Written Assignment 15

The nature of federal government in the United States emphasizes the checks and balances that each branch has over the other. Explain the checks on the powers of Congress and the President that the Supreme Court has, and the checks on the powers of the Supreme Court that each of these other branches has. In your opinion, does this system work well? Why or why not? Your answer should fill at least to full pages of 8.5x11 paper, and be handed in at the beginning of class on Monday, June 25.

Written Assignment 14

What changes to foreign and military policy have occurred because of the threat of terrorism? You should be able to find and discuss at least two changes. Your answer should fill at least to full pages of 8.5x11 paper, and be handed in at the beginning of class on Monday, June 25. 

Making Foreign Policy

I)    Making Foreign and Military Policy

A)    Kinds of Foreign Policy

1)      Majoritarian Policies—confer benefits and costs on almost everyone—questions like war and peace, and arms control treaties are the best examples.

2)      Interest Group Politics—where some groups promote a particular policy that an opposing group actively works against. Policies like free trade, which are promoted by business groups that export products, but are opposed by environmental and labor groups because they view it as working against their interests, are the best examples.

3)      Client Politics—best illustrated by the example of a corporation doing business overseas that gets favorable tax breaks because of it, or the relationship between Israel and the United States, which initially was reliant upon the political power the Jewish bloc held in the United States.

B)    Constitutional Framework of Foreign Policy

1)      President—the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces

2)      Congress—granted the power by the Constitution to declare war—and, perhaps more importantly, also granted the power of the purse.

(a)    War Powers Act (1973)—in the wake of the Vietnam War, Congress attempted to wrest back from the President some of the power they gave away in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This law has not been directly challenged; presidents from Ford onward have refused to acknowledge that Congress has any control over the commitment of US troops anywhere in the world, and Congress has proven reluctant to challenge that perception.

(b)   Congressional Oversight of Intelligence—has also not exactly worked as planned, since the Congressional committees charged with oversight usually simply rubber stamp the action taken. If the pathetic attempt that became known as the Iran-Contra Affair is any indication, even when handed a smoking gun Congress is reluctant to act in a decisive manner.

3)      State Department—headed by the Secretary of State, and is nominally independent of the President, although they usually work closely with the president.

4)      National Security Council—the White House’s foreign policy team.

5)      Defense Department—now plays a much larger role in gathering intelligence, and also rivals the State Department for influence upon the president in formulating foreign policy.

C)    The New International Order

1)      The Old Bipolar World—from the end of WWII to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cold War Struggle was viewed as a struggle between two world super powers—the Unites States and the Soviet Union.

(a)    Using client states—although the US and the USSR never directly confronted one another, they willingly used proxies to attempt to best the other, like in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

2)      9/11—the successful terrorist attack has shaped US foreign policy, largely negatively, in my view.

(a)    “Pre-emptive strikes”—George W. Bush codified and expanded a policy that originated during the Clinton administration, promising to take unilateral action, if necessary, to prevent another such attack.

(b)   Iraq War—while Iraq was reluctant, and did harass UN inspectors, it did cooperate with those inspectors, eventually—who found nothing that the US alleged the Iraqi government was hiding. In fact, the US and its “coalition of the willing” had to wait for those inspectors to leave the country before it could launch an attack.

D)    Three Major Problems

1)      Nation Building—the US has had a mixed record when it comes to nation building; it works best, it seems, in economically advance countries, when the country had enjoyed a relatively stable government in the recent past—and less successfully when those conditions were absent.

2)      Foreign Policy and Terrorism—in only 5 of the 14 major wars the US had been involved in have been fought after obtaining a formal declaration of war by Congress.

(a)    Gaining Congressional approval or not seems largely contingent upon the side of the commitment and its duration.

(b)   Governing principles

3)      Changing the Military—the armed forces are organized to fight other military forces—not terrorist organizations. In the wake of 9/11, much attention had been paid to plans to re-organize the military; perhaps some thought should be spent upon asking whether the use of the military against a terrorist threat is the right strategy, or not.

E)     Politics of Foreign and Military Policy

1)      Majoritarian politics—in the bipolar world of the 20^th century, the perception of danger was usually high enough to get the American people to “rally ‘round the flag,” with the end of the Soviet threat, open opposition to some aspects of foreign policy is much more prevalent.

III)  Conclusion

Written Assignment 13

Domestic policy is determined by a variety of factors. Discuss at least three of these factors in your paper, exploring how they work to shape domestic policy. Your answer should fill at least to full pages of 8.5x11 paper, and be handed in at the beginning of class on Monday, June 25.

