This is “The Bureaucracy”, chapter 14 from the book 21st ...

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Chapter 14 The Bureaucracy

Preamble

On August 28, 2005, Hurricane Katrina inflicted widespread devastation on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

Devastation Wrought by Hurricane Katrina Source: Photo courtesy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, File:Hurricane_katrina_damage_gulfport_mississippi.jpg.

Reporters from the networks and cable channels rushed to chronicle the catastrophe. They emotionally expressed their horror on camera and in print at the woefully tardy and inadequate response to the disaster by the government's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The head of FEMA confessing on television that he had only learned belatedly that thousands were stranded at the New Orleans' convention center without food or water symbolized this incompetence.

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Through the media and the Internet, Americans and people throughout the world witnessed an inept federal agency and learned that it was led not by a disaster expert but by a political appointee whose previous employer was the International Arabian Horse Association. FEMA is just one of over two thousand executive agencies1--governmental organizations in the executive branch that are authorized and designed to apply the law. Collectively these agencies make up the federal bureaucracy2. The bureaucracy consists of career civil servants and of political appointees. Most of these bureaucrats competently carry out their duties largely unnoticed by the media. Few reporters cover agencies on a regular basis. Agencies sometimes get into the news on their own terms; all of them employ public relations experts to crank out press releases and other forms of mass communication containing information on their programs and to respond to reporters' requests for facts and information. But the media often portray the bureaucracy negatively as a haven of incompetence and, as with their coverage of FEMA and Hurricane Katrina, are quick to chase after stories about bungling, blundering bureaucrats.

1. Organizations within the federal executive branch designed to apply the law.

2. That part of the executive branch outside the presidency that carries out laws and regulations.

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14.1 What Is Bureaucracy?

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading this section, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What is bureaucracy? 2. How do the media depict the federal bureaucracy? 3. How has the federal government bureaucracy evolved? 4. What is the Pendleton Act? How has the merit system changed the

makeup of federal bureaucracy? 5. What are the four main types of federal agencies?

The influential early-twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber suggested that bureaucracy is an efficient way to govern large, complex societies. For Weber, the ideal form of bureaucracy3 has four characteristics:

1. A rational division of labor into specialized offices with fixed jurisdictions

2. Employees chosen for their skills, knowledge, or experience, not for their politics

3. A chain of command wherein officials report to higher-ups 4. Impersonal reliance on written rules to limit arbitrary variation from

one case to the nextDonald P. Warwick, A Theory of Public Bureaucracy: Politics, Personality, and Organization in the State Department (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 4.

Bureaucracy in the Media

3. An organization marked by hierarchical division of labor, internal specialization, and adherence to fixed rules.

Such a depiction of bureaucratic organization and effectiveness is rarely found in the news. When the media consider bureaucracy, it is most often to excoriate it. One scholar examined a recent year's worth of newspaper editorials and concluded, "Mismanagement, wasteful spending, ethical lapses, and just plain incompetence stimulated editorial responses regularly....By contrast, editors rarely devoted much space to agencies' success."Jan P. Vermeer, The View from the States: National Politics in Local Newspaper Editorials (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 93?94. Likewise, television news zeroes in on waste, fraud, and abuse. Reporters provide

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new episodes of recurring segments such as ABC's "Your Money" and NBC's "The Fleecing of America." The federal bureaucracy is a favorite target.

This frame finds government bureaucracies rife with incompetence and bureaucrats squandering public funds. The millions of dollars misspent are drops in the bucket of a federal budget that is more than a trillion dollars; but bureaucratic inefficiency, if not ineptitude, seems to be the rule, not the exception.

Such stories are easy for journalists to gather--from investigations by the Government Accountability Office of Congress, from congressional hearings, and from each agency's inspector general. Thus the media widely covered the damning reports of the inspector general of the Securities and Exchange Commission on the reasons for the agency's failure, despite many warnings and complaints from credible sources, to investigate Bernard Madoff's $65 billion Ponzi scheme.Zachery Kouwe, "In Harsh Reports on S.E.C.'s Fraud Failures, a Watchdog Urges Sweeping Changes," New York Times, September 30, 2009, B10.

Entertainment media depictions of bureaucracy are often negative. The movie The Right Stuff (1983), based on Tom Wolfe's best-selling history, eulogizes an era of test pilots' daring individualism. Test pilot Chuck Yeager bravely and anonymously breaks the sound barrier and then returns to the fraternity of fellow pilots in a tavern whose walls are covered with pictures of gallant men lost in the quest. But when the Soviet Union launches the Sputnik satellite in 1957, panic-stricken Washington sends buffoonish bureaucrats to recruit test pilots--excluding Yeager--into a stage-managed bureaucracy for the astronauts chosen to go into space.

The entertainment media do sometimes show bureaucracy as collectively effective and adaptable. Apollo 13 (1995) portrays NASA and its astronauts as bureaucratic and heroic. After a blown-out oxygen tank aboard the space capsule threatens the lives of three astronauts, the NASA staff works to bring them back to Earth. The solution to get the astronauts home is clearly an ingenious collective one thought up by the various NASA workers together.

Bureaucracy is the problem in The Right Stuff and the solution in Apollo 13. The Right Stuff tanked at the box office. Apollo 13 cleaned up, probably because of its reassuring story, tribute to the astronauts' gallantry (it is hard to view astronauts as bureaucrats), and happy ending.

14.1 What Is Bureaucracy?

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