The popular conception of bureaucracy is familiar. There are of course the rules: innumerable, entangled, often impenetrable. There are the stiff waiting rooms: white, fluorescent-lit, with rows of identical chairs and gray partition panels. Above all, perhaps, there are the people, the infamous bureaucrats. They are the supposedly human face of the state—cold, distant, unconcerned. Of all the ills of bureaucracy, they might be the worst. They look without seeing, they listen without hearing, and they proclaim decisions that can change people’s lives with the indifference of a butcher slicing a piece of steak.

Or so one might think. In preparation for my book, When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency, I spent eight months as a volunteer receptionist at a publicly funded anti-poverty agency, observing how my coworkers did their jobs. As a nonprofit contractor for the state, the agency helps low-income families apply for a range of public programs, such as food stamps, health services, fuel assistance, and early-childhood education. This is the new face of the administrative state: private provision of services with public funding and oversight.

Located in a large city in the northeastern United States, the agency operates a network of 16 neighborhood centers, each modest in size, but serving collectively close to 100,000 families annually. The center to which I was assigned employed eight to 10 full-time caseworkers, and relied on the unpaid, part-time support of an equal number of volunteers and interns. It catered primarily to African American and Hispanic clients, reflecting the demographics of the surrounding area.

While working there, I learned that the routine of everyday work at the front lines of public service is not quite what it seems from the outside. It is neither as simple, repetitive, nor rule-governed as one might believe. If frontline work is soul-sucking, it is less because bureaucrats must mechanically apply rules than because they must shoulder, day in and day out, the weight of difficult discretionary decisions which most people have the luxury to ignore.

Frontline bureaucrats are often portrayed as unthinking automata, yet they are in fact vested with a substantial margin of discretion. This is where the challenge of implementing policy starts. It is not that rules are absent; on the contrary, they abound. But they are often sufficiently ambiguous that they lend themselves to various plausible interpretations, or so numerous that they conflict with one another. When this is the case, bureaucrats must exert independent judgment to figure out what to do. If they were to stop doing so and adhere religiously to the scripts provided to them, public-service agencies would come to a halt.

Some uses of discretion are technical. In welfare agencies, for instance, caseworkers must draw on their expertise to determine which work-training program is most likely to be successful for a particular client. Other uses of discretion, however, are normative, or value-laden. Did clients have a “good reason” to miss their appointment? Did they exert “sufficient effort” to look for a job? Questions such as these call for moral or political judgment. And the stakes are high: When one is dealing with vulnerable clients, erring on one side or the other can make the difference between someone having food on the table, a safe place to sleep, and a bit of dignity left or not.