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. There are simply far fewer government-run services.
Nevertheless, the federal government has used forms of privatization and contracting throughout its history. This movement grew stronger in the s and s as politicians, particularly on the right, declared that air needed to be let out of the bloated federal government. In the s, as President Bill Clinton and especially his vice president, Al Gore, worked to aggressively shrink the federal bureaucracy, privatization came to be embraced across the political spectrum.
But to many others, talk of privatization is worrying. They contend that certain government functions are simply not possible to replicate in a private context. 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. Following his reelection in , President George W. This power is called administrative adjudication, and it involves applying rules and precedents to specific cases. Since the Carter Administration in the late s, the federal government has frequently sought to remove regulations established by earlier administrations, a practice called deregulation.
The federal bureaucracy usually carries out deregulation, often with encouragement from the president. In the late s and early s, for example, the government deregulated the airline industry, significantly increasing competition and lowering prices. Sometimes the federal government changes its regulations significantly, a process known as reregulation.
In theory, federal bureaucracies merely carry out the policies enacted by Congress and the president. In practice, however, many scholars argue that the bureaucracy plays a significant role in federal policymaking via iron triangles and issue networks. An iron triangle is an alliance of people from three groups: a congressional subcommittee that deals with an issue, the executive agency that enforces laws on that issue, and private interest groups.
Often, the members of the triangle know each other well, and people frequently move from one corner of the triangle to another. The members of the iron triangle work together to create policy that serves their interests. Example: An iron triangle might form around a particular weapons system. The Defense Department may want a new weapons system, members of congressional Armed Services Committees may want to look tough on defense by voting for a new system, and military suppliers want to make money by selling weapons systems.
Therefore, it is in the interests of all three parties to push Congress to authorize the new weapons system. An issue network is a group of individuals who support a specific policy, not a broader issue.
The three parts of the iron triangle are often parts of a single issue network, but other people may also be a part of the network, including experts, scholars, and the media. The influence of issue networks is similar to that of iron triangles: By working together, members of an issue network can shape and determine policy.
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