The Bureaucracy: The Cleverest Lobby of Them All

...As the aide of one senator who has a record of unfailing backing for the programs of “his” bureaucracy told me, “My senator gets elected for what he supports on behalf of organized groups, not for what he dismantles on the public’s behalf...

...And Congress would seem to be almost the last bastion of defense the public has against the expanding size and power of the bureaucracy...

...Well, the President has problems holding it down all across the line, and I’m with him all the way...

...Somehow, the President turns out to be a busy man...

...His desire to have the states take over an increasing share of the responsibilities for their cities runs into one of the bogeys of bureaucracy: the transfer of power to other jurisdictions...

...Inevitably, the most loyal administration appointee loosens his muzzle when speaking into receptive congressional ears...

...As soon as’ the OMB gives the agency its preliminary guidelines, those bureaucratic fiefdoms within the agency who stand to get less than they hoped for crank up the lobbying machinery...

...The Natural Ally ~~~ Suspicion of the bureaucracy is so deep-seated in the grass roots of the country that running against the bureaucracy is one of the traditional rites of electioneering...

...Conference of Mayors began 52 to appear in newspapers and on television, and other groups obtained audiences with the President to impress upon him their support of some of Harris’s proposed programs...

...Just as the Labor Department maintains a cozy relationship with the AFL-CIO, HUD has a whole battery of client organizations, such as the National Housing Conference, the U.S...

...A former HUD assistant secretary, now with an interest group, told me that the bureaucracy will often take the idea for a new program to its contacts in the “support” groups before turning it into a legislative proposal...

...In anticipation of power struggles with each new administration, the bureaucracy’s first order of business is the taming and gradual absorption of political appointees...

...they listen, outwardly rapt, inwardly yawning at this formula speech...

...The bureaucrats, strictly speaking, don’t lobby the President-they get someone else to do it...

...A Little Give and Take The support lobbies are particularly valuable to the bureaucracies at budget time (which, considering that agencies regard budget preparation and requests for supplemental appropriations as their first priority, is virtually all year round...

...The officer had just testified in House hearings in support of a rather modest defense budget proposed by the administration...

...The Gain or Loss of Power Reorganization is always an area of sharp conflict between a President and the various bureaucracies...

...It’s not that the organized groups control the voters-for the most part, they don’t...

...Lauren Selden, a spokesman for the AARP and the National Retired Teachers will say only that the associations changed their position because of Ma...

...She went to talk with the AARP...

...We have come to an uncomfortable acceptance of the tremendous influence interest groups have on the legislative process...

...But they do have the money to finance an opposing candidate, and a well-heeled opponent is what an incumbent fears the most...

...When the HUD bureaucracy leaked Secretary Harris’s conflict with the White House to the press, statements from such groups as the U.S...

...David Broder, as the President was preparing to present his 1979 budget, reported: “Washington Post reporters have been called in the past week by agency officials or leaders of allied interest groups to warn of possible budgecide all across the government, affecting everything from foreign aid to assorted minor programs run by the Energy and HEW Departments...

...Some people here, however, think it would be more effective with a slight switch in emphasis...

...newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post have contactssome high, some low-within the bureaucracy of every agency, who supply them a wealth of detail on the damage the cuts will cause...

...Joseph Califano, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, did not throw his hat very high into the air at Carter’s proposal for a separate Department of Education...

...Long,Standing Relationships Congressmen and their committee staffs deal on a daily basis with representatives of the bureaucracy...

...An almost complete coincidence of interests exists between these committees and the bureaucracies they monitor...

...New initiatives are what the chief needs if he is ever going to get the President’s attention...

...All Cabinet officers had been under presidential instruction to avoid expensive new initiatives...

...The chief finds that his day is spent with his subordinates, the senior bureaucrats...

...The American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, aided by the House Veterans Affairs Committee, and urged on, one can assume, by the Veterans Administration, have successfully lifted veterans’ educational programs out of the proposed department...

...Add to these the “think tanks” like the Brooking Institution, the Harvard-MIT Center for Joint Studies, and various university centers that receive study grants from HUD, on the basis of which they develop reports often suggesting new programs...

...Among these were responsibilities for administering the provisions of the Equal Pay Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act that are currently held by the Department of Labor...

...Leonard Reed is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...These top aides know their field, they understand federal budget jargon, they know how to get things done, and they have what appear to be workable programs to suggest...

...Within the agency, then, the call goes out for program proposals from the bureaucracy, with emphasis on proposals that support presidential priorities...

...But, I have to admit I’m disappointed in what he’s come up with for us...

...is going to cut the bureaucrats down t o size and bring them under control (although, tongue in cheek, he tells them that they are the experts...

