58 3: Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics
to contract or privatize functions of government are inherently political, as they
involve decisions to shift the locus of state power, and certainly represent choices
to move public resources to other network members, including private compa-
nies or not-for-profi t organizations. Yet beyond the call by O’Toole and Meier to
focus on these political implications, the fi eld has not yet produced the necessary
work. Scott Robinson (2006), for example, argues we lack the conceptual tools to
understand the governance implications of diff erent types of networks and how
political context shapes their creation, membership, goals, and outcomes. Given
the explosive growth of networked administration and its poorly understood
implications for public policy and eff ect on democratic values, there can hardly
be a better example of the practical and critical need for theory development, not
just in the realm of bureaucratic politics, but also in the general fi eld of public
administration.
Given the highly political nature of bureaucracy that Seidman, O’Toole, and
others have described, eff orts to make the administrative arm of government
more eff ective and effi cient persistently fail because the real objectives of bureau-
cracy have nothing to do with effi ciency and better management practices. Power
is really at stake in reorganization, and this is the reason the president, Congress,
and other political actors take such an intense interest in administration. Reorga-
nization has become such a perennial part of politics that it is increasingly pur-
sued for its own sake—a political objective with no underlying administrative
strategy whatsoever. During the 1980s, for example, House Republicans proposed
abolishing the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, and Housing and
Urban Development. Th e 1996 Republican presidential nominee, Bob Dole, also
campaigned on a promise of eliminating the Internal Revenue Service. Th ese
proposals were largely calculated to make political profi ts from popular negative
stereotypes of the bureaucracy and made no real sense from an administrative
point of view. No one made serious proposals for the wholesale elimination of
programs, no one had a strategic plan to reassign these programs, and no one
made any real argument that the end result would be more eff ective and effi cient
government. Th e whole point seemed to be to attack the administrative infra-
structure in the belief that smaller government was better government. Yet if
there were to be no wholesale elimination of public programs, government would
not get smaller, just more confused, and, in all likelihood, increasingly privatized
(Seidman 1998, 110).
Such political games with the bureaucracy are not the sole province of Re-
publicans. Th e Clinton/Gore administration played a particularly cynical game
in its reinvention eff orts, repeatedly publicizing the shrinking federal payroll.
Th e quarter-million federal positions eliminated by the reinvention movement
were mostly supervisors, personnel specialists, budget analysts, accountants,
auditors, and the like. Th ese people primarily oversaw third-party operations,
namely, the private contractors the government increasingly uses to carry out
public programs and policies. Contract employees who indirectly do the public’s