President Ford veto

Op-Ed By Mark Trahant

More than twenty years ago the BBC captured the essence of bureaucracy in a sitcom called, “Yes, Minister.” The basic plot was that the Minister for Administrative Affairs, Jim Hacker, would come up with an idea – sometimes wonderful, sometimes odd – only to have its implementation sidetracked by civil servants.

Hacker’s nemesis, Sir Humphrey Appleby, once described his task as “the traditional allocation of executive responsibilities has always been so determined as to liberate the ministerial incumbent from the administrative minutiae by devolving the managerial functions to those whose experience and qualifications have better formed them for the performance of such humble offices, thereby releasing their political overlords for the more onerous duties and profound deliberations which are the inevitable concomitant of their exalted position.”

Of course bureaucracy in the United States is different. Our civil servants have far less power than they do in the United Kingdom.