bureaucrat
noun
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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.
Examples of bureaucrat in a Sentence
Christopher S. Chivvis, Foreign Affairs, 14 Oct. 2024
Congress should eliminate it, reduce invasive federal regulation, and stop giving bureaucrats the power to micromanage financial risks.
—Norbert Michel, Forbes, 2 Oct. 2024
That was a significant feat for a TV series that took Hollywood out of its comfort zone by featuring politicians and bureaucrats, and not the cops, doctors, detectives and lawyers that traditionally inspired network TV drama characters.
—Etan Vlessing, The Hollywood Reporter, 19 Sep. 2024
If Merrell had been right, if thalidomide was as safe as the company promised, this whole incident might have gone down in history or just been forgotten as one very nitpicky bureaucrat tying up a fantastic new drug in red tape.
—Katie Hafner, Scientific American, 12 Sep. 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Bureaucrat.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bureaucrat. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.
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bureaucrat
noun
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