Bureaucratization

Bureaucracy in the United States

A federal bureaucracy remained largely undeveloped until the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–37), when an informal process of institutional regulation was replaced by a formalized administrative system. The emergence and expansion of a federal bureaucracy was a consequence of the implementation of universal white-male suffrage. In an age characterized by political majority rule by white men, power had to be abstracted, divided, recombined, and allocated —a process that required a formalization of administrative hierarchies, a specialization of administrative procedures, a division of responsibilities, and an explicit definition of jurisdiction and powers. This bureaucratization of government was instrumental in shaping a democratic and national system of political organization.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, antebellum moral reformers who had gained positions of power adopted an ideal of a masculine “scientific morality,” which combined moral imperatives with abstract standards of bureaucratic efficiency and rational performance. This ideal significantly informed the policies of the Freedmen's Bureau, created in 1865, and of the Civil Service Commission, created by the 1883 Pendleton Act, which set out to regularize the process of selecting and appointing federal office holders. With the rise of the corporation in the late nineteenth century, processes of bureaucratic governance quickly spread into the private sector as well.

The idea that government should be in the hands of trained administrators instead of partisan legislators received [Page 76]a boost during the Progressive Era and the “managerial revolution” of the New Deal, both of which saw a host of new bureaucratic agencies emerge, including the Federal Reserve Board (1913) and the Social Security Administration (1935). In the 1930s and 1940s, private businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and labor unions (which all began to interact and cooperate more closely with the emerging corporate state) increasingly adopted bureaucratic forms of governance. By 1945, bureaucratization had transformed much of the public and private sectors in the United States.

Bureaucratization received a new boost in the 1960s, when the federal government added 400,000 new positions and state and local governments added another 4 million new jobs. The decade also witnessed a dispersion of administrative functions from the federal to the local level, and a subsequently closer intertwining of federal, state, and local governments. As part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society program, as well as his War on Poverty, the federal government funded over 150 Community Action Agencies under the Community Action Program. Built on an idea of “maximum feasible participation,” these programs localized bureaucracy and accountability. Johnson's Creative Federalism and Richard Nixon's New Federalism appeared to work against centralization of power, but actually promoted a dissemination of bureaucracy. Despite attempts to stem bureaucratization through deregulation in the 1980s and the new populism that emerged in the 1990s, attempts to control bureaucracies have usually led to the creation of new bureaucracies.

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