Bureaucratic agencies are staffed by non-elected officials who are not directly accountable to voters in the way elected officials are. As a result, an agency's internal incentives (such as budget growth, job security, or minimizing its own workload) may diverge from the goals of the elected officials who oversee it or the public it serves. This gap between agency incentives and principal (elected official/public) goals can reduce the efficiency of resource allocation carried out through the political process.