Politics and the administration The structure of the administration – The executive departments – The independent regulatory commissions – Government corporations – The Federal civil service – Congress and the Federal service – Presidential control of the administration – Administration and the Federal system

So far we have been concerned largely with the complex manoeuvres and manipulations related to the formulation of government policy through its various stages, from the electoral process to the point where President and Congress issue their authoritative decisions. All of this has been eminently ‘political’, but in this chapter we turn to an area in which the importance of political influences is just as great but not so obvious. ‘Administration’ may suggest simply the putting into effect of decisions taken elsewhere, and some civil servants and reformers in the past have argued that politics and administration should be kept in quite distinct compartments. According to this view, the civil service should simply be the neutral instrument of the democratically elected politicians, and should not itself have a policy-determining role. There have been attempts in the United States to implement this view, in particular in the case of those agencies that have been given regulatory functions in the industrial and commercial field. The proponents of this view argue that, once its goals have been set for it, the only function of the bureaucracy is to pursue those goals with the maximum efficiency, free from the considerations of personal gain or political advantage that would cloud their judgement or affect their behaviour if they were involved in any way in political intrigues.