Research the federal bureaucracy, building on the lessons presented for this week, and then consider the issue of global warming.
Which federal agencies and cabinet departments are most important in determining the existence and causes of climate change?
Secondly, which ones formulate and execute policies in response to assertions of climate change?
Req. Reading
Lesson 6: Federal Bureaucracy
“Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.”
-John Maynard Keynes
“If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you, but the bureaucracy won’t.”
-Hyman Rickover, Admiral
Expected Outcomes
To understand the evolution of the federal bureaucracy and its role in American society; to understand the politicization of the bureaucracy; and to critically evaluate important bureaucratic decisions.
Overview
Bureaucracy is a necessary part of any complex society, as bureaucracies organize, compartmentalize and standardize the many tasks required of modern society: garbage collection; road maintenance; the issuance of drivers’ licenses; the maintenance of clean water; national defense; immigration, etc…
The United States now has over 310 million people, a growth that has fueled the size of the federal bureaucracy. Also, the federal government occupies an increasingly central role in American life, meaning that bureaucracy is getting larger.
A “bureaucracy” is a term employed to refer to governmental bureaus or departments which are part of the Executive Branch (under the authority of the president), but mostly staffed with non-elected officials. Bureaucracies are compartmentalized, marked by a hierarchical authority among numerous offices and by fixed “standard operating procedures.” (see Max Weber)
Most political scientists recognize that bureaucracies are inherently expansive, that is, they seek to grow into the future. Clearly, the federal bureaucracy in Washington, DC, has grown enormously since the New Deal and World War II. Americans tend to dislike bureaucracy, but many are also dependent upon their services, and even the general public depends upon a functioning Food and Drug Administration, for example. As data reveal, the federal bureaucracy has grown substantially over the past 60 years – far outstripping the growth rate of the U.S. population.
The following is a list of Executive Branch departments, many of which have more departments under its internal administration.
Executive Branch Departments
Department of Agriculture (USDA)
Department of Commerce (DOC)
Department of Defense (DOD)
Department of Education (ED)
Department of Energy (DOE)
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
Department of Justice (DOJ)
Department of Labor (DOL)
Department of State (DOS)
Department of the Interior (DOI)
Department of the Treasury
Department of Transportation (DOT)
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)
Of these, the Department of Homeland Security is the largest department because it assimilated pre-existing organizations under an umbrella department:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
U.S. Coast Guard
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
U.S. Secret Service
Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US CERT)
Domestic Nuclear Detection Office
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
To learn more about the federal bureaucracy, check out the Official US Executive Branch website. To learn more about the creation of Executive Branch departments, visit this CRS Report on Executive Departments.
One aspect common to many if not most bureaucracies is their location in what political scientists call an “iron triangle” of power and influence.
“Iron triangle” is a legacy term used by political scientists to describe the policy-making relationship between the legislature, the bureaucracy, and interest groups. On the Federal level, the phrase refers to the United States Congress – in particular, the congressional committees responsible for oversight of specific industries – along with the Federal agencies (often independent agencies) responsible for regulation of those industries, and the industries and their trade associations.
Central to the concept of an iron triangle is the assumption that bureaucratic agencies, as political entities, seek to create and consolidate their own power base. The result is a three-way alliance – the iron triangle – that is sometimes called a sub-government because of its power to determine policy. However, in the 21st century with advances in communication (to include Internet social media), the iron triangle concept has become less applicable as a model of reality.
Different scholars and political scientists will select different case studies regarding federal bureaucracy. The ones chosen here are those that are most relevant to the entire course and have been selected because of general interest.
Current Controversies Regarding the Federal Bureaucracy
Just as controversy is endemic to the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches of government, so too does debate swirl around various bureaucracies – over their missions, their budgets and the degree of their politicization. By examining these controversies, we open up a window into the relationship of the bureaucracies to the three main branches of government: Legislative, Executive and Judicial.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
The FDA evolved out of public concern over the safety of the food supply in the early 20th century. In part, this concern was provoked by Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book, The Jungle, about slaughterhouses that ground up sick and pregnant cows – along with other stomach-turning items.
