Public Policy Implementation

The American policy process entrusts government career administrators with an extraordinary responsibility for the implementation of public policy. Political accountability normally is taken to mean that administrative agencies are subject to the supervening authority of elected officials.

The chief executive officer has enormous leverage over administrative agencies. Legislative accountability runs close to the heart of the American system of democratic governance. The burden of maintaining bureaucratic accountability is a multipronged undertaking that includes reliance on organizational and legal processes, in addition to political accountability to the two major branches of governance.

The most frequently used mechanism of administrative accountability is reliance on formal organizational structures and processes.  Some of the major organizational controls that are relied upon to achieve this result.

Despite the best organizational and political efforts to maintain accountability over administrators during the policy implementation process, we have not eliminated the need for the exercise of extensive administrative discretion. The growing recognition of this necessity has shifted attention away from relying on mechanisms of external political and organizational accountability to those that depend on the bureaucracy to police itself based on a set of broad legal rules established by the legislature.

In practice, this means that government and its political and administrative agents must be able to find a law, rule, or constitutional provision to justify their actions. Since justice for the individual is the focus of an administrative adjudication, the main concern is to ensure the appropriateness and correctness of the decision.

Ethics is the code of moral principles and values that governs the behaviors of a person or group with respect to what is right or wrong. The code thus shifts our focus away from debate over what should be on our list of public service values to a debate over the kind of framework that is needed to balance and reconcile conflicts among these values.