What mechanisms do presidents have at their disposal for restructuring the federal bureaucracy to increase their political control? How have these been used in the last century? Provide examples

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The ideal answer should:
a. Explain that presidents do not need to take the existing bureaucracy as a given and can use their power to actively engage in the politics of bureaucratic restructuring.
b. Describe how presidents can add agencies to the federal bureaucracy, noting that more than 400 agencies were created in the second half of the twentieth century, and more than half were established through the use of unilateral presidential actions.
c. Note that presidents can alsoremove agencies, using the example of Nixon's dismantling of the Office of Economic Opportunity, and that 60 percent of all agencies created in the last half of the twentieth century were dismantled by 2000.
d.Analyze the different factors that contribute to presidential decisions about whether to continue or terminate agencies, including the type of agency, its location in the federal bureaucracy, and political reasons.
e. Discuss how presidents who cannot eliminate difficult agencies often just create new ones,thereby increasing the overall level of inefficiency associated with bureaucracy.