ABSTRACT
An underappreciated fact about the development of a bureaucratic ethic is that practicing public administrators, not scholars or elected officials, introduced it. The American Society for Public Administration, which is the most representative association of all the public professions (and, therefore, confronts knotty problems in writing a uniquely broad ethical code), rejected attempts to adopt a code of ethics in 1938 and 1949. In 2008, Congress, largely as the result of a lobbying scandal, established an Office of Congressional Ethics, which has been commended as 'a proven force for good on Capitol Hill. Practicing public and nonprofit ethics have their own unique challenges. Public administrators are committed to ethics. The academic effort to avoid the question of how public administrators should make decisions that are in the public interest is called bureaucratic account-ability, or the study of how various restraints safely channel bureaucrats into making decisions that are democratic, ethical, legal, and fair.