Making Domestic Policy

I)       Making Domestic Policy

A)    Politics and the Economy—presidents try to achieve a healthy (growing) economy all of the time, but that is not always achievable. Whether employment is growing or falling, and whether business investment is growing is often beyond the control of the president in a free market, capitalist economy.

1)      What Economic Numbers Hurt the President?

(a)    Unemployment—rising unemployment figures or a decline in the gross domestic product makes even employed people less willing to support the incumbent government.

B)    How the Government Tries to Manage the Economy—despite the fact the president gets top-notch advice from the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) and Congress from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it is impossible to know how the economy is going to perform more than a few month out—and we often can’t tell when a recession begins, or even ends, until months after the event.

1)      The Federal Reserve Board—the Fed is, in theory, a relatively free agent; 7 members are appointed for 14-year terms, with one appointed as the chair (and head of the New York City Federal Reserve Bank) for a 4 year term as the president of the Board. The Fed is charged largely to determine the interest rate it charges member banks for short-term loans that ensure liquidity in the credits system—the so-called “prime rate.” This in turn affects the interest rate banks charge customers for loans on houses, cars, and other consumer debt. This is how the money supply is regulated, which in turn is also used to control inflation; the higher the interest rate the Fed charges banks, the tighter the money supply, which in turn slows the growth of the economy—and vice versa.

2)      Fiscal Policy—the taxing and spending policies undertaken by government is known as fiscal policy. Ideally, in a recession, the government policy would entail increasing spending and decreasing taxation; in periods of inflation, the government would act to slow the economy by decreasing spending and increasing taxation. Obviously, the latter policy is not very popular with the American people, and therefore most politicians are reluctant to embrace it, even when it is needed. With the re-emergence of conservative small-government advocates in the late 1970s, it has gotten even more difficult to raise taxes—not only at the federal level, but at the state and local levels, as well.

(a)    Supply-side economics—part of the legitimization for the Reagan tax cuts was the theory of supply-side economics, which said that by decreasing tax rates, government could spur the economy enough to put more people to work, which would cause the economy to grow, putting more people to work, and actually increase tax revenue. The application of this theory, however, resulted in the Reagan Recession, which saw unemployment reach 25 percent in some areas, and the federal deficit to balloon to unheard of levels.

C)    Social Security and Medicare—although the federal government spends its (okay, actually our money) on many things, only 4 of them make up the largest share of the federal budget: Social Security, Medicare, national defense, and interest on the national debt.

1)      Changing Social Security—when Social Security began in 1935, there were 42 workers paying taxes for each beneficiary receiving a check; today, there are about 3.5 workers paying for each beneficiary. This means there is more money being paid out than there is coming in. Politicians have long been aware of this problem, and in fact in the mid-1980s took steps to remedy the situation by creating the Social Security Trust Fund, which took the money raised from a tax increase (during the Reagan Administration!) and investing it in the safest investment in the world—US Treasury notes, which are used to finance the federal government debt. Proposals for “solving” the Social Security “crisis” include:

(a)    Raise the retirement age

(b)   Reduce the benefits for high earners

(c)    Raise Taxes on all workers

(d)   Increase the wage cap

(e)    Let individuals make investments of some or all of their Social Security funds—also known as “privatizing” Social Security.

2)      Social Security Trust Fund—what you hear very little of from the talking heads on television is that the Social Security Trust Fund was set up to handle this shortfall—and the trustees, making the most conservative of estimates, guarantee that it can do so until 2036, according to the trustees latest report—when the last of the baby boomers will be 72 years old. Then the fund will only be able to pay out 75 percent of promised benefits. So, in reality, there is no crisis involving Social Security.

3)      Changing Medicare—when Medicare was passed in 1965, its sponsors said it would cost 12 billion dollars a year (that’s 82 billion in today’s dollars, by the way); in 2007 the government spent 440 billion dollars. These costs have become higher for several reasons: people are living longer (in part because of the better medical care they have been receiving); and new medical and surgical procedures are saving more lives, but often at very high prices.

(a)    Management of Medicare

(b)   Keeping costs low

(c)    Health Savings Account

D)    Making Policy Decisions—each policy has a cost and a benefit; a cost is the burden of a program (whether that be increased taxes, unpleasant regulations, or social stigma), while a benefit is a gain, whether financial or social, that flows to people. Whether a policy has a net benefit or a net cost greatly depends upon one’s ideological perspective or economic or social relationship to what the policy effects.

1)      Majoritarian Politics—politics that promotes widely distributed benefits and costs that make them appeal to a large portion of the populace—like Social Security and Medicare.

