204 Politics and the administration
are made, although there are also the ‘political’ posts, normally requiring
confirmation by the Senate. American students of administration have some-
times used the British civil service as a model for the reform of their own
system, arguing that it should be politically neutral, but others, who would
deplore excessive use of patronage, nevertheless are worried about creating a
‘neutral’ service, without a deep commitment to presidential programmes.
Congress and the federal service
We have already seen, at various points, how Congress affects the working
of the administration and the people who compose it. Congress sets up the
administrative structure by legislation or by approval of presidential reor-
ganisation plans. The president’s nominations to senior positions must be
confirmed by the Senate, and must, therefore, be cleared with influential
Senators. The legislature provides the funds by which the administration
operates, and may scrutinise estimates very closely, probing the working of
departments and agencies at committee hearings. Congressional commit-
tees continually call civil servants before them and subject them to very close
questioning.
Although individual members of the civil service may form quite close
connections with members of Congress, there is a built-in distrust of ‘bu-
reaucrats’ among Senators and Representatives. Most legislators, as we have
seen, feel a very close affinity to the people in their constituencies, some-
times over 2,000 miles away from Washington, DC. They have much sym-
pathy with the state and local governments with whom they will have been
in close contact throughout their political careers. The federal government,
therefore, remains in some sense the enemy still, even when they themselves
become members of the national legislature. Most of them resent, and are
fearful of, big government, and the power that it gives to a vast, impersonal
and permanent bureaucracy. Few members of Congress, therefore, resist the
temptation to attack civil servants when the opportunity arises, and the pe-
riod since the Second World War has provided on occasion extreme examples
of this tendency.
The internal and international strains of the post-war period, the Cold
War and the fear of communism provided the backdrop for the phenomenal
rise to prominence of Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy, as chairman of
the Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations of the Senate Government
Operations Committee, pursued a vendetta against civil servants, accusing
them of communist sympathies and causing a number of them to resign or be
dismissed. He particularly attacked civil servants in the Department of State,
the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of the Army. The ex-
tent and bitterness of McCarthy’s attacks eventually led to a reaction against
him, and after the extraordinary public battle between McCarthy and the
army in 1954 he was censured by the Senate. This was an extreme exam-
ple of an attack on the service, but the House Committee on Un-American