Taming the Careerists

Over two million bureaucrats serve in the US federal government under various employment contracts. Minju Kim's Taming the Careerists asks how the design of those contracts – specifically, the features that strengthen or weaken job protections – shapes the behavior of bureaucrats and, in turn, American foreign policy. While past studies identify tools that help the president control the bureaucracy, Kim demonstrates that the president can additionally control the behavior of bureaucrats by weakening job protections, which makes bureaucrats more accountable to presidential preferences. The book shows that bureaucrats adjust how they implement policy based on the structure of their job protections, and that weakening these protections can unintentionally disrupt the stability of foreign economic policy. Drawing on administrative data, policy memos, interviews, and computational text analysis, Kim reveals the trade-off between accountability and stability, shedding light on the personnel management rules that quietly sustain the daily work of America's foreign policy bureaucracy.