Popular Government in the United States: Foundations and Principles by Charles S. Hyneman

Author:Charles S. Hyneman [Hyneman, Charles S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351497947
Google: JisxDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 36078752
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Direction and Control by Elected Officials

The basic design of American government creates a formidable obstacle to effective political control of public administration. The high administrative official finds himself answering to two bosses. He is instructed, criticized, and sometimes thwarted by Congress. And he is expected to please the President, with a prospect of losing his job if he fails to do so. This unhappy circumstance invites a constitutional change which would strip Congress of its power to supervise and discipline, and make the President supreme in control of the administrative branch. There is great risk in this solution, however, for the ability of the people to control the President would be endangered.

Political control of administration—i.e., the subjection of the appointed officials to the elected officials—is inextricably bound up with the enactment of legislation and the appropriation of money. And the basic design of our government makes Congress and President near-equal participants in lawmaking and appropriations. If Congress alone answered directly to the people and the President answered only to Congress, then it might be feasible to make the appointed officials answerable only to the President. But our constitutional plan does not feature such a chain of command. The people elect Congress to make public policy and fund the operations of government, but they elect the President to share in these acts. The congressmen may boast that they are closer to the people, but the President may retort that he is the only officer chosen by the entire nation. When Congress and President are at loggerheads on an important issue of policy, the President may conceive that he rather than Congress correctly reads the wishes of the people.

A desire for orderliness prompts us to demand that the chief administrative officials report to a single authority, and the design of our government makes the President alone a suitable candidate for that responsibility. But if we give the President full command of administration, we combine in one office a persuasive influence in making public policy and a commanding influence in its execution. The President thus becomes co-determiner of how the ends of government shall finally be realized. The joinder of power to make public policy with the power to execute it is the first requisite for despotism. And the joinder of these powers in a single official has long been recognized as an invitation to dictatorship. Yet this is a condition toward which the American people have been marching for a full century, and a condition that many political scientists urge us to bring to full realization without further delay.

This is the dilemma. If the chief executive, having the great mass of administrative power (the bureaucracy) under him, does not conform to the policies made by the elected policy making authority, dictatorship is incipient. But the chief executive who commands that mass of bureaucratic power is himself the acknowledged leader of the policy makers and has the greatest prestige of all of them. How are we to resolve this dilemma? How can we

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.