The Federal Bureaucracy

Abstract

In 1978 at the passage of the Carter Administration’s Civil Service Reform Act, the president and others declared that the reform prepared the bureaucracy to move into the next century and equipped it well for whatever challenges might come its way. That rosy optimism was countered almost immediately by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980; the succeeding years produced many additional “bumps.” Under Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton the federal bureaucracy was downsized, reorganized, reengineered, reinvented and even closed down for a short period of time (Ingraham, 1997). Many federal programs endured substantial budget cuts and some, such as the Energy Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have had their very existence questioned. Where does the federal bureaucracy, as a set of institutions, stand today?