2)      Client Politics—helps prospective beneficiaries organize themselves. The best examples are subsidies paid to farmers and dairies, and regulations and tariffs concerning the import of certain food products. The farm lobby is very effective in gaining concessions for their objectives (which they sell as benefiting the family farm, even though most of the beneficiaries are actually corporate farms), but the costs are widely spread out. Sometimes that dynamic changes, however, like the dramatic reform of welfare.

3)      Interest-Group Politics—when a small group gets a lot of benefits and another small group pays most of the cost, both sides have strong incentives to form interest groups to advocate their positions; i.e. labor unions and management from the 1930s-1970s, consumer advocates and manufacturers in the 1960s-1970s.

4)      Entrepreneurial Politics—Often laws are passed that benefit society as a whole over the objections of a small interest group that is responsible for paying most of the cost. The best example are the many environmental and consumer protections laws passed during the 1970s.

E)     What These Political Differences Mean—majorities can be formed by each of these four types of politics. On any given issue, one or another group may be powerful, but no one group is powerful across all issues.

Written Assignment 12

What do you think can be done to improve bureaucratic performance? If you argue that the only way to improve that performance is to cut it, you should assess the ramifications of your proposed cuts would mean. For instance, if food inspection is cut from the Department of Agriculture's budget, what would take its place to ensure the safety of food? Your response should take the form of a 2-3 page paper, and be handed in at the beginning of class next Wednesday, June 20.

The Federal Bureaucracy

I.                   Distinctiveness of the American Bureaucracy

A.    Four Political Distinctions

1.      Political authority shared between president and Congress

2.      Most federal agencies share their functions with related agencies in state and local governments

3.      The expansion of personal and civil rights during the 1960s and 1970s has helped to cause more litigation involving federal bureaus and agencies

4.      The bureaucracy is much smaller in the United States than elsewhere; whereas in Europe the government accounts for about 12 percent of all employment, in the United States public employees make up less than 3 percent.

B.     Growth of the Bureaucracy—the struggle for control of the bureaucracy began in 1789 with the very first session of Congress and the Washington administration, and continues to this day.

1.      Bureaucracy before the New Deal—although the governments in the United States in the early years from its founding were very small, Congress and the executive branch have long fought over who would be appointed to what position.

a.       Patronage—as political faction gave way to political party, appointments to various bureaucratic agencies became a way to reward political party loyalists, and thus began the “spoils system” or patronage system of government.

b.      Civil Service—the patronage system began to be called into question as people began to discover graft and corruption in their government. The assassination of James Garfield by a deranged gunman named Charles Guiteau—who had convinced himself that his relatively minor assistance to the Garfield campaign deserved the award of an ambassadorship—certainly helped propel this trend, and resulted in the passage of the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Act.

c.       Growth of the Bureaucracy—was spurred first by the American Civil War, and then by the rapid industrialization of the country’s economy after the war. The growth of interstate commerce necessitated the growth of a national government along with it. The early agencies, however, did not “regulate” the economy, but rather provided research, gathered statistics, and passed out benefits. It was not until the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission (at the insistence of the railroad industry) that government attempted to regulate the economy by any other method than managing the currency.

d.      Belief in limited government and states’ rights largely kept the government small—even when these beliefs were called into question, it was done in a limited way in order to maintain a great deal of political power in the states.

2.      A Change in Role—occurred as a result of the government’s response to the Great Depression and World War II. Reversing earlier decisions, the Supreme Court (under a great deal of political pressure) began to allow Congress to delegate some of its authority to make whatever decisions were deemed necessary to solve a problem or the serve “the public interest.”

a.       Federal income tax—although the income tax was instituted by the 16^th Amendment in 1913, the federal government really didn’t use it to fund its activities until World War II. Between 1940 and 1945, federal tax collection increased from $5 billion to $44 billion, and did not decrease significantly after the war ended.

b.      Modern growth of bureaucracy—with the New Deal, government began providing many more services than it had previously—and the American people generally approved of this increased service and stability. The postwar “baby boom” meant that the country grew to be much larger than it was before the New Deal, and of course also meant that if government were to continue to provide that level of service, it would need to grow as well.

c.       “Thickening” of government—to meet oversight requirements from both Congress and the Courts, new administrators had to be hired to ensure that new rules and strictures were being followed.

d.      Government bureaucracy tends to be self-perpetuating, in that government agencies, once established, tend to remain in existence. These agencies do not go out of business (generally—although the Post Office may be an exception to this rule) as firms do in the private sector.