The FDA is in a difficult position. On the one hand, it must safeguard the nation’s supply of food and drugs. On the other hand, it often feels the need, or the political pressure, to approve certain goods and services in order to maintain a healthy food and drug industry.
Many of the FDA’s decisions end up being political ones. A few decades ago, the FDA experienced intense political controversy regarding tobacco. Was it a drug? Should tobacco companies be prevented from advertising on television? Should government researchers testify in court against tobacco companies? “Joe Camel” garnered controversy for allegedly pitching to teens and children.
The anti-tobacco movement was mostly a liberal movement, strongest on the East and West coasts. Several California cities, for example, have even banned smoking in one’s own home, in one’s yard, or in one’s car, in an apparent infringement on personal liberty.
The FDA ended up cracking down on tobacco, and some consumer groups hope that it similarly enforces strict standards regarding food safety, genetically-modified food and cloned food, for example.
The FDA used to regularly balance the interests of industry and consumers, reaching a compromise, but in the past decade the FDA has begun to side with industry and against consumer groups on a more regular basis, sparking controversy.
Interestingly, it is not just liberals and progressives fighting the food industry’s efforts to advance genetic modification (GM). Christian and evangelical groups are often opposed to tinkering with DNA on theological grounds, claiming that such modifications alter the fundamentals of God’s design. In sum, elements of the far left and the far right are united in efforts to resist GM food and even the “chipping” of farm animals.
These liberal and conservative groups are concerned about the deterioration of food quality generally. The FDA, for instance, has let Congress grant more chemicals exemptions from inclusion on food labels. One of these includes a drug for soft drinks that tricks the taste buds into sensing sugar. The FDA also cooperated with industry and Congress to help pass “National Uniformity for Food Act,” which eliminated strong state standards and replaced them with much weaker federal ones.
A related agency, the USDA, also caved to political pressure and now forbids beef producers from advertising “hormone-free” meat, because the major slaughterhouses fear that universal testing by minor beef producers would raise industry standards (and cost more money).
Another controversy emerged when, under pressure from the meat and dairy industry, the FDA changed the name “irradiation” (a process using low levels of radiation to kill germs but which might genetically alter the food) to “cold pasteurization.”
Finally, the FDA recently moved to approve milk and food from cloned animals, even though such animals live about half the time as normal animals – perhaps suggesting, to some, something fundamentally wrong with cloned cows and pigs. For these consumer groups, the FDA added insult to injury by not requiring food companies to label the food as genetically modified.
Excerpt from “The Plural of Cow is Cow” – A Critique of the FDA
From Biotech Empire
Meat from cloned animals – untested and unlabeled – is coming to supermarkets in the United States. A headline from The New York Times:
F.D.A. Says Food from Cloned Animals Is Safe
“After years of delay, the Food and Drug Administration tentatively concluded yesterday that milk and meat from some cloned farm animals are safe to eat. That finding could make the United States the first country to allow products from cloned livestock to be sold in grocery stores…
A poll this month from the nonprofit Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found that while most consumers knew little about animal cloning, 64 percent said they were uncomfortable with it, with 46 percent saying they were “strongly uncomfortable.”
According to most dictionary-style definitions, “cloning” is the process of creating an identical copy of an original life form. But clones are not “identical” in the full sense of the word because something gets tweaked during the process of replication, and clones end up being defective copies of the originals.
Many cloned animals die unexpectedly. They differ from normal animals at the cellular level, specifically in the lengths of “telomeres” (cellular structures which prevent a cell’s chromosomes from fusing with those of another). Dolly, for example, was the first sheep to be cloned from an adult somatic cell, and she died prematurely. It seems that copies of originals – and copies of copies – are inherently flawed. What’s true for the Xerox machine is true for life forms.
