Definition of BUREAUCRAT (original) (raw)

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In French, a bureau is a desk, so bureaucracy means basically "government by people at desks". Despite the bad-mouthing they often get, partly because they usually have to stick so close to the rules, bureaucrats do almost all the day-to-day work that keeps a government running. The idea of a bureaucracy is to split up the complicated task of governing a large country into smaller jobs that can be handled by specialists. Bureaucratic government is nothing new; the Roman empire had an enormous and complex bureaucracy, with the bureaucrats at lower levels reporting to bureaucrats above them, and so on up to the emperor himself.

Synonyms

Examples of bureaucrat in a Sentence

the bureaucrats at the town hall seem to think that we need a building permit to build a tree house

Recent Examples on the Web

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Federal bureaucrats dragged their feet on school reopening, then sat on their hands after school closures advocated by national teachers unions erased two decades of learning improvement. —Erika Donalds, The Mercury News, 19 Dec. 2024 Millennial comedians let rotten bureaucrats go unprotested. —Armond White, National Review, 18 Dec. 2024 The imposition of price controls is more often than not the imposition of a loss that businesses (including banks) aren’t in the position to sustain, thus the cessation of the service price-controlled by federal bureaucrats. —John Tamny, Forbes, 16 Dec. 2024 However, their immediate goal is to slash the $500 billion in annual discretionary spending authorized by unelected bureaucrats rather than Congress. —Christiaan Hetzner, Fortune, 21 Nov. 2024 See all Example Sentences for bureaucrat