Occasionally, however, when a particular bureaucracy has committed or contributed to a blunder of some magnitude, the hearings can become quite animated and testy. This occurred in following the realization by Congress that the IRS had selected for extra scrutiny certain groups that had applied for tax-exempt status. While the error could have been a mere mistake or have resulted from any number of reasons, many in Congress became enraged at the thought that the IRS might purposely use its power to inconvenience citizens and their groups.
It is designed to operate in a fact-based and nonpartisan manner to deliver important oversight information where and when it is needed. In the approximately nine hundred reports it completes per year, the GAO sends Congress information about budgetary issues for everything from education, health care, and housing to defense, homeland security, and natural resource management.
This report details the achievements and remaining weaknesses in the actions of the GAO for any given year. Apart from Congress, the president also executes oversight over the extensive federal bureaucracy through a number of different avenues. Most directly, the president controls the bureaucracies by appointing the heads of the fifteen cabinet departments and of many independent executive agencies, such as the CIA, the EPA, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
These cabinet and agency appointments go through the Senate for confirmation. The other important channel through which the office of the president conducts oversight over the federal bureaucracy is the Office of Management and Budget OMB.
With this huge responsibility, however, comes a number of other responsibilities. These include reporting to the president on the actions of the various executive departments and agencies in the federal government, overseeing the performance levels of the bureaucracies, coordinating and reviewing federal regulations for the president, and delivering executive orders and presidential directives to the various agency heads.
During the s, the two political parties in the United States had largely come together over the issue of the federal bureaucracy. While differences remained, a great number of bipartisan attempts to roll back the size of government took place during the Clinton administration. This shared effort began to fall apart during the presidency of Republican George W. Bush, who made repeated attempts to use contracting and privatization to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy more than Democrats were willing to accept.
This growing division was further compounded by Great Recession that began in For many on the left side of the political spectrum, the onset of the recession reflected a failure of weakened federal bureaucracies to properly regulate the financial markets. To those on the right, it merely reinforced the belief that government bureaucracies are inherently inefficient. Over the next few years, as the government attempted to grapple with the consequences of the recession, these divisions only grew.
The debate over one particular bureaucratic response to the recession provides important insight into these divisions. The bureau in question is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau CFPB , an agency created in specifically to oversee certain financial industries that had proven themselves to be especially prone to abusive practices, such as sub-prime mortgage lenders and payday lenders.
To many in the Republican Party, this new bureau was merely another instance of growing the federal bureaucracy to take care of problems caused by an inefficient government.
To many in the Democratic Party, the new agency was an important cop on a notably chaotic street. Divisions over this agency were so bitter that Republicans refused for a time to allow the Senate to consider confirming anyone to head the new bureau.
Many wanted the bureau either scrapped or headed by a committee that would have to generate consensus in order to act. During the height of the recession, many Democrats saw these tactics as a particularly destructive form of obstruction while the country reeled from the financial collapse. Warren is currently a U. As the recession recedes into the past, however, the political heat the CFPB once generated has steadily declined. Republicans still push to reduce the power of the bureau and Democrats in general still support it, but lack of urgency has pushed these differences into the background.
Indeed, there may be a growing consensus between the two parties that the bureau should be more tightly controlled. In the spring of , as the agency was announcing new rules to help further restrict the predatory practices of payday lenders, a handful of Democratic members of Congress, including the party chair, joined Republicans to draft legislation to prevent the CFPB from further regulating lenders.
This joint effort may be an anomaly. But it may also indicate the start of a return to more bipartisan interpretation of bureaucratic institutions. What do these divisions suggest about the way Congress exercises oversight over the federal bureaucracy? Do you think this oversight is an effective way to control a bureaucracy as large and complex as the U. Why or why not? A number of laws passed in the decades between the end of the Second World War and the late s have created a framework through which citizens can exercise their own bureaucratic oversight.
FOIA provides journalists and the general public the right to request records from various federal agencies. These agencies are required by law to release that information unless it qualifies for one of nine exemptions. These exceptions cite sensitive issues related to national security or foreign policy, internal personnel rules, trade secrets, violations of personnel privacy rights, law enforcement information, and oil well data.
FOIA also compels agencies to post some types of information for the public regularly without being requested. The black marks cover information the CIA deemed particularly sensitive.
In fiscal year , the government received , FOIA requests, with just three departments—Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice—accounting for more than half those queries. In its latest report, published in and using and data the most recent available , ten of the fifteen did not earn satisfactory overall grades, scoring less than seventy of a possible one hundred points.
