Jessie Hauser
Unit Five Vocab
Bureaucracy - a set of complex hierarchical departments, agencies, commissions, and their staffs that exist to help a chief executive officer carry out his or her duties; bureaucracies may be private organizations or governmental units
Executive Order - rule or regulation issued by the president that has the effect of law; all executive orders must be published in the Federal Register
Iron Triangle - the relatively stable relationships and patterns of intersection that occur among an agency, interest groups, and congressional committees or subcommittees
Issue Networks –the loose and informal relationships that exist among a large number of actors who work in broad policy areas
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) –the office that prepares the president’s annual budget proposal, reviews the budget and programs of the executive departments, supplies economic forecasts, and conducts detailed analyses of proposed bills and agency rules
Impeachment –the power delegated to the House of Representatives in the Constitution to charge the president, vice president, or other “civil officers,” including federal judges, with “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors;” this is the first step in the constitutional process of removing such government officials from office
US v. Nixon (1974)-key Supreme Court ruling on power of the president, finding that there is no absolute constitutional executive privilege to allow a president to refuse to comply with a court order to produce information needed in a criminal trial
Executive Privilege -an implied presidential power that allows the president to refuse to disclose information regarding confidential conversations or national security to Congress or the judiciary
Executive Agreement - formal government agreement entered into by the president that does not require the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate
Cabinet - the formal body of presidential advisers who head the fifteen executive departments; president often add others to this body of formal advisers
Veto Power -the formal, constitutional authority of the president to reject bills passed by both houses of Congress, thus preventing their becoming law without further congressional action
Line-Item Veto -the authority of a chief executive to delete part of a bill passed by the legislature that involves taxing or spending; the legislature may override a veto, usually with a two-thirds majority of each chamber
War Powers Act -passed by Congress in 1973; the president is limited in the deployment of troops overseas to a sixty-day period in peacetime (which can be extended for an extra thirty days to permit withdrawal) unless Congress explicitly gives its approval for a longer period
Pardon -the authority of a government to cancel someone’s conviction of a crime by a court and to eliminate all sanctions and punishments resulting from conviction
Executive Office of the President (EOP) -establishment created in 1939 to help the president oversee the executive branch bureaucracy
Patronage - jobs, grants, or other special favors that are given as rewards to friends and political allies for their support
Spoils System - the firing of public-office holders of a defeated political party and their replacement with loyalists of the newly elected party
Independent Regulatory Commissions - an agency created by Congress that is generally concerned with a specific aspect of the economy
Pendleton Act -reform measure that created the Civil Service Commission to administer a partial merit system; the act classified the federal service by grades, to which appointments were made based on the results of a competitive examination; it made it illegal for federal political appointees to be required to contribute to a particular political party
Independent Executive Agency - governmental unit that closely resembles a Cabinet department but has a narrower area of responsibility (such as the Central Intelligence Agency) and is not part of any Cabinet department
Hatch Act -law enacted in 1939 to prohibit civil servants from taking activist roles in partisan campaigns; this act prohibited federal employees from making political contributions, working for a particular party, or campaigning for a particular candidate
Interagency Councils - working groups created to facilitate coordination of policy making and implementation across a host of governmental agencies
Max Weber - described a bureaucracy as a hierarchal authority structure that use task specialization, operates on merit principle, and behaves with impersonality; a German sociologist and political economist who is best known for his theory of the development of Western capitalism that is based on the “Protestant Ethic.”
Rule-Making - a quasi-legislative administrative process that has the characteristics of a legislative act
Regulations - rules that govern the operation of a particular government program that have the force of law
Administrative Adjudication –a quasi-judicial process in which a bureaucratic agency settles disputes between two parties in a manner similar to the way courts resolve disputes
Budget and Impoundment Act - the president must spend all appropriated funds unless he tells congress what he wants to spend and congress agrees to delete the items (like a line-item veto); a U.S. federal law that governs the role of the Congress in the U.S. budget process
National Security Council (NSC) –executive agency responsible for advising the president about foreign and defense policy and events
Council of Economic Advisors - a three member body used to advise president on economic policy; an executive agency responsible for providing economic advice to the President
12th Amendment - procedure for the Electoral College electing President and Vice-President and how the Senate has the actual final say on who will be the next President and Vice-President
20th Amendment -establishes the beginning and ending of the terms of the elected federal offices and deals with scenarios in which there is noPresident-elect
22nd Amendment–establishes that no U.S. President can be elected to more than two terms, it also limits the maximum time a President may serve to 10 years
25th Amendment–defines the conditions under which the President yields authority to the Vice-President due to disability, and codifies the process for appointing a new Vice-President should the office become vacant
Office of Personnel Management- an independent agency of the U.S. government that manages the civil service of the federal government