But then the biological engineers fixed the problem, or so they thought at first. They produced a fresh batch of biologically younger cows – until, alas, they grew up too fast, and accelerated aging did them in…
The FDA, whose parent bureaucracy was founded in 1906, does not test for accelerated aging or any dimension of this technology’s inherent weirdness. The FDA was never in the business of measuring telomeres or other cellular exotica.
So why clone animals for food in the first place? Donald Coover, owner of SEK Genetics, Inc. (a beef cattle semen distribution company), is favorably quoted in an FDA report:
“The consumer is looking for a nutritious and wholesome product provided to them in a repeatable and reliable manner… If a consumer spends $30 on a steak dinner at a restaurant, they expect a great steak, but don’t always get it.”
The quest for standardization in commerce is a familiar story. Henry Ford accomplished the mass production of a homogenous product, the Model-T car. “People can have the Model T in any color,” Ford said, “as long as it’s black.” So the industrial process of Fordism has simply moved from the factory to the farm – and from the farm to the fork.
The Model-T analogy is quite apt. Eric Schlosser, in Fast Food Nation, describes how chains like McDonald’s developed assembly-line kitchens just as most Americans were getting their post-war wheels. Drive-up restaurants soon followed. But mass-produced food led to a decline in food safety and to a sharp rise in obesity and disease. If anyone doubts this, they can view Morgan Spurlock’s brilliant movie, Super Size Me, in which his McDonald’s-only roadtrip landed him in the hospital.
The fast-food industry covets the uniformity and predictability promised by cloning. Cloning aims to impose discipline upon the food supply, particularly upon burgers, whose production at present funnels an entire herd of cows into one burger:
“In just 4 ounces, a typical burger patty is packed with the meat and fat of 50 to 100 cattle from multiple states and two to four countries. Eat two hamburgers a week – as the average American does – and in a year’s time the consumer samples a stampede: 5,200 to 10,400 cattle.”
The common hamburger, mixing the meat of dozens of cows, is bovine goulash. But cloning leads to the exact opposite situation. It will be possible for people the world over to bite into hamburgers made from a singular flawless cow, forever. That’s right: McDonald’s in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Mexico City could all be selling burgers made from the same cow, over and over.
Perhaps Plato was right, and every object has a perfect form, even a cow. Plato did not think that perfection existed here on Earth, but then again Plato did not foresee cloning. As the bio-engineers would have it, cloning promises to progressively tease out Nature’s faults, thus realizing civilization’s quest for the perfect hamburger.
Is cloned meat risky? The FDA insists that cloned livestock is “virtually indistinguishable” from conventional livestock (notice the word “virtually”). In addition to “virtually,” another Orwellian term used by the food industry is this: “substantial equivalence.” The FDA claims that cloned food is “substantially equivalent” to normal food…
The FDA even insists that “cloning doesn’t put any new substances into an animal, so there’s no ‘new’ substance to test.” The FDA’s party line is that cloning is no big deal: “Clones are similar to identical twins, just born at a different time.” 5 Not mentioned in the statement is that the twin born later tends to kick the bucket prematurely. Shared birthday parties, yes, but the FDA fails to plan for separate funeral arrangements…
Most Americans feel that cloned food is unethical, unhealthy or simply disgusting. This is actually the main reason the FDA will not require mandatory labeling. Will some food companies be motivated to issue “Clone Free” labels? The better question is: Will they be allowed to? After all, the label “Hormone Free” for meat is “unapprovable” because FDA sided with the major slaughterhouses, refusing to allow a label that set such high standards.
No solid study exists testing the effect of cloned food on human health, partly because the technology for cloning mammals has only been around since about 1996. One study, however, is about to be launched as a live experiment, with American consumers serving as guinea pigs. The Center for Food Safety describes the situation accurately:
“Animal cloning is a new technology with potentially severe risks for food safety. Defects in clones are common, and cloning scientists warn that even small imbalances in clones could lead to hidden food safety problems in clones’ milk or meat. There are few studies on the risks of food from clones, and no long-term food safety studies have been done… Given that researchers do not understand many of the health problems that arise throughout the lifecycles of cloned animals, the FDA acted irresponsibly in assuming that the foods produced from these animals are safe for humans to eat.”
