WHAT IS THE FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY?| 329Bureaucratic Expertise and Its Consequences
Bureaucrats are experts. Even compared to most members of Congress or presi-
dential appointees, the average bureaucrat is a specialist in a certain policy area,
with a better grasp of his or her agency’s mission. For example, people who hold
scientifi c or management positions in the FDA usually know more about the ben-
efi ts and risks of new drugs than people outside the agency do. A bureaucracy of
experts is an important part of state capacity—the knowledge, personnel, and
institutions needed to implement policies that benefi t society.^11
RED TAPE AND STANDARD OPERATING 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. Many critics cite the abundance of red tape, which refers to unnec-
essarily complex procedures, or standard operating procedures, which are
the rules that lower-level bureaucrats must follow when implementing policies
regardless of whether those rules are applicable. The performance of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) after Hurricane Katrina in 2008 is a
classic example: while many observers criticized FEMA for taking several days
to fully implement disaster relief, FEMA employees were in fact following long-
established plans that had been approved by FEMA managers and members of
Congress.
There have been many attempts to make the bureaucracy operate more eff ec-
tively by mandating that bureaucrats make decisions using specifi c procedures or
criteria. Though each of these eff orts can claim modest success, none have funda-
mentally changed the way the government does business. Thus, cases of bureau-
cratic ineptitude and failed reform eff orts raise a critical question: How can an
organization full of experts develop such dysfunctional ways of doing business?
Bureaucrats are neither clueless nor malevolent. What, then, explains red tape
and counterproductive standard operating procedures? The answer is the very
strength of the American bureaucracy: its expertise.
Because bureaucrats know things that elected offi cials do not and because
bureaucrats have their own policy goals, it is hard for elected offi -
cials to evaluate what bureaucrats are doing. For example, FEMA
was criticized for using a cruise ship to house relief workers after
Hurricane Katrina, which cost more than it would have to send
these employees on a Caribbean cruise. While the contract was
expensive, the FEMA staff er who signed the contract may have
found that all other options were more expensive or simply not fea-
sible. Without looking deeper into these issues, it is impossible to
be sure.
Of course, sometimes bureaucrats simply make mistakes. For
example, the FDA has delayed helpful drugs from reaching the
market or has approved drugs that were later found to have harm-
ful side eff ects. However, these decisions may have been justifi ed
based on the information available to bureaucrats at the time. Here
again, it is hard to say whether bureaucrats are at fault for such
decisions.
DESPITE THEIR POLICY EXPERTISE,
bureaucrats still make mistakes.
When the Medicare program
implemented the Prescription
Drug Benefi t in 2006, information
about the new coverage was
available on an easy-to-read
website, but the agency soon
learned that many seniors who
needed the information did not
know how to use a web browser.state capacity The knowledge,
personnel, and institutions that the
government requires to effectively
implement policies.red tape Excessive or unnecessar-
ily complex regulations imposed by
the bureaucracy.
standard operating proce-
dures Rules that lower-level
bureaucrats must follow when
implementing policies.