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Understanding Government Bureaucracy: Challenges and Solutions

Explore the necessity of government bureaucracies, political decision-making by bureaucrats, and challenges in managing the bureaucracy. Learn about Congressional oversight efforts and common beliefs about bureaucracies. Discover the functions of bureaucracies and the Fenno Paradox.

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Understanding Government Bureaucracy: Challenges and Solutions

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  1. The Bureaucracy Chapter 10

  2. Key Questions • Why are government bureaucracies necessary? • What political decisions do bureaucrats make? • Why is it so difficult to manage the bureaucracy? • How has Congress tried to control the bureaucracy and how effective were those efforts?

  3. Bureaucracy • Define the term • What comes to mind?

  4. The Federal Bureaucracy From a purely technical point of view, a bureaucracy is capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency, and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings. --Max Weber

  5. Do you believe the US needs smaller government? • Which programs/agencies should we cancel?

  6. Common Beliefs About Bureaucracies • Bureaucracies Are Immensely Wasteful • Business is Always Better than Bureaucracy • We Want the Government to Act Like a Business • Bureaucracy is a Major Cause of Government Growth • Bureaucracies Usually Provide Poor Service • Agencies Should Treat Us as Individuals http://www.governmentisgood.com/articles.php?aid=20&print=1

  7. What Bureaucrats Do • FUNCTIONS OF BUREAUCRACIES

  8. Fenno Paradox

  9. Government agencies are seldom in the headlines ….unless they slip up But after the BP spill, MMS’s top officials were forced to resign and a reorganization of MMS was undertaken. For example, who ever heard of The Minerals Management Service (MMS), a bureau within the Department of the Interior… Until the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon and the resulting oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?

  10. Another Fenno Paradox? A Pew Research Center poll found, for example, that roughly two-thirds of Americans believe that government programs are “usually inefficient and wasteful.” Americans have a favorable impression of their most recent encounter with the federal bureaucracy (as, for example, when a senior citizen applies for social security), but they have a low opinion of the bureaucracy as a whole.

  11. Another Fenno Paradox? A Pew Research Center poll found, for example, that roughly two-thirds of Americans believe that government programs are “usually inefficient and wasteful.” Americans have a favorable impression of their most recent encounter with the federal bureaucracy (as, for example, when a senior citizen applies for social security), but they have a low opinion of the bureaucracy as a whole.

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