Furthermore, cloning animals advances the technology for cloning humans. In fact, the word “clone” was coined in 1963, when a biologist and “transhumanist,” or “posthumanist,” J.B.S. Haldane, presented a paper with this grand and sweeping title: Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten-Thousand Years.
As the transhumanists forget, biotechnology has often been harnessed to the abuse of power, and grandiose hopes (and biological ones no less) projected across thousands of years of time reminds one of the racialist ambitions of the Nazis. Animal cloning is specifically reminiscent of Dr. Josef Mengele’s twisted experiments on twins. It’s a fine line between high-tech animal husbandry and human eugenics.
But does the FDA think that animal cloning will lead to human cloning? “The FDA does not believe so..,” the agency said, oddly talking about itself in the third person. Then the FDA concludes with this:
“Additionally, there are unresolved issues regarding the broader social and ethical implications of the use of cloning for humans.”
Well, nothing that can’t be sorted out eventually…
The topic of genetic-engineering and cloning is highly controversial. Civilization has always been involved in “selective breeding” and “animal husbandry,” but only in recent years have scientists created “transgenic” plants and animals with characteristic never possible in nature, like rushing to maturity in half the time. Furthermore, farming never involved animal-and-plant mixtures: “Anti-freeze” fish genes from Arctic flounders are spliced into tomatoes. Farmers were never able to cross the animal-plant divide, but now they can.
While some researchers are in favor of the technology, others think that changing the parts of a complex system is not like changing one wooden plank on a boat (there, it’s more or less still the same boat). They claim that entire system changes or, to be more precise, degenerates. Karen Charman describes the plan in “Force Feeding Genetically Engineered Foods:
“The biotech industry has chosen a slam dunk strategy to gain public acceptance for its products: Slip unlabeled genetically engineered food into the food supply and hope too many people don’t notice or object. Deal with those who do notice and object with an army of “experts” that stand ready to refute any criticisms or critics of the technology. If a lot of people start to object, by that time it should be too late because much of the food supply will already be genetically engineered.”
Of course, reasonable debate exists regarding the safety or dangers of genetically-modified and cloned food. However, in Washington DC, this debate has been hijacked by the political process. Scientists and researchers did not move to rush the approval of GM and cloned food. Lobbyists and bureaucrats did instead.
Now, the latest controversy concerns the FDA not seriously inspecting food imports from China, where sanitation on farms is virtually non-existent. Some farms have been watered with sewage, and animals have been fed highly-toxic food substitutes.
Related controversies within the FDA have less to do with food and more to do with drugs.
Serious controversy arose when the FDA – feeling industry pressure – rushed a series of drugs to market with various types of fast-track approval procedures only to have to recall them later because they were unsafe: Vioxx, Rezulin, Bextra, Baycol, Serzone, etc… The FDA also received media scrutiny when it delayed printing black-box warnings on anti-depressants, because of industry fears.
A high-ranking doctor, Dr. David Graham, “defected” from the FDA and testified to Congress:
“As currently configured, the FDA is not able to adequately protect the American public. It’s more interested in protecting the interests of industry. It views industry as its client, and the client is someone whose interest you represent…
Industry money is influencing the decisions that get made, and it creates this incentive structure. You have this culture, you have these expectations, you have pressure from Congress. All of them come to a head at the FDA and all of those incentives are in the direction of “approve the drug.”
Most recently, consumer groups have criticized the FDA for allowing pharmaceutical companies to aggressively market sleeping pills, anti-depression pills, anti-obesity pills and male-potency pills – even on television.
These groups also criticize the FDA for allowing pharmaceutical to “invent” new “diseases” and then sell pills to cure them: “Restless Leg Syndrome” is a commonly-cited example. All of this, critics charge, is “Big Pharma” engaging in “disease mongering” for profits, much like McDonald’s or Burger King periodically releasing a new burger – and the FDA is permitting it, the charge goes.
