Work for a federal agency? You probably don’t know who your boss is
It is the common confusion among the federal agencies that who their actually boss is. Is it congressional committees that oversee them or the President who appoints their leadership? In the recent study The Irony of Congressional Oversight the 3 researchers of Vanderbilt University surveyed more than 2,400 federal officials for knowing about who is the most influential personality.

The answers were as follow:
1. The White House
2. Congressional oversight committees
3. The majority party leadership

The chief finding of the survey was that the “Congress” is slightly less influential than the White House. One of the researchers of Vanderbilt University David Lewis said that “Even congress does not clearly know that which committee has jurisdiction on certain issues”. He further said that “those people who are running the agencies go to White House for guidance rather than to Congress”.

The only solution to this issue is that congress needs to come up with defined jurisdictions of each oversight committees. Otherwise, there will not be significant changes in the attitude of the federal agencies.