“First, as mentioned earlier street-level bureaucracies usually must choose additional services rather than improvement in services if they have slack resources. Second, claims of qualitative improvements in the form of spending more time on each case are often spurious. Case loads are often informally divided into active and inactive categories. The inactive cases are often not truly inactive but represent cases to which the street-level bureaucrat is unable to attend in the ordinary course of the day. They are regarded as low priority for reasons having little to do with the client but a lot to do with the pressures on the workers. A social worker required to make more home visits than he or she can possibly arrange and still take care of more pressing responsibilities, or a legal services lawyer with a large case load, only a portion of which he or she can act on in the course of a week, have divided their cases in such ways by necessity. When additional workers enter these agencies, they may reduce the formal case load by taking on a portion of each worker's load. But presumably they will only be able to work with the same number of clients as the other workers. Thus they will have the same active
case load, and everyone in the agency will have smaller inactive case loads. More clients will be seen or served, but the amount of actual time spent with the average client will not have improved.”