Though the implementation of public policy is the most visible and obvious part of the policy making process for the bureaucracy, it is only one of several phases. Making public policy encompasses additional processes that stand outside of the three core functions of policy implementation (rule making, rule implementation and rule adjudication) discussed in the last section. To gain a fuller understanding of the role of the bureaucracy in the political system, we need to place the implementation of policy in a broader context.

In most models, the policy-making process includes the following five steps, as this chapter's diagram Policy Making and Policy Implementation illustrates:

1. Agenda setting

2. Policy formulation

3. Policy adoption

4. Policy implementation

5. Policy evaluation

We reflexively view implementation as the core function of the bureaucracy. Regulatory agencies inspect workplace safety or automobile emissions, for instance, while other types of departments or agencies develop programs to provide public services to the citizens of Texas, including social services, education, highways, etc. So the first question that might arise from this model is: why is the bureaucracy engaged in the agenda setting, adoption, evaluation and review of public policies? Isn't that why we have a legislature?

While the legislature is charged with making all laws or statutes, the bureaucracy usually must take the general enabling legislation created by the legislature and build real programs and administrative rules for implementing corresponding public policy. When the enabling legislation deals with regulation (e.g., regulating environmental quality or building standards), the bureaucracy's authority to develop programs and rules is critical to carrying out the letter and the spirit of the law.

But bureaucracies inevitably become involved in actual policy making as they develop experience, accumulate information, and gain expertise on matters of public policy. This experience enters not only the policy implementation process, but also the process of review, assessment, and revision. Any organization, whether public or private, must evaluate and revise its policies and programs in order to continue to thrive, or at least survive. This can happen on a variety of different levels, from individual evaluation and revision of how best to execute a specific task or job, to agency-wide evaluation. In Texas, organization-wide evaluations generally occur on an annual or biennial basis, depending on the agency. Much review follows the biennial rhythm of the legislative session and state budget-making, so that internal bureaucratic review is coordinated with legislative oversight.

Somewhere in between the daily evaluation and revision on the individual or group level and the organization-wide scheduled evaluation of the bureaucracy lies an incremental approach to program evaluation and revision. This approach was referred to in an influential article written more than four decades ago as "muddling through," as this chapter's feature The Science of Muddling Through discusses in more detail.

Whatever the combination of types and frequency of formal and informal evaluation and revision, the policy process that begins with proposed ideas and ends with revisions becomes a series of cycles over time. The policy process starts with new ideas, but once policies are implemented, subsequent policy cycles occur as revisions of earlier policies. Many policy proposals and the processes they spawn, consequently, are revisions of earlier policies. As an example, consider the reorganization of the state's health and human services bureaucracy discussed in section 1.1. Though the state health bureaucracy emerged from the 2003 proposals in a new form, most of the new policies and programs were revisions to previous policy and program initiatives that were well established within the state's public policy system.

The policy process in Texas is also shaped by the political organization of the executive branch, which elects several bureaucratic leadership positions, as the Executive Branch chapter explains. Evaluation and revision might be even more commonplace in Texas, where many of the major executive positions are elective. Elected executive officials come into office seeking to create changes that can subsequently be identified as major personal innovations when the next election comes around. Thus, despite the unelected status of most of the public bureaucracy, the policy process that takes place inside the vast administrative apparatus inevitably has political dimensions - that is, it involves competition for resources and influence. These political dimensions of the process, equally inevitably, lead to recurring calls for some degree of control and accountability over the bureaucracy.