Among the most prominent of these was John Gaus (1931). He observed that federal agencies not only carried out clearly understood directives from Congress but also independently shaped those directives and exercised discretionary policymaking authority while translating the vague intentions of statutes into specific government actions. Bureaucracy obviously wields political power. This being so, those who sought to understand public agencies could not simply carve off administration from politics and leave the complexities of the latter to political theorists.If bureaucracies were helping to determine the will of the state, they were inescapably political institutions, and Gaus argued that administrative theory ignored this fact at its peril. Most famously, in the final sentence of an essay in Public Administration Review, he threw down an implied gauntlet to those who would fashion a theory of administration: “A theory of public administration means in our time a theory of politics also” (1950, 168). Gaus thus succinctly summarized the purpose of theories of bureaucratic politics.