Nsl Iron Triangle

The iron triangle is an alliance made up of 3 groups, bureaucrats, Congress and interest groups. All of these three groups have common goals that they work together to achieve; also they each have their own individual, personal goal. An example of this would be how interest groups seek to promote their ideas, in order to do this they will lobby Congress and Congress will try to help in order to gain support, meaning votes from their constituents, along with promoting their own ideas that they have shared with the interest group.

In order for Congress to accomplish their agenda, they can seek out a bureaucratic agency. Once the agency supports Congress, then Congress as a result will support policy that will benefit the agencies. An example of this would be budget increases. As you can see this is a triangle in which all of these groups of people are benefitting in some way. A more specific example that shows the “triangle” of groups working together could be seen within the agricultural policy.

Two major committees of Congress deal with this policy; these two committees are the Senate Committee and the House Committee, making up one part of the triangle. This part does the proposing so that Congress can vote on them. The next addition of this triangle is the bureaucrats. This group is made up of 95,000 employees; this is not counting the contractors which work for the Department of Agriculture. Lastly you have the foundation of the triangle. The agricultural interest groups are the different federations, which present to the committees in Congress their concerns dealing with agriculture.

This iron triangle is very important factor towards policymaking because the policies that the people want to be made will benefit everyone that is involved. Without this triangle, it would be difficult to make policies because the interest groups, the bureaucracy would not be able to work together as well as they do now. This, as a result would cause many problems because of the disagreements between the groups, which would cause the policies to come to a standstill. This means that very few things would get done, benefitting few people in the end.