...It’s important to tell them what’s in it for them and to get them on board while you’re developing legislation,” he said...

...What the administration .fears is illustrated by the account Senator Charles Mathias gives of a session that Carl Vinson, when he was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, held in his office with a high-ranking Navy officer...

...Perhaps fortunately, much of its energy is dissipated in intramural squabbles-both within the same department, like, for example, the Thirty-Year War between the FBI and the Justice Department and the Voice of America vs...

...whatever their flaws, senior bureaucrats don’t get there by being dopes...

...Career bureaucrats know how to protect their flanks while, nevertheless, getting their message across...

...For committee staff members, dealing directly with senior civil servants with whom they have long-standing relationships is an important part of their work...

...So while candidates talk economy, incumbents know that the votes lie in spending...

...The bureaucrats are not interested in the publicity for its own sake but for its power to mobilize the interest groups to take action aimed at influencing the President...

...The loss of a bureaucracy’s power or influence through a cutting of its budget or a threatened reorganization translates into a similar loss for the key members of the subcommittee...

...the bureaucracy is also encouraged, however, to hropose additional programs...

...The power structure of Congress is built on the committee system and the bureaucracies constitute the raison d’etre of the subcommittees...

...The bureaucrats, strictly speaking, don’t lobby the President-they get someone else to do it...

...The President is then confronted with a powerful bloc supporting an expensive program proposal in which he may have little interest and that was generated entirely by the bureaucracy...

...Selden denies being lobbied by the Labor Department, saying only that the Labor Department “solicited our views...

...Part of the conflict centers about the spending programs Hams wants...

...The rest consists of the bureaucracy and the political appointees, who, except for those on the White House staff, soon find themselves absorbed into it...

...It is a problem, but it is at least one that the public can recognize and, perhaps, confront...

...According to the plan, the agency brings its proposed legislative program back to OMB, a little give and take occurs, and then, like good soldiers, the agency officials accept the decision...

...However, he has brought up the idea of including the veterans’ program in the new department on several occasions in the past few weeks...

...Well, the agency position is that the legislation should be drafted this way,” the bureaucrat may say, “and the rationale is thus and so...

...Vinson ushered him into his office, sat him down and said, “And, now, Admiral, take off your muzzle...

...The Washington Post on March 5 reported the unkind rumor that Califano publicly raised the prospect of taking over those programs “in order to covertly stir up veterans’ opposition that could block the creation of the new department...

...The budget process is supposed to work something like this: The Office of Management and Budget lets the agencies know roughly how big the whole pie is this year, what the President’s priorities are, and about how much less or more than its current appropriation the agency should base its proposals on...

...Throw in, too, the fact that each subcommittee has exactly the same constituency as its counterpart bureaucracy : the urban coalitions, for example, which have a mutually supportive liaison with HUD, maintain a similar relationship with the House Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development...

...His patron is the President, with whom, he is certain, he will have an intimate relationship...

...The interest groups have motivations ranging from a simple and ravenous appetite for the buck to the relative altruism of the Sierra Club in its patronage of the Environmental Protection Agency or the work on behalf of the foreign aid bureaucracy done by the League of Women Voters and the American Association of University Women...

...We have come to an uncomfortable acceptance of the tremendous influence interest groups have . . . The bureaucracy, of course, is not a monolith...

...He discovers that they are a surprisingly capable and intelligent group of people...

...Conference of Mayors, the National League of Cities, and a host of associations rep resenting homebuilders, mortgage bankers, and savings and loans as well as a shifting pattern of coalitions with a big stake in urban spending...

...Hams proposed and adamantly insisted upon programs for 1979 that would cost about 40 per cent more than the White House’s Office of Management and Budget had allowed for...

...The example too obvious to dwell on is the Defense Department, with the huge contracts it holds out to an eager and powerful clientele...

...Information Agency, or between contending jurisdictions reaching out for the same prize...

...The AARP decided not to send the letter and to support the rebrganization...

...In real life what happens is quite different...

...The bureaucracy of the department was not amused and, according to a congressional committee staff member, lobbied extensively with organized labor, women’s groups, and senior citizens’ organizations to have them take a position against the plan and launch mail campaigns to Congress and the m i t e House...

...Eleanor Holmes Norton, director of the EEOC, got wind of the letter...

...Each bureaucracy has its own constituency that it helps support and upon whose support it relies in its battles-battles in which the enemy is often the administration...

...And it has to be attractive to as many of these groups as are needed for the formation of what we call a critical mass-large enough to swing the necessary bloc of votes in Congress...

...the U.S...

