Administrative Adaptability to Political Change.

This article presents information regarding administrative adaptability to political change. The most dramatic tests of the adaptability of career civil servants result from the election or accession of a new President. Less traumatic changes occur when a new agency head is appointed during a Presidential term or there is a basic redirection of Administration or congressional policy. In any of these instances, a key career man or woman in the highest levels of the competitive civil service may find established relationships suddenly and profoundly disrupted. Administrative loyalty may be defined as a conscientious effort to assist one's superiors to succeed in achieving their program goals or in reconsidering and modifying program goals to achieve better results. It is by all odds the single most important factor in the adaptability of the career bureaucracy to political leadership. It is the cement of mutual trust without which an organization is not even an arithmetic sum of the human beings in it.