472 Chapter 13 | The Bureaucracyas the FAA or the Federal Highway Administration (FHA) (both within the Department
of Transportation), can be controlled by the president (to some extent) through his or
her appointees.^35 In contrast, independent agencies are often designed to have more
freedom from oversight and control by the president and Congress. For example,
governors of the Federal Reserve, though nominated by the president and confirmed
by the Senate, serve for 14 years—outlasting the administration that nominated them.
Outside the nomination and confirmation process, the president and Congress have
very little control over the Federal Reserve’s policies; the organization is self-financing,
and its governors can be removed from office only if Congress takes the extreme step of
impeaching them.
In contrast, appointees to executive departments and the EOP serve “at the pleasure
of the president,” meaning the president can remove them from office at any time.
For example, during 2017 and 2018 there were rumors that President Trump was
planning to fire both Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General
Rod Rosenstein because they would not carry out Trump’s wishes to end the Justice
Department’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Whether it
would have been ethical or politically wise to fire Sessions and Rosenstein are both
good questions—but there is no doubt that Trump had the authority to remove them
from office.
These details about the hiring and firing of bureaucrats and the location of agencies
in the structure of the federal government matter because they determine the amount
of political control that other parts of the government can exercise over an agency, as
well as which individuals (the president or members of Congress) get to exercise this
power. As political scientist Terry M. Moe puts it, “The bureaucracy rises out of politics,
and its design reflects the interests, strategies, and compromises of those who exercise
political power.”^36The Size of the Federal Government
The federal government employs millions of people. Table 13.1 shows the number
of employees in each executive department. The Department of Defense is the
largest cabinet department, with more than 700,000 civilian personnel. The
Department of Education is the smallest, with only 4,100 employees. Many
departments are on the small side: four cabinet departments have fewer than
20,000 employees. The same is true for many independent agencies and
organizations within the EOP. The General Services Administration (GSA), for
example, has only about 12,000 employees. Millions of additional people work
for the government as members of the armed forces, as employees of the Postal
Service, as employees of civilian companies that contract with the government, or as
recipients of federal grant money.
The What Do the Facts Say? feature in this chapter shows the number of civilian
federal employees from 1961 to 2017. Clearly, the federal workforce has steadily
increased over time, although it has declined from its peak in the 1990s and remained
steady in recent years. Some observers argue that growth in employment was
driven by the fact that bureaucrats are budget maximizers who never pass up a
chance to increase the size of their organization regardless of whether the increase
is worthwhile.^37 Of course, the fact that federal employment has remained steady in
recent years suggests that something besides budget maximization is at work. The
best explanation for overall size of the federal government is the size of America
itself—more than 330 million people spread out over an area more than twice the size of
the European Union—combined with America’s position as the most powerful nationbudget maximizers
Bureaucrats who seek to increase
funding for their agency whether
or not that additional spending is
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