Plotting a Functional Typology for Government Agencies

How many federal agencies are there? It depends… on many things.In addition to the lack of a widely agreed-upon definition for what constitutes an agency, agencies exist in a variety of forms and possess varied characteristics across and within types.

While this diversity may have developed to suit the needs of each individual agency in isolation, it does not necessarily benefit the government as a whole. This proliferation of agencies can undermine the very advantages that their establishment is intended to provide.

A functional typology of agencies is therefore needed as a foundation for developing a more coherent framework for their creation and management. This paper analyses the entire portfolio of 34 agencies from two ministries in Malaysia – the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI), and the Ministry of Human Resources (MOHR) – approaching this task through four foundational governance dimensions.

It then proposes a functional typology for classifying agencies based on their expected distance from ministerial control, along with considerations for their governance structure, oversight, and accountability mechanisms.