56 3: Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics
are distributed among the executive, the legislature, various organizational com-
ponents within each branch, and organized interest groups.
Accordingly, we should expect Congress to be intensely interested in the or-
ganizational makeup of the executive branch and deeply involved in questions of
administration. Indeed, Seidman argued that one of the central reasons for the
“eccentric” organizational makeup of the executive branch is the jockeying for
political power among the various elements of the legislative branch. Congressio-
nal committees have historically operated as highly autonomous minilegislatures
that routinely struggle for jurisdictional supremacy over policies or programs. In
1966, for example, two agencies were created to administer highway safety: the
National Highway Safety Agency and the National Traffi c Agency. Both agencies
were headed by one appointee. In other words, structurally built into the admin-
istration of highway safety programs and policies are duplication, confused lines
of authority, and many other management and organization issues that would
tend to promote ineffi ciency. Th is makes sense if administration is viewed as in-
exorably intertwined with politics rather than separable from it. Th e reason for
two agencies rather than one was a simple matter of intrachamber politics: Two
Senate committees wanted to confi rm the agency head, and the creation of two
agencies achieved this purely political goal. Th e organizational and administra-
tive “problems” of the executive branch are thus oft en “nothing but mirror im-
ages of jurisdictional confl icts within the Congress” (Seidman 1998, 27).
Th e bureaucracy is politically important not only to the president and to
Congress but also to a broad range of organized interests. Seidman pointed out
that the public bureaucracy has a parallel private bureaucracy—businesses that
perform contract work for the government—heavily invested in the status quo.
Contracting with a private fi rm to perform various public functions has its advan-
tages. Private companies, for example, are subject to lower levels of oversight and
accountability, which gives them an operational fl exibility that public agencies
frequently lack. Using private companies also helps reduce the number of civil
servants on the public payroll, an important consideration for presidents dealing
with the size of the public bureaucracy, always a politically sensitive issue. Th e
downside to these arrangements is the loss of accountability and the high resis-
tance of private fi rms to changes in the public bureaucracy because their liveli-
hoods are dependent upon preserving the status quo (Seidman 1998, 15).
Networks and Bureaucratic Politics
Th is fact that bureaucratic politics extends beyond the bureaucracy itself was
highlighted by Laurence O’Toole (1997b) in his admonition to take networks
seriously. For public administration, networks can be thought of as a set of orga-
nizations that are interdependent; that is, they share goals, interests, resources,
or values. Th ese interdependencies tie together not just public bureaucracies
within, between, and among diff ering political jurisdictions, but private and