Responses

Please choose one of the following questions and react to it briefly. You need to reply to 2 other student’s post. I will give you my peers’ posts later. (I need the discussion question answer in 24 hours, you can give me the response part later.)

When you submit answer, please begin by pasting the question you are responding to in the text field. Then write your answer below.

Discussion question options:

One of the goals of the Trump Administration has been to reduce the size of the Federal Bureaucracy and the Federal Workforce. The Administration has imposed hiring freezes and has often elected to not replace civil servants who have retired or left for the private sector. In your view is this a good approach to managing government? Why or why not? What are the benefits of reducing the size of the federal workforce? What are the potential drawbacks of having fewer (and less expert) civil servants in office? Does the benefit outweigh the costs? [You may wish to think about the 5th Risk reading or the Covid crisis].

According to Michael Lewis’s The 5th Risk, bureaucracies are staffed by experts whose mission is to manage long term policy programs and prevent unlikely but serious policy problems. The politicians who control the bureaucracy (Presidents and Congress) are elected, and have short term incentives to win re-election. What challenges does this create for the funding and maintenance of programs meant to prevent crises? In your view, what reforms or educational initiatives (if any) would you recommend to help elected officials and the public understand the need for expert bureaucrats?

According to this recent Pew Research poll, (Links to an external site.) American show high levels of cynicism about government, and display low levels of trust in the federal government. However, when asked about specific programs Americans often show much more positive opinions of the performance of the federal government (Links to an external site.). Why do you believe is this the case? Do you believe this is a problem for American democracy? Why or why not?

Before You begin:

Posts and responses should be thorough and thoughtful. Just posting an “I agree” or “Good ideas” will not be considered adequate. Support statements with examples, experiences, or references. Be brief — keep each post and response to one or two short paragraphs. Keep in mind that fellow learners will be reading and responding to you, too.
Posts should be within a range of 75-150 words.
Make certain that all posts and responses address one of the the questions, problems, or situations as presented for discussion. This does not mean you should not extend the topic, but do not stray from the topic.
Discussions occur when there is dialogue; therefore, you need to build upon the posts and responses of other learners to create discussion threads. Make sure to revisit the discussion forum and respond (if necessary) to what other learners have posted to your initial responses.
When relevant, add to the discussion by including prior knowledge, work experiences, references, web sites, resources, etc. (giving credit when appropriate).
Contributions to the discussions (posts and responses) should be complete and free of grammatical or structural errors.

You should read the following course reading materials before you begin:

Please be sure to read the entire chapter. The link takes you to the introduction.

American Government, Chapter 15: The Bureaucracy (Links to an external site.) https://openstax.org/books/american-government-2e/pages/15-introduction
McCrain, Josh. 2017. (the file I uploaded) The Washington Post’s The Monkey Cage.
Lewis, Michael. 2017. “The 5th Risk (Links to an external site.).” Vanity Fair. https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2017/9/the-5th-risk

REQUIREMENTS

Ohio State University

Political Science

Answer preview…………………….

apa 360 words

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