US presidents exercise centralized control over thebureaucracy primarily through reactive oversight.

More than 2.5 million people work across the entire executive branch of the US government in hundreds of agencies and commissions. William West takes an in-depth look at how the President is able to oversee this vast bureaucracy. He writes that centralized influence over agency policy making is mostly reactive and based around the practice of regulatory review. He argues that Presidents lack the organizational capacity to monitor and influence what agencies do in more than a selective way, and that this reactive strategy allows the White House to focus its limited resources on agency initiatives that are problematic while ignoring the majority that are not.