Formulation and Implementation of Policy in the US Government

Summary

The formulation and implementation of policy in the US is highly complicated. It could be
argued that the US government possess various structures but, there is lack of actual
organizations because basicfeature of structures is lack of effective coordinationand control.
The fragmentation of the US government has some merits which include involvement of
several decision makers in the decisions making process tomitigate chances of errors and
requirement of total agreement for proposal being implemented becomes an operating
program or become a law. The people of America have to pay a price for lack of policy
consistency and coordination. All the three parts of the government i.e. House of
Representatives, Senate and their president, are controlled by same party, which might
experience legislating issues. The Constitution expressly delegates the authority to each
Congress to take required decisions for its members (Maskell, 2015). Lately, US government
can be described as a divided government as different political parties control different
branches of the federal government. This has also result in deadlock situation. Thus, for
analysis of policy development process one must take into consideration influence of divided
government, deadlock and federalism.
Federalism is a formal and constitutional allocation that provides all the powers which are not
specifically given to the federal government to states (W W Norton & Co., 2019). In the case
of conflict between state and local law, dominance is given to federal law. With the
expansion of activities of the government at all the levels, separation of functions among
federal, state and local governments has blurred. As a result, these governments are involved
in variety of similar activities. Despite existence of complication, incoherence and overlap in
intergovernmental relations, federal system has become more centralized. The administration
by Trump has displayed interests in returning more powers to the state as well as local
governments, but lack of legislative action in the administration did not result in any such
shifts.