...It is more difficult to deal with because it is submerged from public view...

...The process by which appointees, right up to the Secretary of the Department, are gradually integrated into the bureaucratic camp is a familiar one to any federal manager...

...It consists of the bureaucracy obeying its most basic impulses-the deep desire of the eager bureaucrat to do much more for the public than the public need requires...

...According to the same source, the following sequence of events took place (our camera isolating just one part of the action): The OMB task force discussed its plan with the American Association of Retired People and came away convinced that th6 group would support the reorganization...

...Frequently, the alternate approach then suggested is one the senior bureaucrat fought for 54 and lost in discussions with his political superiors...

...Open Conflict Through such identification, for example, Patricia Roberts Hams, Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, has gradually come into a position of more or less open conflict with the President who appointed her...

...Each successive administration, while recognizing the necessity and inevitability of the bureaucracy’s con‘Well, the agency position is that the legislation should be drafted this way,’ the bureaucrat may say, ‘and the the rationale is thus and so...

...Some people here, however, think it would be more effective with a slight switch in emphasis...

...As his relationship with the senior career servants grows more respectful, intimate, and dependentas he begins to feel a genuine need to be liked and respected by them-the appointee’s identification with their expansionist drive begins to place him in a somewhat different role vis-a-vis the President...

...Norton’s strong promise of commitment of fesources to the age discrimination aspect of the proposd and her promise to appoint an advisory committee from the senior citizens’ groups to help administer the program...

...Some Labor Department officials then talked with the AARP, which shortly thereafter drafted a letter to the White House opposing the plan...

...It is effective because the bureaucracy is familiar with the levers of power and good at manipulating them...

...dealings with bureaucrats-especially if those bureaucrats are conducting a sub rosa campaign against an administration proposal...

...If that imtated the President, one of his notions set the Secretary’s teeth on edge...

...We are less cognizant that the collusion that takes place between these groups and the bureaucracy makes the latter a legislative power in its own right...

...Almost before the agency officials leave the OMB office, the press is alerted to any proposed cut...

...They will call on civil servants for their off-the-record views on administration proposals, for advice, and for advance warning of any conflicts between the career bureaucrats and the political leadership of the agency...

...There are two kinds of lobbying that government employees do...

...With or without the acquiescence of its chief, a threatened bureaucracy will muster the support of its allies to protect its interests...

...The budget...

...Responsibility for the Carter administration’s plan for civil rights reorganization was given to an OMB task force, which came up with a blueprint that centralized various antidiscrimination functions in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission...

...Political appointees The executive branch of the federal government has been described as two-and-one-half million people of whom one (two if you count the vice president separately) has been elected...

...It should be noted that no competent spokesman for interest groups can afford to make public his The power structure of Congress is built on the Committee system and the bureaucracies cons ti tu te the raison d’etre of the subcommittees...

...The second is less well known, more important, and potentially more dangerous...

...as often as not, however, the political leadership of the agency so thoroughly identifies with the top stratum of civil servants that the bootlegged modification of the administration’s legislation represents a common position...

...In fact, Congress is the natural ally of the bureaucracy in its expansionism and in its subterranean war with the President...

...The process by which appointees, right up to the Secretary of the Department, are gradually integrated into the bureaucratic camp is a familiar one to any federal manager...

...Indeed, unless he is the rare Cabinet member who comes with his own agenda, when he does see the President his ideas will be those of his subordinates...

...The new chief comes in feisty, convinced that he...

...Typically, a ranking political appointee will bring with him to the congressman’s office a senior bureaucrat who has at his fingertips the facts about a proposed piece of legislation...

...What is involved for the bureaucracies is the gain or loss of power, prestige, and funds...

...For every bureaucracy there is either a congressional subcommittee to “oversee” it or one whose legislative work meshes with it...

...Their lawyers draft the agreed-upon legislation, which the White House then sends to Congress...

...The first, and most familiar, involves working through unions to get increased pay and benefits...

...But every bureaucracy has alliances with special interest groups (and congressional committees, about which more later...

...Relationships are likely to be personal and intimate, with officials of HUD frequently being chosen from these organizations or leaving HUD to take posts in them...

...Califano has repeatedly denied this...

...I had hoped...

...tacts with Congress, as well as with the interest groups, tries-with uniform lack of success-to place constraints on the bureaucracy’s use of these exchanges for its own purposes...

...They will be joined by bureaucrats from the Departments of Agriculture and Defense, which have big education programs they don’t want lifted out, and from the Department of Labor, which has its own training programs...

...HEW bureaucrats opposed to the idea will not be alone as they conduct a sub rosa battle to scuttle the plan...