Over two million bureaucrats serve in the US federal government under various employment contracts. Minju Kim's Taming the Careerists asks how the design of those contracts – specifically, the features that strengthen or weaken job protections – shapes the behavior of bureaucrats and, in turn, American foreign policy. While past studies identify tools that help the president control the bureaucracy, Kim demonstrates that the president can additionally control the behavior of bureaucrats by weakening job protections, which makes bureaucrats more accountable to presidential preferences. The book shows that bureaucrats adjust how they implement policy based on the structure of their job protections, and that weakening these protections can unintentionally disrupt the stability of foreign economic policy. Drawing on administrative data, policy memos, interviews, and computational text analysis, Kim reveals the trade-off between accountability and stability, shedding light on the personnel management rules that quietly sustain the daily work of America's foreign policy bureaucracy.

‘In this timely and important volume, Minju Kim demonstrates clearly and forcefully how presidents control career bureaucrats through employment contracts. Focused on the US foreign policy bureaucracy, the book is broadly applicable. An impressive achievement.’

David A. Lake - Distinguished Professor of the Graduate Division, University of California, San Diego

‘Taming the Careerists demonstrates that carefully designed employment arrangements can make foreign policy bureaucrats more responsive to the president, but at what cost? In this important work, Professor Kim shows us how to increase responsiveness to the president but asks us to confront how such changes can lead to harmful instability in our relations with other nations.’

David E. Lewis - Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor, Vanderbilt University