Lesson 02: The Continuous Reinventing of the Machinery of Government
The Executive Branch
Figure 2.1. The Government of the United States (click the image to download)
Most of the work associated with PA takes place in the executive branch of government. The roles of any executive branch of government tend to fall into two major categories: faithfully administering laws handed down from the legislature and responding to emergencies and crises. See Figure 2.1 to learn about different branches of the U.S. government.
The term executive branch in the U.S. national government implies a coherence and overall philosophy of organization that is definitely not present in reality. The federal executive branch is a complex web of different sorts of organizations based on separate legislation and organized without any general template. This structure mirrors successful organizations found in the private sector. However, a few basic patterns are apparent.
The smaller-is-better philosophy of the Founding Fathers of the Constitution resulted in the establishment of a small number of executive departments: War, Navy, Treasury, State, and the attorney general (the president's chief legal counsel). After World War II, the departments of War and Navy were merged to form the Department of Defense, and the president's chief legal counsel grew into the Department of Justice. Politically, the Defense, State, and Justice departments remain the strongest departments because they represent the most fundamental government functions: national defense, diplomacy and foreign relations, and law and criminal justice.
As U.S. society expanded and citizens demanded more services, additional departments were added to represent important groups in society that expected direct services to assist them in dealing with various problems. These so-called clientele departments include such major national organizations as the departments of Agriculture (the first and still one of the largest such departments), Commerce, Labor, and Veterans Affairs.
A second wave of organizational creation occurred with the rise of the regulatory role of government, beginning with the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. Regulatory bodies were created to provide a middle ground between purely market-based economic decisions and a government-run economy. They reflected the desire of society in the industrial era to find ways to require private entities to balance their interests with the public interest Most regulatory agencies—such as the previously mentioned Interstate Commerce Commission (which was eliminated in 1995), the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and several others—were initially set up outside the large federal departments. Others, such as the Food and Drug Administration, were included in departments. In recent years, the trend has been to provide stronger coordination between regulatory agencies and the other elements of the executive branch, either by giving general management powers to a chairperson or by folding them into the structure of a larger agency or department.
Much of the work of the national government (roughly 80–90%) is done in the field, not in Washington, D.C. Washington is for the most part the home to the headquarter operations of federal departments and agencies, but field offices employ a great number of federal workers. The field structure recognizes not only the vast geographic sweep of the nation but also the need to coordinate the work of the national government with that of states and local governments.
Large federal departments are best understood as holding companies for administrations, agencies, and bureaus within the umbrella of the department. It's this subdepartmental level of organization that provides the best clue as to the programs implemented by a department. For example, the Department of Transportation is organized largely around the major transportation modes—automobile (the Federal Highway Administration), railway (the Federal Railroad Administration), public transit (the Federal Transit Administration), aircraft (the Federal Aviation Administration), and waterborne transportation (the Federal Maritime Administration—all of which form the basic pillars of the department. Each has its own head reporting to the departmental secretary, who is responsible for coordinating and leading the overall department.
Some organizations are line organizations and others are staff organizations. This fundamental distinction was first used in military organizations and has now permeated all public bureaucracies. Line organizations are those that directly support the goals and mission of an organization—for example, infantry units in the army. Staff units provide support for both the line units and overall command; using the military example again, the staff units include such functions as intelligence, logistics, personnel, budget and finance, and the medical corps. Staff units can be stand-alone units, such as the Office of Management and Budget or the Office of Personnel Management, which report directly to the president, or be embedded within another component of the executive branch, such as the chief counsel's office or budget office of any large agency or department.
The Historical Account of the Growth of the Executive Branch
The reading by Newcomer and Kee provides a good historical account of the growth of the executive branch since the founding of the republic in the 1780s and 1790s. Federalist 23, one of the most significant of the essays that form the Federalist Papers, provided a theoretical justification for a strong national government with an active and competent system of national public administration as a key factor. Yet, as the authors point out the enormous growth in the role played by the national government in the economy and society could not have been anticipated at the time that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay made their arguments for a strong national government.
What has occurred, according to Newcomer and Kee, is the expansion of responsibility without the necessary capacity to provide the sort of leadership that only the national government can provide in a system of divided powers and complex public–private relationships. The size of the national government workforce has been kept artificially low for political reasons, leading to a complex way of doing business that requires policies to be administered by subnational governments or private contractors, or through the use of fiscal policy and other indirect means. The authors propose the need for an overall strategic design led by the national executive to provide the "unity of energy" Hamilton thought was the essential role of the executive. This idea can be accomplished through attention to accountability mechanisms for contracting and intergovernmental relations, attention to risk management concerns, and strategic workforce planning.
Figure 2.1. The Government of the United States (click the image to download)