Government bureaucracy is something Americans have long loved to hate. Yet despite this general antipathy, some federal agencies have been wildly successful in cultivating the people’s favor. Take, for instance, the U.S. Forest Service and its still-popular Smokey Bear campaign. The agency early on gained a foothold in the public’s esteem when President Theodore Roosevelt championed its conservation policies and Forest Service press releases led to favorable coverage and further goodwill. Congress has rarely approved of such bureaucratic independence. In Congress vs. the Bureaucracy, political scientist Mordecai Lee—who has served as a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill and as a state senator—explores a century of congressional efforts to prevent government agencies from gaining support for their initiatives by communicating directly with the public. Through detailed case studies, Lee shows how federal agencies have used increasingly sophisticated publicity techniques to muster support for their activities—while Congress has passed laws to counter those PR efforts. The author first traces congressional resistance to Roosevelt’s campaigns to rally popular support for the Panama Canal project, then discusses the Forest Service, the War Department, the Census Bureau, and the Department of Agriculture. Lee’s analysis of more recent legislative bans on agency publicity in the George W. Bush administration reveals that political battles over PR persist to this day. Ultimately, despite Congress’s attempts to muzzle agency public relations, the bureaucracy usually wins. Opponents of agency PR have traditionally condemned it as propaganda, a sign of a mushrooming, self-serving bureaucracy, and a waste of taxpayer dollars. For government agencies, though, communication with the public is crucial to implementing their missions and surviving. In Congress vs. the Bureaucracy, Lee argues these conflicts are in fact healthy for America. They reflect a struggle for autonomy that shows our government’s system of checks and balances to be alive and working well.

The first edition of Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy is one of the most successful Brookings titles of all time. This thoroughly revised version updates that classic analysis of the role played by the federal bureaucracy—civilian career officials, political appointees, and military officers—and Congress in formulating U.S. national security policy, illustrating how policy decisions are actually made. Government agencies, departments, and individuals all have certain interests to preserve and promote. Those priorities, and the conflicts they sometimes spark, heavily influence the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. A decision that looks like an orchestrated attempt to influence another country may in fact represent a shaky compromise between rival elements within the U.S. government. The authors provide numerous examples of bureaucratic maneuvering and reveal how they have influenced our international relations. The revised edition includes new examples of bureaucratic politics from the past three decades, from Jimmy Carter's view of the State Department to conflicts between George W. Bush and the bureaucracy regarding Iraq. The second edition also includes a new analysis of Congress's role in the politics of foreign policymaking.

In Bureaucracy’s Masters and Minions: The Politics of Controlling the U.S. Bureaucracy, the author argues that political control of the bureaucracy from the president and the Congress is largely contingent on an agency’s internal characteristics of workforce composition, workforce responsibilities, and workforce organization. Through a revised principal-agent framework, the author explores an agent-principal model to use the agent as the starting-point of analysis. The author tests the agent-principal model across 14 years and 132 bureaus and finds that both the president and the House of Representatives exert influence over the bureaucracy, but agency characteristics such as the degree of politization among the workforce, the type of work the agency is engaged in, and the hierarchical nature of the agency affects how agencies are controlled by their political masters. In a detailed case study of one agency, the U.S. Department of Education, the author finds that education policy over a 65-year period is elite-led, and that that hierarchical nature of the department conditions political principals’ influence. This book works to overcome three hurdles that have plagued bureaucratic studies: the difficulty of uniform sampling across the bureaucracy, the overuse of case studies, and the overreliance on the principal-agent theoretical approach.

This book assesses the influence of bureaucracy in American politics, asking how government agencies and Congress come to know about, and understand, important policy problems confronting citizens and government officials.

Who determines the fuel standards for our cars? What about whether Plan B, the morning-after pill, is sold at the local pharmacy? Many people assume such important and controversial policy decisions originate in the halls of Congress. But the choreographed actions of Congress and the president account for only a small portion of the laws created in the United States. By some estimates, more than ninety percent of law is created by administrative rules issued by federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services, where unelected bureaucrats with particular policy goals and preferences respond to the incentives created by a complex, procedure-bound rulemaking process. With Bending the Rules, Rachel Augustine Potter shows that rulemaking is not the rote administrative activity it is commonly imagined to be but rather an intensely political activity in its own right. Because rulemaking occurs in a separation of powers system, bureaucrats are not free to implement their preferred policies unimpeded: the president, Congress, and the courts can all get involved in the process, often at the bidding of affected interest groups. However, rather than capitulating to demands, bureaucrats routinely employ “procedural politicking,” using their deep knowledge of the process to strategically insulate their proposals from political scrutiny and interference. Tracing the rulemaking process from when an agency first begins working on a rule to when it completes that regulatory action, Potter shows how bureaucrats use procedures to resist interference from Congress, the President, and the courts at each stage of the process. This exercise reveals that unelected bureaucrats wield considerable influence over the direction of public policy in the United States.

"ÝAn¨ excellent book .Arnold seeks to examine the interactions between members of the House of Representatives and members of the upper bureaucracy in respect to the geographical allocation of federal expenditures..The methodology employed is ingenious and persuasive."-David Fellman, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science