 | | a relatively small number of political appointees, whose tenure is typically temporary, are presumed to govern the activities of [the 4.25 million, excluding the 600,000 employees of the U.S. Postal system] mostly permanent federal employees in the civil service, the military services, and other career systems. The politically appointed and presumably responsive executives amount to less than one-tenth of one percent of total direct federal employment. (Mosher 1985, 405)
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The institution of the federal bureaucracy exists in more-or-less creative tension with the institution of democracy in this country. While career executives might be seen to represent the former, political executives who serve at the pleasure of the democratically elected president represent the latter. It is the interaction of the career professionals with the democratic controls of the political appointees that keeps the political dynamic alive.
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There is a careful sense of interplay and interdependence between these two institutions of bureaucracy and democracy as represented by their practitioners, the career and political executives. Bureaucracy thrives on the democratic values of openness, fairness, and achievement. Neutral competence is its highest standard. Democracy depends on the public service ethic and administrative expertise to bring to fruition its commitment to the common good through exercise of responsive competence.
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| | Bureaucracy and democracy are two of the great political forces of the modern age. That [their] growth has been parallel seems paradoxical, as they appear wholly opposed in spirit; the former requires hierarchy, order, and technical expertise, the latter equality, freedom, and participation. While these conflicts should not be minimized, neither should they obscure the common heritage and continuing interdependence of these forces. Both bureaucracy and democracy, as Max Weber, the great German sociologist, observed, rest on the Enlightenment impulse to law and reason, on the rejection of traditional, ascriptively based systems of authority. And more to the point, neither force can survive and prosper without the other. Just as true bureaucracy thrives on the democratic values of achievement, fairness, and unfettered information, so is bureaucracy a fundamental requisite of modern democratic government. Absent the administrative capacity to give them substance, public policies in pursuit of the public good, as articulated by elected representatives, can be no more than feeble and sterile avowals of intent. (Huddleston 1987, 79)
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