Congress and the "Details" of Administration

Datos Bibliográficos

ID6366289
AutoresAllen Schick (0000-0002-9230-6503, autor de correspondencia)
Año1976
Volumen36
Número5
Páginas516-516
Fecha de publicación1976-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaPublic Administration Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0033-3352 • E-ISSN: 1540-6210
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.2307/974232
OpenAlexW2318822655
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas19
Referencias citadas2

A former President once wrote of Congress: has entered more and more into the of until it has virtually taken into its own the substantial powers of government.' This protest was not composed by a recent President railing against the renascent assertiveness of Congress in the post Vietnam-Watergate era. It was written by Woodrow Wilson in 1885, almost 30 years before he attained the presidency,2 and only two years before the publication of his influential essay The Study of Administration which demarked public as an activity and discipline separate from politics. There is a certain ambivalence in Wilson's complaint, one which has persisted through 200 years of American government and which helps to account for disparities in legislative and executive views about control of administration. Wilson refers to the details of administration as these everyday matters were unworthy of legislative attention. Congress, the phrase suggests, should not be distracted from the big and important affairs of state by the minutiae of public administration. But Wilson clearly recognizes that control of these very of could give Congress all the substantial powers of Administration, Wilson implies, is the source of power in modern governments; hence, control of means control of the government. This view of and statecraft dominated his 1887 essay.3 Throughout American history, the Executive Branch has tended to advance the first interpretation while intending the second. (Nobody bothered to explain why, is indeed merely a matter of details, executives should be concerned by legislative intrusions.) For its part, Congress has instinctively realized that loss of the would diminish its political role. It is not that every small detail brings big power, but that the accumulated loss of control over administrative unquestionably aggrandizes executive power at the expense of Congress. From the perspective of administrative reform, this has not been an unintended or unwanted outcome. There was no place for Congress in the new discipline of public administration, nor has Congress been given much attention in the subsequent development of the field. Hyneman's Bureaucracy in a Democracy is a distinguished (and still relevant) exception,4 but if we simply assume that public is what students of public study, the executive is clearly the solid center of their special concern.5 For 100 years, American public has functioned in the service of executive power, an arrangement that has accommodated this discipline to the realities of American politics

Administration (probate law · Business · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Law · Law, Rights, and Freedoms · Public Administration