An agency’s ability to resist cuts tracks its public standing, not client need.

Evidence

When public managers decide to fight demands for service reduction they say that all waste, duplication, and nonessential services have been cut, and that any further cuts will be in essential services. Their ability to make this claim depends on general public perception of the importance of the agency and public employees’ collective capacity to resist. Thus schools can make the claim more effectively than welfare agencies, police departments more effectively than sanitation departments. Cuts in service provision obviously may affect service quality, but is is impossible to determine from public rhetoric where the politics of distributing urban resources to public employees ends and injury to service delivery begins. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1256

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Lipsky’s broader thesis that institutional politics, not need, drives who bears bureaucratic burden; parallels the discretionary rationality literature.