How many bureaucrats are there

Turning a spoils system bureaucracy into a merit-based civil service, while desirable, comes with a number of different consequences. The patronage system tied the livelihoods of civil service workers to their party loyalty and discipline. Severing these ties, as has occurred in the United States over the last century and a half, has transformed the way bureaucracies operate.

Without the patronage network, bureaucracies form their own motivations. These motivations, sociologists have discovered, are designed to benefit and perpetuate the bureaucracies themselves. Bureaucracies are complex institutions designed to accomplish specific tasks. This complexity, and the fact that they are organizations composed of human beings, can make it challenging for us to understand how bureaucracies work.

Bureaucracies are naturally competitive and power-hungry. This means bureaucrats, especially at the highest levels, recognize that limited resources are available to feed bureaucracies, so they will work to enhance the status of their own bureaucracy to the detriment of others.

This effort can sometimes take the form of merely emphasizing to Congress the value of their bureaucratic task, but it also means the bureaucracy will attempt to maximize its budget by depleting all its allotted resources each year. In this way, the bureaucracy will eventually grow far beyond what is necessary and create bureaucratic waste that would otherwise be spent more efficiently among the other bureaucracies.

Other theorists have come to the conclusion that the extent to which bureaucracies compete for scarce resources is not what provides the greatest insight into how a bureaucracy functions. Rather, it is the absence of competition. Similarities exist between a bureaucracy like the Internal Revenue Service IRS and a private monopoly like a regional power company or internet service provider that has no competitors.

Such organizations are frequently criticized for waste, poor service, and a low level of client responsiveness. Consider, for example, the Bureau of Consular Affairs BCA , the federal bureaucracy charged with issuing passports to citizens. There is no other organization from which a U. Thus there is no reason for the BCA to become more efficient or more responsive or to issue passports any faster.

A bureaucracy is a particular government unit established to accomplish a specific set of goals and objectives as authorized by a legislative body. In the United States, the federal bureaucracy enjoys a great degree of autonomy compared to those of other countries. However, many agency actions are subject to judicial review.

In Schechter Poultry Corp. United States , the Supreme Court found that agency authority seemed limitless. In the U. There are currently fifteen cabinet departments in the federal government. Cabinet departments are major executive offices that are directly accountable to the president.

Occasionally, a department will be eliminated when government officials decide its tasks no longer need direct presidential and congressional oversight, such as happened to the Post Office Department in Each cabinet department has a head called a secretary, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

These secretaries report directly to the president, and they oversee a huge network of offices and agencies that make up the department. Within these large bureaucratic networks are a number of undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, deputy secretaries, and many others. The Department of Justice is the one department that is structured somewhat differently. Rather than a secretary and undersecretaries, it has an attorney general, an associate attorney general, and a host of different bureau and division heads.

Policies passed by authoritative decision makers are interpreted and implemented by executive agencies and departments. 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? Notably with respect to the number of agencies, the Administrative Conference of the United States -- which lists agencies in the appendix of its most recent Sourcebook of United States Executive Agencies -- had the following to say :.

For example, FOIA. This appears to be on the conservative end of the range of possible agency definitions. The United States Government Manual lists 96 independent executive units and components of the executive departments. An even more inclusive listing comes from USA. That's right: There is "no authoritative list of government agencies.

It had been in December The table nearby summarizes these and other tallies. If no one knows definitively how many agencies, components and commissions exist by whose decrees we must abide, that means we similarly do not know how many employees let alone contractors work for the government.

The job of reforming the executive branch is an extremely complex one, and the agencies are fighting it and will fight it, with support from dominant media. This entrenchment and collaboration appears to account for some of what is meant by the "swamp.

Even when we isolate a given agency, it may be hard to tell exactly what is and is not a binding rule or regulation. Since the federal government is so extensive, issuing a formal rule may not even be necessary to achieve bureaucratic ends since agencies can issue "guidance" instead.

That calls out for a concerted, sustained response. The Trump program is focused on what the executive branch can do alone, but also on identifying what will require congressional action , as detailed in Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney's memorandum to agencies on the reorganization effort.