Bureaucratic Failure In The Federal Government: Article Analysis

Bureaucracies hold a tremendous amount of power over the entire country and the lives of the citizens. They help establish the rules and principles of an organization that are employed by all large scale institutions. Although bureaucracies are efficient and make it simpler for governments to accomplish task faster such as implement the laws that congress writes, their efforts may go unnoticed. Ever since bureaucracies were formed there has been a negative connotation attached to them by the people of the united states. That negative connotation that the people have attached towards bureaucracies is that they believe they waste time, money and have incomprehensible rules. Because there are many factors against these agencies it can be very

However, in bureaucracy more money doesn’t necessarily mean doing more work. One reason why bureaucracy can be so hard to manage is because of rigid compensations for federal employees. The problem with rigid compensations is that it is given and based on longevity and not necessarily how well a person performs in their work. Usually in other jobs and fieldworks compensations, bonuses, and salary raises are given to those workers who are performing above average and doing excellent work. Unfortunately, in bureaucracies’ things work in the opposite direction. According to the article titled Bureaucratic Failure in the Federal Government by Chris Edwards it states that “the rigid salary and benefits structure makes it hard to encourage improved employee efforts or to reward outstanding achievements.” This is not good because it can reduce the enthusiasm of the good workers to continue working hard because they are seeing the poor workers being rewarded equally. This can cause the bureaucracy hard to manage due to the fact that the best workers are more prone to leave while the bad workers will stay decade after decade because they will be compensated as if they work doing an excellent job. Overall this will cause “the lack of good output measurement in federal agencies” (Edwards paragraph

But sometimes setting priorities can cause individuals to disregard other important factors. This is the case when there are new political officials in federal agencies. When these new employees come into office they are “eager to launch new initiatives, but they are less interested in managing what is already there” (Edwards paragraph 18). This can be detrimental to managing a bureaucracy because it can cause the new employees to make the same mistakes the past employees and political official have continuously made. They decide to ignore all the functions of the previous system, they do not learn the previous lessons that were in place, and they throw away all investments and correlations with the previous projects. Another problem with new political officials when they come into office is that since their tenure only last about two and a half years “appointees tend to push superficially appealing initiatives that look good on their resumes, but they shy away from tackling longer-term, structural reforms” (Edwards Paragraph 18). Most of these new hires lack the necessary skills for management and technical