ABSTRACT
In contemporary American politics, bureaucrats are thus suspected of being biased rather than neutral in their policy perspectives or even of trying to sabotage policy proposals that political leaders want to put into effect. The neutral competence of the national bureaucracy was thus relegated to a secondary role in the execution as well as the design of War on Poverty programs. Neutral competence has been most acceptable as an administrative ideal in the case of presidents with more modest images of themselves as agents of change. The obsession of political leaders in each of these institutions with the responsiveness of bureaucracy to their policy goals pays unmistakable homage to the fact that governmental power increasingly asserts itself today through the decisions and actions of civil servants. The wide-ranging efforts of both the White House and Congress to increase their control over bureaucracy in recent years clearly indicate that the administrative state has come of age in present-day American society.
