The executive branch
bureaucracy
The permanent administrative apparatus of government: agencies, offices, and career staff organized by rule and hierarchy rather than by election.
In full
Bureaucracy is descriptive before it is pejorative. Rules, records, and hierarchy are what let a program treat two applicants the same way in two different states, and what make a decision reviewable afterward. The costs are the familiar ones: slowness, form-filling, and the difficulty of holding anyone in particular responsible for an outcome.
Also written as: red tape
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A plain-language explanation for civic education, not legal advice. When in doubt, the official source named above controls.