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Federal Bureaucracies And How They Affect Modern Politics

Beaucracies. The term is heard all the time in everyday modern politics. But what is a Bureaucracy? And how do they affect modern politics? A bureaucracy can be quite simply defined as: An unelected body of administrative policy-making government officials. Historically, bureaucracy was a government administration managed by departments run by unelected officials. In a more modern sense, bureaucracy refers to the administrative system governing any large institution. Since being instituted, the word “bureaucracy” has developed negative connotations for many people. Bureaucracies are often criticized for their complexity, their inefficiency, their inflexibility, their wastefulness and most importantly their unconstitutionalness. Some examples of these inefficient, unconstitutional bureaucracies are:
-The National Security Association (NSA)
-The Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
-The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Yes the CIA is in fact a bureaucracy.
-The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), yes the FBI is a bureaucracy as well.
-The Food and Drug Association (FDA)
-And of course the infamous Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)
I’m sure you’ve heard a variety of scandals involving some of the bureaucracies I just named. Such as the IRS targeting Conservative and Libertarians activist groups. The Snowden leak that revealed that the NSA has been listening in on our phone calls, without warrants. Countless scandals have been revealed concerning federal bureaucracies. This shouldn’t be a surprising fact. Most of our elected officials are corrupt; these are people who depend on us for their reelection. Can you imagine what somebody who didn’t have that worry would do? But before I tell you about some of the horror stories people have reported. I will go into the history of bureaucracies.

The original bureaucracies of the U.S Federal government consisted of three small departments, The Department of State, The Department of War and The Treasury. When George Washington implemented these bureaucracies he promised to only hire “the best people”. Since Washington was a member of the Federalist party, most of his employees belonged to this particular party. Washington’s logic was most likely that the best people to work with, would be those that agreed with him. At the time, this was not necessarily a terrible thing, being that there were only three departments. These were people who would be working closely with Washington. When Thomas Jefferson became President, he fired all the Federalists and hired members of his own party. This began the tradition of rewarding friends and political allies by hiring them for government positions, in exchange for their unwavering support. This tradition would follow with nearly every Presidency. The President would hire members of his own political party, and fire members from the previous President’s party.
In the 1800s more and more people would getting government jobs through this Patronage system. The amount of bureaucracies and the amount of employees they held grew rapidly as the country moved westward. New bureaucracies were needed to manage the land and the settlers who settled on the new land. More Post Offices were needed as more people settled into these new lands. The Civil War sparked an immense growth in bureaucracy to handle the vehement demands of war. After the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution stimulated the economy, and even MORE departments and bureaucrats were needed to regulate the economy and the businesses now fueling it.Throughout the 1800s, bureaucracy was growing slowly. But the biggest expansion of bureaucracy happened during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. His New Deal meant bigger government, bigger government meant more responsibility, and more responsibility fueled the need for more departments. In 1933 the number of federal employees was about half a million, in 1945 the number increased to 3.5 million. The numbers steadily grew as more and more departments were needed to secure the growing responsibility of the federal government.

The Louisiana State University federal agency directory lists over 1,300 distinct organizations across all three branches of the federal government. This does not count the many auxiliary agencies of the federal government. This is not good. That’s near 1,500 departments each with thousands of employees, ALL of them unelected. The amount of unelected policy makers surpass the number of elected policy makers by the thousands, by the millions. There are people in the government, that you can’t fire or impeach, that decide how you get to live your life. Even the congress is beginning to become impervious to the growing amount of elected bureaucrats. Bureaucrats have become so powerful, that they are doing POLITICIANS favors, instead of the other way around. Just like power does with anyone else, it has corrupted these bureaucrats.

Now it’s time for a few stories. These stories come from real citizens of American who were harassed and abused by these federal departments. These stories were told to media networks, in an effort to alert people to the crimes against the constitution happening in their own backyard.

The Huffington Post reported a story about Thomas Sawyer, aged 61 who must wear a urostomy bag due to his health condition, became of a victim of the TSA when he was traveling out of the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. During an aggressive pat down, a TSA agent broke the seal of his bag as he was checking it for toxic chemicals, drenching Sawyer in his own urine in front of the entire Metropolitan airport.

CBS news reports a disturbing story about four year old Ryan who was born sixteen weeks premature. He had to wear leg braces because his ankles didn’t form properly and his legs were not fully developed. One day his parents decided to take him to Disney World, when they ran into some trouble at the Philadelphia airport. The TSA agent forced Ryan to take his leg braces off, and walk through the metal detector without support from any of his family members.

The Washington Times reported a story about Amish farmer Daniel Allgyer, his wife Rachel, and their eight children who were invaded by two U.S marshals and a state farmer with loaded weapons pointed at them. What was their crime? What horrible crime did they commit that the police had to come to their door with loaded weapons pointed at these farmers? They sold farm fresh cheese, butter, milk and produce. Yes, you heard me right. That was the vicious, hateful crime they committed. The Amish live their lives without many of the technological conveniences of the modern age. So it’s really not surprising that the farmers didn’t use any genetically modified ingredients in their produce. Because the FDA, an UNELECTED bureaucracy, banned the interstate sale of raw milk in 1987 these farmers were technically breaking a law. That’s right. An unelected bureaucracy passed a law that congress didn’t even get to vote on, that just so happens to infringe on our freedoms. If that isn’t a good example of the enigma that is federal bureaucracy, I don’t know what is.

The stories of the people I just mentioned are just a few of many horror stories concerning the federal bureaucracies of our country. Americans are harassed, abused and heavily fined by these unelected bureaucrats every day. Every day, more and more stories are reported as these unelected bureaucrats getting infringe on our rights. More and more stories of innocent Americans being fined or imprisoned for breaking laws that were not voted on, or even published in the books. This is the modern bureaucracy ladies and gentleman, this is the modern America.

Not only are these numerous departments infringing deeply on our rights, but they are also EXTREMELY wasteful. Can you imagine how much money it would cost to pay for all these departments and their auxiliaries? The government, or rather we taxpayers, must pay for the supplies, the weapons, the employees, the marketing and the building zones for more than 1,300 different federal departments and the numerous federal auxiliaries of the U.S Government and the military. Can you imagine how much money that is? That’s a freakish amount. See, one of the big reasons bureaucracies are so wasteful are because of the way they are funded. They are funded according to how much they spend that month. If they spend all of their funds, they get the same amount next month. If they don’t, then their funds are reduced next month. So bureaucracies, in an attempt to keep their money, spend all of their money even if it means wasting it so they don’t lose funds. In April this year Secretary Napolitano, head of the DHS, requested 39 BILLION dollars…not including the 3.9 billion she was requesting for domestic aid. Ladies and Gentleman, 42 billion dollars are going to JUST the DHS for JUST fiscal year 2014. Does this not sound suspicious to you? The IRS has requested 11 billion dollars. The IRS. All they do, or let me correct myself all they SHOULD do is collect our tax money. What do they need 11 billion dollars for?? The NSA budget isn’t even published. It’s classified. They won’t even share their budget, which leads me to believe they probably get much more than they should get.

So, let’s recap. There are over 1300 distinct federal bureaucracies, not included bureaucracy auxiliaries. These bureaucracies have accumulated countless scandals, including humiliating handicapped children and raiding Amish farms over milk. These bureaucracies also managed to accumulate most of our National Debt, and the small bureaucracies accumulate more in a year than most middle class families will make in their entire life. Our country is at a crisis ladies and gentleman, and a majority of our problems come from government bureaucracy.
 
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