The Government in Sunshine Act of is different from FOIA in that it requires all multi-headed federal agencies to hold their meetings in a public forum on a regular basis. The act defines a meeting as any gathering of agency members in person or by phone, whether in a formal or informal manner. These include meetings where classified information is discussed, proprietary data has been submitted for review, employee privacy matters are discussed, criminal matters are brought up, and information would prove financially harmful to companies were it released.
Citizens and citizen groups can also follow rulemaking and testify at hearings held around the country on proposed rules. The rulemaking process and the efforts by federal agencies to keep open records and solicit public input on important changes are examples of responsive bureaucracy.
A more extreme, and in many instances, more controversial solution to the perceived and real inefficiencies in the bureaucracy is privatization. In the United States, largely because it was born during the Enlightenment and has a long history of championing free-market principles, the urge to privatize government services has never been as strong as it is in many other countries.
As a result, elected leaders have employed a number of strategies and devices to control public administrators in the bureaucracy. Congress is particularly empowered to apply oversight of the federal bureaucracy because of its power to control funding and approve presidential appointments.
The various bureaucratic agencies submit annual summaries of their activities and budgets for the following year, and committees and subcommittees in both chambers regularly hold hearings to question the leaders of the various bureaucracies. These hearings are often tame, practical, fact-finding missions. Occasionally, however, when a particular bureaucracy has committed or contributed to a blunder of some magnitude, the hearings can become quite animated and testy.
This occurred in following the realization by Congress that the IRS had selected for extra scrutiny certain groups that had applied for tax-exempt status. While the error could have been a mere mistake or have resulted from any number of reasons, many in Congress became enraged at the thought that the IRS might purposely use its power to inconvenience citizens and their groups.
It is designed to operate in a fact-based and nonpartisan manner to deliver important oversight information where and when it is needed. In the approximately nine hundred reports it completes per year, the GAO sends Congress information about budgetary issues for everything from education, health care, and housing to defense, homeland security, and natural resource management.
This report details the achievements and remaining weaknesses in the actions of the GAO for any given year. Apart from Congress, the president also executes oversight over the extensive federal bureaucracy through a number of different avenues. Most directly, the president controls the bureaucracies by appointing the heads of the fifteen cabinet departments and of many independent executive agencies, such as the CIA, the EPA, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
These cabinet and agency appointments go through the Senate for confirmation. The other important channel through which the office of the president conducts oversight over the federal bureaucracy is the Office of Management and Budget OMB. With this huge responsibility, however, comes a number of other responsibilities.
These include reporting to the president on the actions of the various executive departments and agencies in the federal government, overseeing the performance levels of the bureaucracies, coordinating and reviewing federal regulations for the president, and delivering executive orders and presidential directives to the various agency heads.
A number of laws passed in the decades between the end of the Second World War and the late s have created a framework through which citizens can exercise their own bureaucratic oversight. FOIA provides journalists and the general public the right to request records from various federal agencies.
These agencies are required by law to release that information unless it qualifies for one of nine exemptions. These exceptions cite sensitive issues related to national security or foreign policy, internal personnel rules, trade secrets, violations of personnel privacy rights, law enforcement information, and oil well data. FOIA also compels agencies to post some types of information for the public regularly without being requested.
The black marks redacting cover information the CIA deemed particularly sensitive. Credit: Central Intelligence Agency. In fiscal year , the government received , FOIA requests, with just three departments—Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice—accounting for more than half those queries.
In its latest report, published in and using and data the most recent available , ten of the fifteen did not earn satisfactory overall grades, scoring less than seventy of a possible one hundred points. The Government in Sunshine Act of is different from FOIA in that it requires all multi-headed federal agencies to hold their meetings in a public forum on a regular basis. The act defines a meeting as any gathering of agency members in person or by phone, whether in a formal or informal manner.
These include meetings where classified information is discussed, proprietary data has been submitted for review, employee privacy matters are discussed, criminal matters are brought up, and information would prove financially harmful to companies were it released. Citizens and citizen groups can also follow rule-making and testify at hearings held around the country on proposed rules.
The rule-making process and the efforts by federal agencies to keep open records and solicit public input on important changes are examples of responsive bureaucracy. When those in government speak of privatization, they are often referring to one of a host of different models that incorporate the market forces of the private sector into the function of government to varying degrees.
We will look at three of these types of privatization shortly. Divestiture, or full privatization, occurs when government services are transferred, usually through sale, from government bureaucratic control into an entirely market-based, private environment. At the federal level this form of privatization is very rare, although it does occur. When it was created in , it was designed to be a government entity for processing federal student education loans. Created by elected officeholders, bureaucratic organizations exist to perform essential public functions both on a day-to-day basis and, especially, at times of national emergencies.
What is the political status of the federal bureaucracy? What is its power? How does the public view it? What essential functions do bureaucratic agencies and departments perform? How are individual departments and agencies organized?
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