Does the relative lack of success in producing widely applicable bureaucratic politics frameworks mean the effort to do so should be reassessed? The progenitors of the bureaucratic politics movement would surely answer no, for the simple reason that the most important characteristic of public administration is its political nature, and we ignore this at our peril. Long once wrote that “there is no more forlorn spectacle in the administrative world than an agency and a program possessed of statutory life, armed with executive orders, sustained in the courts, yet stricken with paralysis and deprived of power. An object of contempt to its enemies and of despair to its friends” (1949, 257).