II.                Federal Bureaucracy Today

A. Discretionary Authority—the power of the bureaucracy should not be measured by the number of employees, but by their ability to choose courses of action to make policies that are not spelled out in advance by law. If appointed officials have this kind of power, then how they use it is crucial to understanding modern government. There are four broad factors that explains the behavior of these officials:

--The manner in which they are recruited and rewarded

--Their personal attributes, such as their socioeconomic backgrounds and political attitudes.

--The nature of their jobs: roles and missions

--The way in which outside forces—political supervisors, legislators, interest groups, and journalists—influence how the bureaucracy behaves.

           

1. Recruitment and Retention—the federal civil service system was designed to recruit people on the basis of merit, not party patronage, and to retain them on the basis of performance, not political favoritism—and all of this was generally handled by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

                       

 a. Changes in the system—over the years, this system became more decentralized, and now most agencies do their own hiring, and examinations are used less frequently.

                        b. Excepted Service—is defined as being those employees hired outside the competitive service—and now make up about half of all employees in the bureaucracy. Some of these excepted employees—probably not more than 3 percent—are selected by the president for policy-making and politically sensitive posts—much like the old political patronage jobs. These new excepted service jobs fall into three broad categories:

                                    --Presidential appointees authorized by statute

                                    --“Schedule C” jobs, having confidential or policy-determining character

                                    --Non-career executive assignments

                        c. The Buddy System—in upper level positions, recruits are often within the social network of other officials, and are hired because of these connections, in what is known as a “name-request” job.

                        d. Senior Executive Service (SES)—with the passage of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, Congress recognized that many high-level positions in civil service had important policy-making responsibilities, and that the President and his cabinet should have greater discretion and flexibility in recruitment and hiring. SES was suppose to provide that flexibility, while also retaining experienced upper-level management.

                        e. Agency point-of-view—because of the job security civil service provides, many employees spend their entire work lives within a single agency, and develop an “agency point-of-view” on most matters.

            2. Personal attributes—Social class, education, and personal political beliefs all shape how bureaucrats behave.

                       

a. Upper-level bureaucrats tend to be white, better educated, and more affluent than the average American (kind of like their contemporaries in the private sector).

                        b. Bastion of “liberalism”—upper level bureaucrats also tend to have more liberal political view than does the “average” American. This is probably due to their willingness to devoted themselves to a career in government bureaucracy, where compensation tends to be lower than in the private sector, but workers are compensated by the feeling that they are helping to create a better society.

            3. Roles and Mission—People are often drawn to work within a particular government agency because of their interest in the particular realm over which the agency holds sway. Because of this, they are likely to adhere to the sense of mission or the role that a particular agency develops—as long as they sense that the agency is attempting to fulfill that mission.

            4. Outside forces—bureaucrats do not operate in a vacuum. There are at least seven external forces with which a government bureau must cope:

                        --Executive branch superiors (like cabinet officers)

                        --White House staff

                        --Congressional committees

                        --Interest groups

                        --The media

                        --The courts

                        --Rival government agencies

            At the most general level, government agencies can be divided into two main groups: those oriented toward presidential control (which tend not to have local constituencies) and those oriented toward Congressional control (which tend to have local constituencies —that is to say, decisions they make tend to have an effect locally)

                        a. Desire for autonomy—government bureaucrats, like people generally, prefer to be left alone so they can do their work as they wish. When this occurs, we say that the bureau has autonomy—but it generally can only maintain that autonomy as long as autonomy does not lead to complacency.

                        b. Agency allies—Government bureaus and agencies often develop relationships with interest groups concerned with the mission of the bureau or agency. While claims are often made that a particular agency has been “captured” by a particular interest group, it is probably closer to the truth to note that the agency is part of an issue network, in which there are a number of players.

III. Oversight

A. Congressional Oversight—Some interest groups are important to agencies because these interest groups are also important to Congress. But Congress is more important to the bureaucracy because Congress controls the budgets of these agencies.

            1. The Appropriations Committee and Legislative Committees—because an agency budget has to both be authorized and appropriated, each agency serves not one master but several, and have to remain cognizant of that fact.

            2. Congressional Investigations—as part of its oversight powers, Congress has also asserted the power to investigate various agencies to ensure that they are operating according to the way they were envisioned to operate.

B. Bureaucratic “Pathologies”—the difficulties we sometimes face in working with bureaucracies are often explained by referring to government “red tape” that prohibits government from functioning efficiently. There are also famous examples of government purchasing items from contractors that they could simply purchase in a store for much less. What gets left out in these stories are that these examples is that much of this red tape is created by Congressional oversight, and many of these “cost-overruns” are in reality accounting requirements.