In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Guarding the Guardians:Oversight Appointees and the Search for Accountability in U.S. Federal Agencies
  • Patrick S. Roberts (bio) and Matthew Dull (bio)

Who will guard the guardians? Plato first posed the question in the Republic, and his answer was that it would be ridiculous to suggest that the guardians of the city-state required oversight. No one could be their superior, because the guardians were of the highest moral caliber. The guardians would police themselves, Plato claimed in his famous noble lie, guarded by a sense of professional responsibility and the myth of their superior origins, which instilled noblesse oblige.1 Centuries later, however, the Roman poet Juvenal came to the opposite conclusion in a different case. Juvenal mused that wives could not be trusted to resist the temptations of infidelity, but placing them under guard was not a solution since the guards could not be trusted either.2

The American founders answered the question of who guards the guardians not primarily by a call to virtue, but by proposing a structural solution: the separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial powers of government to dilute the concentration of power, and checks and balances as means by which the branches could defend their prerogatives.3 As the bureaucracy emerged as a center of power, however, elected politicians pursued forms of oversight to make sure that government agencies pursued their missions in a way that was consistent with politicians' wishes. Bert Rockman has defined oversight as "the legislative supervision and monitoring of the executive, whether overt or covert."4 Subsequent analysis of legislative oversight focused on abstract categories such as formal and informal means of oversight, on oversight's role in the representative process, or occasionally on politicians' [End Page 207] brazen attempts to bring purportedly neutral and scientific agencies in line with political objectives.5

While there are many forms of political oversight of the bureaucracy, from reporting rules to ad hoc inquiries, the creation and filling of positions dedicated to oversight offers a twentieth-century American answer to Plato's enduring question about whether guardianship can be institutionalized in a class of people. These positions are theoretically interesting because oversight positions provide an alternative logic to politicization, which refers to politicians' attempts to fill the bureaucracy with loyalists subject to temporary appointments who have policy preferences close to those of elected politicians. Bert Rockman defines politicization as the "effort of a government (in the United States, a presidential administration) to manipulate the bureaucracy by organization and/or personnel so as to ensure the loyalty of the bureaucracy to the government's (president's) preferences and political interests."6 For Rockman and most political scientists, politicization begins with the presidency, and serves to fill government with partisan patrons and to move the political ideology of government policy closer to that of elected politicians, particularly the president. Politicization is fundamentally a mechanism of control.7

What accounts for the growing ranks of appointed inspectors general (IG), general counsels (GC), and chief financial officers (CFO) scattered across American government? Figure 1 highlights growth in numbers of presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed (PAS) IGs, GCs, and CFOs between 1989 and 2009. We think the expansion of these positions represent an alternative logic to the prevailing account of politicization. As the state grew, members of Congress also reached for new instruments of accountability. Morris Fiorina noticed a change in Congress in the 1960s, when members eschewed running for office based on controversial policy positions and "instead place[d] heavy emphasis on nonpartisan, nonprogrammatic constituency service."8 Members of Congress funded and authorized bureaucratic programs, contributing to the growth of the state, but they also responded to citizens' demands for help as the state grew. Constituents bothered by bureaucratic duty or confused by a maze of administrative procedures, wondering to whom they should write, or how they could appeal for a decision in some matter, sought the help of their representative or senator, and members could win the allegiance of voters by responding to these demands.9 As Morris Fiorina observed, "In a very real sense each congressman is a monopoly supplier of bureaucratic unsticking services for his district."10 [End Page 208]

Congress may...

pdf

Share