Founding Principles Chapter Twelve: Policy Implementation from Bowdoin College on Vimeo.

Once a piece of legislation has made it onto the statute book, it then has to be put into practice. This issue policy implementation is tackled by Thomas Brackett Reed Professor of Government Andrew Rudalevige in his latest contribution to the Monkey Cage, a political science blog published by The Washington Post.

Rudalevige examines the history of the US public sector “[f]rom the 800 people employed by the federal government in 1789 to the more than 2.5 million civilians on today’s payroll,” and explains how “one person’s red tape is another person’s vital protection.”

Over the summer The Monkey Cage has been regularly publishing an episode per week of Founding Principles, a series of short videos presented by Rudalevige explaining how American government works. In this episode—the twelfth of fifteen—he explains why President Woodrow Wilson was correct when said “it is harder to run a Constitution than to frame one.”