464 Chapter 13 | The BureaucracyYou might think that the problem of control isn’t too difficult to solve as long as
bureaucrats act as impartial experts and set aside their own policy goals. Many studies
of bureaucracies, beginning with the work of the early political theorist Max Weber,
argue that bureaucrats should provide information and expertise and avoid taking sides
on policy questions or being swayed by elected officials, people outside government,
or their own policy goals.^10 However, bureaucrats’ behavior doesn’t always fit Weber’s
vision. Many enter the bureaucracy with their own ideas about what government should
do, and they make decisions in line with those goals. For example, in the case of Flint,
Michigan, where residents discovered in 2016 that their water supply was contaminated
by dangerously high levels of lead, some EPA scientists felt strongly that the federal
government should have demanded quick action by state and local authorities, bypassing
the investigative procedure that their superiors wanted. In other cases, some bureaucrats
may be tempted to favor interest groups or corporations to secure a better-paying job
after they leave government service. However, even if bureaucrats wanted to remain
completely dispassionate, they would still face a government in which many other
people with their own policy goals would attempt to influence their behavior. Members
of Congress or the president sometimes try to use the bureaucracy to implement policies
that reflect their personal preferences or reward their political supporters.^11
One important consequence of the problem of control is the complexity of
bureaucratic organizations and procedures. Despite bureaucrats’ policy expertise,
their decisions often appear to take too much time, rely on arbitrary judgments of what
is important, and have unintended consequences—to the point that actions designed to
solve one problem may create worse ones. Examples include red tape, which refers to
excessive or unnecessarily complex regulations, and standard operating procedures
(SOPs), which are the rules that lower-level bureaucrats must follow, regardless of
whether they actually apply, when implementing policies.
In part, red tape and SOPs are inevitable given the complexity of the tasks
bureaucrats are given to do. For example, the U.S. Tax Code takes up thousands of
pages—but in a country as large as the United States, where people have many different
sources of income and there are many distinct kinds of corporate activity, a tax code
that treats people and companies fairly while raising enough revenue to run the
government is inevitably going to be complicated.
However, sometimes red tape and SOPs are the result of elected officials’ attempts
to mitigate the problem of control. For example, some of the complexity of the
American tax code is due to Congressional mandates that create tax breaks for
favored corporations and individuals. In the abstract, elected officials might prefer
that the tax code be determined by expert bureaucrats. In reality, however, members
of Congress want to make sure their state or district is treated fairly—as well as
provide tax breaks in order to increase their chances of getting reelected—and are
willing to sacrifice expertise in favor of these other benefits, even if it makes the tax
code more complex.
In other ways, such as the notice-and-comment procedure described earlier,
elected officials require bureaucrats to inform them in advance about proposed policy
decisions before they are implemented. Other congressional mandates define who can
work in different jobs at an agency, where agency offices are located, and many other
specifics of agency structure and process. Very few of these mandates contribute to
bureaucratic nimbleness, but that is not their intent. What they are designed to do is
give elected officials ways to mitigate the problems of control.
The problem of control has existed throughout the history of the federal
government. It affects both the kinds of policies that bureaucrats implement and
the structure of the federal bureaucracy, including the number of agencies and their
missions, staff, and tasks. Moreover, elected officials use a variety of methods to solvered tape
Excessive or unnecessarily complex
regulations imposed by the
bu reauc rac y.
standard operating procedures
(SOPs)
Rules that lower-level bureaucrats
must follow when implementing
policies.Scott Pruitt, the Environmental
Protection Agency administrator,
testified on the agency’s 2019 budget
during a hearing of the House Energy
and Commerce subcommittee after
concerns about his conduct and
spending, which included first-class
flights and the installation of a
$43,000 soundproof phone booth in
his office. Pruitt ultimately resigned
in 2018 amid growing concerns about
his ethics.Full_14_APT_64431_ch13_454-487.indd 464 16/11/18 1:43 PM