The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy
The EPA is now central to several political controversies regarding global warming and, by extension, the national use of petroleum (which also involves the Department of Energy).
The theory of global warming is highly controversial. Scientists and conservative politicians disagree sharply over the degree of actual global warming on the planet and the degree to which it might be artificially-induced. For some, global warming is the most urgent and pressing public policy decision the world faces; for others, it is a giant hoax.
Global warming is the observed increases in the average temperature of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, centered on the 20th and 21st centuries. Apparently, the average near-surface atmospheric temperature rose 0.6 ± 0.2 ° Celsius (1.1 ± 0.4 ° Fahrenheit) in the 20th century. This is thought to be due to either the release of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, which traps the sun’s rays and heats up the planet, or to a natural heating up of the sun itself.
According to most scientists, the temperature increase and increasing levels of carbon dioxide do not fall within the normal parameters of previous cycles of global climate. They tend to approve of Al Gore’s documentary about global warming and heed his call for the Congress to do something about it, namely by mandating that cars achieve more miles to the gallon.
There are a few scientists who claim that the increases are a normal part of the earth’s climate cycle. These scientists claim that Al Gore’s movie is “hype” and, in the popular media, right-wing pundits like Glenn Beck have argued that Al Gore is distorting the facts.
The ongoing debate between those who consider global warming to be a “fact” and those who consider it to be “hype” is carried over into Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency. High-ranking EPA officials have alternately rejected, then accepted, and then rejected the existence of global warming, reflecting the scientific confusion and political winds in Washington.
Another fascinating aspect of this debate concerns the Department of Energy. The question about oil has special relevance in the wake of the new “Peak Oil Model.” According to this model, the world is simply running out of oil, although other scientists claim that the model is false.
Developed by geophysicist M. King Hubbert, the theory predicts that future world oil production will soon reach a peak and then rapidly decline relative to consumption. The actual peak year will only be known after it has passed. Based on available production data, proponents have predicted the peak years to be 1995-2000, or, according to one influential group, 2007 for oil and somewhat later for natural gas. Recently, there has been much speculation that the world is approaching, or is even now at, the peak year. Basically, the model postulates that demand is increasing faster than supply. This perception is now changing with the advent of “fracking” – a new method for extracting oil and natural gas.
Many believe that the decreasing oil production portends a drastic impact on human culture and modern technological society, which is currently heavily dependent on oil. Others believe that fears of peak production are exaggerated, much like the fears of world overpopulation.
Back in the 1970s, Paul Erhlich had made “scientific” claims about overpopulation in his book, The Population Explosion, that turned out to be (for most demographers) unfounded. He repeated the claim of Thomas Malthus that human populations would outstrip the food supply and most people would starve.
The Social Security Administration
The New Deal was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression. It is important because many of its basic assumptions remain with us today. High on that list is that people are “entitled” to government assistance in times of crisis. And, for better or for worse, entitlements (medical insurance, pensions, welfare) have increase steadily over the decades.
The Social Security Administration grew out of the New Deal. It is often seen as part of the “welfare state,” even though this is a program in which workers pay into a system that later pays them benefits, after retirement. In a sense, this is much like a forced savings plan.
President Bush, with many Republicans and some Democrats, claim that Social Security will face a severe crisis in 15 years or so. They are not in agreement over how to fix it. But, he is not the first president to raise serious concerns over the Social Security program specifically and over social entitlements generally. President Ronald Reagan also urged a complete “rethink” if you will on the nature of the governmental obligation to an individual.
What are the current concerns over the Social Security program? The basic problem is that too many Baby Boom generation workers are about to retire. The average age of the U.S. is going up. At the same time, there will be fewer workers left to pay for so many retired people. Thus, the Social Security withholdings will rise and eventually, pessimists say, the entire system will go bust.
In a nutshell, President Bush and others have proposed the privatization of a large part of a person’s social security entitlement. This, they say, would enable people to actually earn more money with their investments than with the smaller government paychecks.
