What is the federal bureaucracy? 461from power plants. Regulations set the eligibility criteria for student loans, limit how
the military can recruit on college campuses, determine who can get a home mortgage
and what the interest rate will be, and describe what constitutes equal funding for
men’s and women’s college sports teams. Regulations also shape contribution limits
and spending decisions in political campaigns.
Regulations are often controversial because they involve trade-offs between
incompatible goals, as well as decisions made under uncertain circumstances. For
example, the regulations that guide the FDA drug-approval process prioritize the goal
of preventing harmful drugs from coming to market.^4 As a result, patients sometimes
cannot get access to experimental treatments because FDA approval has not been
granted, even when those treatments are the patients’ only remaining option.^5
Advocates for patients have argued that people with dire prognoses should be allowed
to use these treatments as a potentially lifesaving last resort.^6 However, current FDA
regulations prevent them from doing so except under very special circumstances; the
agency argues that unapproved treatments may do more harm than good for these
patients and warns that allowing wider access to these drugs may tempt manufacturers
to market new drugs without adequate testing.
President Trump campaigned on a platform of reducing government regulations
and has issued many directives to bureaucrats to reduce the number and scope of
regulations. You may wonder if the number of regulations has, in fact, been reduced
during the Trump administration. The short answer is no. Though federal agencies
have issued fewer new regulations in the two years since Trump took office, much of
this decline can be attributed to the delay or cancellation of proposed rules that Trump
inherited from the Obama administration. Congress has also taken advantage of a law
that allows the House and Senate to repeal regulations issued during the last months
of a presidential term. However, Trump has had only limited success in eliminating
regulations that were already in force when he entered office. The problem is that once
regulations are in place, changing or repealing them is a lengthy process that often
requires Congress to pass new laws. For example, while Trump and his appointees
at the EPA have proposed repealing the Clean Power Plan, this process will take at
least two years and could be delayed further or even stopped by court challenges. One
possible argument is that since the EPA has the authority to regulate air pollution, it
cannot simply repeal the regulations without replacing them with something else.
Thus, while reducing the number of government regulations was one of the central
promises of Trump’s campaign, his administration has made very little progress
toward this goal.Bringing Expertise to Policy Making Bureaucrats are also an important source
of new government policies. For example, Congress and the president give civilian
and military personnel in the Department of Defense the job of revising military
doctrines—broad directives on how our armed forces should go about accomplishing
specific tasks such as fighting the ISIL terrorist organization in Syria, building civil
society in Afghanistan, or running military training operations in Africa. While
military doctrines reflect input from members of Congress, the State Department and
the president’s appointees, and groups outside government (including lobbyists, think
tanks, and defense contractors), they also reflect the preferences of the bureaucrats
assigned to the task. Thus, as in the case of regulations, when it comes to government
policy, bureaucrats are not just implementers: they have a significant influence on what
government does and does not do.Delivering Services Some bureaucrats are the face of the federal government,
interacting directly with citizens to provide services and other benefits. PeopleFull_14_APT_64431_ch13_454-487.indd 461 16/11/18 1:43 PM