Definition of BUREAUCRATS

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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

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

Some minister or bureaucrat — maybe sinister, maybe just hapless — is inside a government building surrounded by a large, angry, yelling mob furious over a lack of bread or an unjust tax or just a basic lack of representation. — Will Bunch, Philly.com, "(Bleep) civility! 'Trump-shaming' is what happens when elites won't listen to the people | Will Bunch," 26 June 2018 As bureaucrats shut down children’s lemonade stands both in the U.S. and abroad, CountryTime Lemonade is taking a stand of its own. — Chris Morris, Fortune, "CountryTime Vows to Pay Fines of Kids Busted for Operating Lemonade Stands," 8 June 2018 After assuming the vice presidency, Diaz-Canel became virtually invisible, leading many who knew him to wonder what had happened to the glad-handing bureaucrat from Villa Clara. — Andrea Rodriguez And Michael Weissenstein, The Christian Science Monitor, "Diaz-Canel crafts new public persona as Cuban president," 23 May 2018 Junichi Fukuda, who was the top bureaucrat, was accused by a tabloid magazine of harassing female journalists. — Connor Cislo, Bloomberg.com, "Japanese Ministry Says Ex-Official Sexually Harassed Reporter," 27 Apr. 2018 López Obrador's foreign minister will be former Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard, 59, a career politician and bureaucrat. — Dudley Althaus, Washington Post, "Mexico’s leftist president-elect begins his outreach to the U.S. and Trump," 6 July 2018 After the election, Five Star started talks with the hard right League, which took 17% of the vote thanks largely to vigorous campaigning by Salvini against immigrants and Brussels bureaucrats. — Tom Kington, latimes.com, "Fueled by anger and distrust, Italy's leading populist parties working to form new government," 15 May 2018 True accountability will come only when parents and the community, rather than clueless bureaucrats, are the ones putting pressure on schools. — Lindsey Burke, National Review, "Fraud and Failure in D.C. Public Schools," 12 Feb. 2018 Your book is largely about this tension in which bureaucrats operate. — Sean Illing, Vox, "Why Border Patrol agents obey immoral orders," 20 June 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'bureaucrat.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.