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The bureaucracy is unusual because although it is a policymaking institution, it is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. Therefore, who is in control of the bureaucracy is a question that has drawn the attention of many observers. Morris Fiorina, Hugh Heclo, and William Bianco are all political scientists or scholars who address this question with their essays on the topic.

In Morris Fiorina’s essay, entitled “Congressional Control of the Bureaucracy”, Fiorina’s main point is that Congress has the power but not the incentive for “coordinated” control of the bureaucracy, while the president has the incentive but not the power. He states that the president and Congress have different goals and incentives for control. The president’s goals are re-election and a place in history. Members of Congress, on the other hand, just wish to remain where they are. The president’s goals lead him to favor centralized control over the bureaucracy, while the goals of members of Congress lead them to decentralized control. But, Congress is in a stronger position and so decentralized control overcomes centralized control. Congress gives us the kind of bureaucracy it wants. Congress has the power to vote against what a bureaucracy wants, and also Congress can decide the budget for that agency. Therefore, Fiorina concludes that Congress is more in control of the bureaucracy.

Hugh Heclo discusses the weaknesses and the barriers that prevent the president from getting things accomplished in his book, “A Government of Strangers”. Heclo writes about the troubles that the president’s appointees have within the bureaucracy. The president appoints people to departments and agencies to get the things he wants done, but the bureaucracy and our old friend the iron triangle slow these people down and in turn, decrease the amount of control the president has. Appointees get slowed down or even slowed to a halt by bureaucratic sabotage, which is mostly accomplished through the strong structure of the iron triangle. Other forms of this bureaucratic sabotage involve leaking information, often false or tainted with the intent of acquiring a desired result that is usually not good for the appointee, and arranging things with outside ties. Although the iron triangle is hard to break through, appointees retaliate to the sabotage at least enough to weaken the triangle, as Heclo put it, to turn the iron triangle into a “plastic polygon”. From this excerpt of Heclo’s book, it is clear that the president’s control over the bureaucracy is limited.

William T. Bianco expresses a slightly different opinion about the question of who has control over the bureaucracy in his essay “Understanding Congressional Oversight: Police Patrols and Fire Alarms”. Congressional oversight is the way members of Congress can keep track of what bureaucrats are doing and if they are doing a good job. Bianco states that little direct congressional oversight actually occurs; that oversight is lax, or slacking. This means that Bureaucrats are not under that much pressure from Congress, and this gives them some freedom, they can accomplish many things they want or the president wants regardless of what the legislation says to do. This shifts power from the legislative branch over to the executive, so the president gains control. Bianco also makes the point that lack of oversight is what enables iron triangles to exist. Because Congress is unconcerned about what bureaucrats are doing, it enables them to implement policies that are more pleasing to the interests of committee members that are in charge of preparing the agency’s annual budget. This reinforces a relationship and along with organized interests it creates an iron triangle. But, although Congress does not perform a lot of formal investigations over bureaucracies, they have people outside government to do their investigating for them, thus the lack of formal investigation is rational. So in conclusion, there is a lot more oversight going on than it appears at first glance, so the control over the bureaucracy is still there. As Bianco put it, since Congress has this “Fire-Alarm” oversight it does not need to exercise the less effective “Police-Patrol” oversight. Because the Fire-Alarm oversight model creates a greater threat to bureaucrats who might ignore congressional legislation in order to please someone else, it keeps the bureaucracy in check.