Others, however, are skeptical of the plan to privatize Social Security. Private markets can go under too, as has been witnessed in the economic recession of 2008, and there is nothing to prevent a retirement company from declaring bankruptcy. Gamble with other money, these critics insist, but leave Social Security as a public trust and tinker with minor reforms in needed.
The basic elements of the debate are described in a non-partisan article below:
Excerpts from Alan Shapiro’s “The Social Security Controversy”
Over the years there have been amendments to the Social Security system. Today, for example, workers and employers pay a combined 12.4 percent payroll tax on the first $90,000 of a worker’s income, and the retirement age is slowly being raised from 65 to 67.
Social Security is largely a “pay-as-you-go” system: Today’s workers are paying for the benefits of today’s retirees through their Social Security payroll tax. When today’s workers retire, they will be relying on money from the workers of the future. When there is a surplus of money coming into the system, as there is today, that surplus is invested in government bonds. Interest from the bonds goes back into the system’s reserve fund, which then buys more bonds. If money is needed for retiree benefits, the fund can cash in the necessary bonds.
Over time, the number of workers paying into the system in relation to the number of retirees receiving benefits has gone down. During the early years of Social Security there were as many as 42 workers paying into the system for every retiree. But as the country has aged, that ratio has declined. Today about three workers pay into the system for every retiree in Social Security’s “pay-as-you-go” system. The smaller the number of workers in relation to retirees, the smaller the amount paid into the Social Security system. Even so, today’s huge baby boomer generation is currently building up a large surplus in the Social Security trust fund. When those baby-boomers retire, they will begin drawing down that surplus (provided it hasn’t already been spent by the federal government for other purposes).
Most Republicans believe in privatizing many government functions, however, the idea to apply this to Social Security, probably the government’s most popular program, is relatively new. (Social Security has been termed the “third rail” of American politics because, like the third rail in the subway, touching Social Security was thought to result in immediate electrocution.)
In his 2005 State of the Union message (2/2/05), former President Bush outlined some “basic principles” that guided his proposal for reform. He has stated that:
* For those now retired or soon to retire, there would be no change in benefits.
* The aim was to gradually and permanently transform Social Security without raising taxes.
* The new plan would have called for “voluntary private accounts,” allowing younger workers to invest some of their Social Security taxes in the stock market. Bush argued that this would have “given younger workers the opportunity to receive higher benefits than the current system could afford to pay and provide ownership, choice, and the opportunity for younger workers to build a nest egg for their retirement and pass it on to their spouse or their children.”
* The plan would have continued Social Security benefits, as in the past, for those Americans who chose not to have private accounts.
A detailed plan was never provided, nor were specific answers given for a number of major questions. For instance:
* Where would several trillion dollars come from to pay promised retiree benefits while tax money is going into private accounts? (This problem arises because as younger workers siphon away some percentage of their Social Security taxes for their own private accounts, less money will go into the Social Security system to pay current retiree’s benefits.)
* If privatization were instituted, how much would benefits be cut?
* Since private accounts on their own will not solve Social Security’s long-term financial problems, how would proponents of privatization propose to solve them?
* Would society owe anything to people who face poverty in old age because their personal accounts lost money, either due to poor luck in the stock market or because they made poor investment decisions?
These are interesting questions, especially for Americans within sight of retirement. The Social Security Administration will surely play a more central role in American government and society as the population ages and as the political debates mentioned above become louder.
Congressional Oversight
Attached in the Readings section is a Washington Post article discussing the reporting done by the Executive Branch organizations to Congress. This is a fascinating look at how inefficient the federal government can be.
Conclusion
The federal bureaucracy has grown immensely over the past half century in order to address the economic, political and social problems of a nation with over 310 million people.
How much bureaucracy is too much?
Should spending caps be placed on bureaucracies?
To what extent is bureaucracy politicized? How can it be minimized?
These types of questions are becoming increasingly relevant over time.
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