Writing a constitution is the easy part. Here’s how the bureaucracy puts it into action.

Welcome back to The Monkey Cage’s weekly presentation of Founding Principles, a series of short videos designed to explain American government and how it works — in theory and in practice. We started by looking at the structure of the government (Congress, the presidency and the courts) and then at public opinion, the media and elections — both the structure of our electoral system and voter behavior — as well as citizens’ political involvement. Last week we shifted to an examination of the policy process that results from the intersection of all those variables, beginning with the legislative process and the federal budget.