work in sensitive arenas (such as national security), prohibiting these individuals from any partisan politicking, even on their off-hours. The Pendleton Civil Service Act, passed in 1883, was the first concerted government effort to control and reform the bureaucratic system. Passed in the wake of President James Garfield’s assassination by a disgruntled office seeker, the Pendleton Act abolished patronage practices and created the country’s first merit-based civil service system. Today, only a small fraction of civil service jobs are open to direct Presidential appointment; these few positions are listed in the Plum Book, which is issued by Congress and details precisely which choice positions are available (they usually number about five hundred in total).

The Office of Management and Budget is an agency within the Executive Branch that develops a budget for the President to submit to Congress and also deals with the allocation of federal funds.

The Hatch Act of 1939 was issued in response to allegations of corruption and electioneering brought against certain Democrat members of the Executive Branch. It was alleged, and later largely proven, that many lower employees of the executive branch had undertaken actions to help the party carry certain swing states in the election of 1938, among other things. The Hatch Act of 1939 ruled that employees of the Executive Branch cannot engage in partisan political activities, with the exception of the president and certain other high-profile figures.

Since its creation in 1913, the Federal Reserve is tasked with regulating the money supply in the United States, among other responsibilities. It serves as the central bank of the United States and its primary duty is to prevent financial panics and maintain the stability of the financial system. Its record could probably be interpreted as long periods of success with the occasional massive catastrophes, but most economic experts agree that this is much better than the far more frequent financial panics that occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Hatch Act of 1939 was created to prevent employees of the executive branch from participating in campaigns and political activities.

This is an interesting question. Basically, while bureaucrats aren’t elected, and thus you’d think that they can’t make policy, that would be incorrect! Congress oftentimes passes very general laws (that is laws that leave quite a few questions unanswered) and leaves the specifics to the bureaucracies. Bureaucrats fill in the blanks through a process called “rule-making,” which is far beyond the scope of your course (there are entire law courses devoted to it!). Regardless, bureaucracies are involved in policy making.

This should have been a relatively simple question, due to the answer choices. If you recall from American History (or, in reality, the brief introduction you got in American Government), the Jacksonian presidency heralded a new era in American Politics—that of increased democracy, in more than one way. In terms of this question, Jackson ushered in the “spoils system,” in which Jackson’s supporters gained various bureaucratic appointments because they supported him. “To the victor goes the spoils” in politics.

This is a relatively difficult question. The correct answer is “the assassination of President James Garfield.” Charles Guiteau assassinated Garfield after Garfield and his entire administration refused to appoint Guiteau to a diplomatic post overseas. Guiteau believed (likely incorrectly) that he was responsible for Garfield’s election, and thus believed that he deserved a bureaucratic appointment. He became enraged when he did not get it, and killed Garfield some time later. This, in turn, led to the demise of the spoils system, and civil service reform under the Pendleton Act.

The Pendleton Act (most importantly) included the requirement that 10% of bureaucratic jobs must be hired based off of merit, turning around (or at least beginning to turn around) the spoils system. This, of course, was in response to the assassination of President James Garfield by a deranged civil-service seeker.

The correct answer is “iron triangle.” An iron triangle is, well, a triangle including an interest group, congress, and the bureaucracy. Essentially the interest group (or, oftentimes a regulated industry represented by an interest group) sinks money and time into lobbying Congress to vote or act a certain way. Specifically, whichever Congress members are on the (sub)committee that oversees the bureaucracy responsible for regulating the industry. Thus, by lobbying Congress, who then pressures the bureaucracy, the regulated industry manages to create policy that meets their preferences. In more concrete terms, pretend that the regulated industry is McDoogans. Pretend further that the Committee on Fat Foods is responsible for overseeing the agency which regulates McDoogans. Well, McDoogans (or an interest group acting on behalf of, or in the interests of McDoogans) spends time, money, and effort to lobby the Committee on Fat Foods. The Committee on Fat Foods responds by pressuring the agency monitoring McDoogans to create policy favorable to McDoogans!

The federal bureaucracy has actually begun to shrink in size over recent years, partially due to public concerns over so-called “big government,” motivated as well by suspicions of rampant inefficiency and widespread corruption. State and local governments, however, have continued to grow their bureaucratic structures, hiring more and more civilians, many of whom administer federally-mandated and/or funded programs run by the states. By and large, members of the bureaucracy are actually much more representative of the American public than other government officials, most notably in terms of gender and education level. Perhaps this helps account for the overall favorable opinion of bureaucrats held by the American people; when polled, most individuals can point to specific civil servants whom they have interacted with in a positive and satisfactory manner. On the matter of Presidential appointments, while the White House can hand out some high-ranking bureaucratic positions to their supporters, these appointees often find that they hold far less sway over their underlings than they had first imagined. This is largely due to the inherent impermanence of these appointees, who are usually removed from office when the new President arrives, a fact of which all other civil servants are all too well aware.