The Bureaucracy and Policy Making

              Bureaucracies are a rational way for complex societies to organize themselves. Their features include: a chain of command in which authority flows from top to bottom; a division of labor whereby work is apportioned among specialized workers to increase productivity; clear lines of authority among workers and their superiors; a goal orientation that determines structure, authority, and rules; impersonality, in which all employees are treated fairly based on merit and all clients are served equally, without discrimination, according to established rules; and Productivity, whereby all work and actions are evaluated according to established rules. The overall responsibility of the Bureaucracy is to implement the many laws passed by Congress. Because Congress cannot involve itself f in every detail of every program, it sets general guidelines for agency action and leaves it to the agency to work out the details, which they execute through a process called implementation. Many informal and formal mechanisms such as rule making and administrative adjudication, help the bureaucracy and bureaucrats make policy

              Policy making and implementation take place on both informal and formal levels. Most of the decisions made are left to individual government employees on a day to day basis. Street-level bureaucrats and department of justice lawyers make policy on two levels. s. They could either exercise broad judgment in decisions concerning citizens with whom they interact or have their individual actions add up to agency behavior. In rule making, they perform a quasi-legislative process that results in regulations that have the characteristics of a legislative act. In their regulations, they make rules that govern the operation of all government programs that have the force of law. To force the compliance of federal laws by persons or businesses agencies resort to administrative adjudication, a quasi-judicial process in which a bureaucratic agency settles disputes between two parties in a manner similar to the way courts resolve disputes.