Federal Bureaucracy
Teaching the Federal Bureaucracy
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Federal Bureaucracy Discussion & Essay Questions
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Sample of Discussion and Essay Questions
- Bureaucrats Have Bad Reputations
- Why do you suppose bureaucrats have such bad reputations?
- Are they based on performance?
- Do people just dislike government?
- Structure of the Bureaucracy
- Why would the government establish corporations?
- Why not leave these fee-based services or commercial activities to the private sector?
- Wouldn’t for-profit private businesses be more efficient?
- Government corporations include the postal service, Amtrak, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
- What is your sense of these? Are they well run? Inefficient and wasteful?
- Would a private corporation be interested in taking these over?
- Growth of the Bureaucracy
- What explains the historical growth spurts in the federal bureaucracy?
- Why has the size of the bureaucracy remained the same over the past thirty years?
- What does the government seem to be doing in order to deliver services without hiring more people?
- Would you expect the federal bureaucracy to grow or shrink in the next several years?
- What issues/problems/situations will cause it to grow or shrink?
- Will the government /can the government contract out the new services that it will need to provide over the next several years?
- The Spoils System
- Was the spoils system all that bad?
- Don’t most company executives hand out jobs to people they know?
- Aren’t “connections” the ticket to jobs in the private sector?
- Does this lead to inefficiency or corruption?
- Why should the federal government be different?
- Is the spoils system ideologically problematic?
- Or does it lead to incompetence in the federal workforce?
- Accountability in Government
- Why are government agencies pulled in different directions?
- How does the president impose his priorities on these agencies?
- How does Congress impose its priorities?
- Government Waste
- What sorts of reforms might increase the efficiency of the bureaucracy?
- How might overlap and internal conflict be reduced?
- Could administration of the bureaucracy be taken out of the president’s hands?
- Could Congress’s role in the creation, funding, or oversight of the bureaucracy be changed?
- To what extent are the imperfections within the bureaucracy un-fixable?
- Government Regulation
- What are some examples of successful and unsuccessful deregulation?
- In what areas does the government need to increase or decrease its regulatory oversight?
- Health Care
- College Admissions
- Professional Sports
- Education
- Wall Street
- The Oil Industry
- The Environment
- Race Relations
- Banking
- The Workplace
- The Home
- Fast Food
