Lesson 10 Reading 1. There may be little glamour in administration. We have popular TV series and films featuring protagonists of almost every imaginable career except administrator. The American federal bureaucracy is most likely to be portrayed as sinister, especially its more secretive intelligence services. Such sabotage is not a regular occurrence, but it happens often enough.
Law thus blends into administration.
These tasks fall to the Texas Structural Pest Control Board. If you are an environmentalist, a pest control operator, or a school district, on this issue the Board is the government. If you care about pesticides, you may care very much who is on the Board, what perspective they bring, what details they fill in, and how selectively they enforce. Significantly, the Board and its bureaucracy may be expected by different interests to perform by different criteria to variously be professional, act in a timely fashion, stay within budget, protect the public, accommodate the industry, follow the law, be flexible, be open and responsive to voters, exercise leadership, and so on. In this lesson we consider how the chief executive, legislature, interest groups, and public try to control bureaucracy, that is get officials to emphasize criteria they value above others.