New Jersey Politics and Government: The Suburbs Come of Age

Chapter 10. The State Bureaucracy

185 Chapter 10 The State Bureaucracy The skilled career bureaucrat knows thousands of ways to stall a project. . . . Stalling is a piece of cake in an election year, for the political appointees are busier than ever over-reacting to crises erupting daily from unfavorable press coverage. Any bureaucrat worth his salt can wait out a political hack. —Anonymous bureaucrat, “The Trenton Rulebook” Creating an efficient executive branch was a major accomplishment of New Jersey’s 1947 constitutional convention. Since then, executive agencies have grown at a pace the framers could hardly have envisioned. Bureaucracies by nature are concerned less “about the overall architecture of government” than they are with “the narrow sliver they believe they represent.”1 This chapter looks at the factors that shape New Jersey’s executive branch—constitutional, cultural, historical, and political. To reinforce a newly powerful chief executive, the 1947 constitution limited the number of cabinet departments to no more than twenty.They were to contain “all executive and administrative offices, departments and instrumentalities of the State government”and be“under the supervision of the governor.”2 The charter’s framers took aim at the departments, boards, and commissions that had begun to multiply after 1900. No one oversaw their work. Governor Franklin Murphy (1902–1905) thought about reestablishing a governor’s mansion in Trenton because, if he were in town regularly, “the department chiefs might be shamed out of their apparent notions that the State was paying them big salaries only to have them serve as State House ornaments. . . .The work of their departments—even the supervision of them—was left entirely in the hands of their deputies and clerks and assistants.”3 1 8 6 N e w J e r s e y P o l i t i c s a n d G ov e r n m e n t In 1929, a National Institute of Public Administration study found that New Jersey state government consisted of “a grand total of ninetyfour agencies. . . . Many are practically independent of the governor, either because of the nature of their appointment or the length of their terms of office. The seventy-two boards and commissions consist in the aggregate of approximately five hundred members.”4 The report recommended abolishing many of them and putting the rest into twelve cabinet departments responsible to the governor. In his 1932 inaugural address, Governor A. Harry Moore endorsed the recommendations.As it usually did, the legislature ignored the governor. Unusually forceful chief executives like Woodrow Wilson (1911–1912) and Walter Edge (1917–1919, 1944–1947) achieved some administrative consolidation, but the chaotic and antiquated bureaucracy remained largely in place until 1948. Although the 1947 constitution permitted twenty cabinet departments , only fourteen were established. Within thirty years, however, the department limit was reached de jure and breached de facto.To maintain it, authorities and operating commissions “in but not of” cabinet departments proliferated—formally assigned to departments but operating virtually autonomously. Thus, for example, the Civil Service Commission is “in but not of” the Department of Labor and Workforce Development, and the Motor Vehicle Commission is “in but not of” the Transportation Department. The five hundred appointments to boards and commissions that NIPA decried in 1929 are about the same number as today. Today’s complex bureaucracy differs sharply from that of the 1930s, however.The governor now appoints and removes almost all top officers at will, and almost all leave office when the governor does. It is now the governor, rather than legislators or county party officials, who controls the patronage appointments to boards and commissions.Although the senate must confirm many gubernatorial appointments, rejection is exceedingly rare.5 Obstacles to executive leadership are now logistical and political rather than statutory. Still, the career employees just below the top layer of gubernatorial appointments, who actually run agencies, have considerable resources.These “be-heres” (“when this governor and his appointees are gone, we’ll still be here”) command civil service protection, technical expertise, and the agency’s institutional memory.6 The state government is so vast that a thin layer of political appointees can never entirely master the larger departments. Moreover, career managers’ knowledge, close relationships with clientele groups, and their own short tenure can tempt political The State Bureaucracy 187 appointees to join subordinates in opposing gubernatorial programs with negative effects on the agency. State Bureaucracy: Size and Structure...