Bureaucratic actors are located at the center of social policymaking. The chapter illustrates the relevance of conflicts of interests between fiscal bureaucrats and social bureaucrats and politicians, showing that where these conflicts are intense neoliberal reforms may be blocked or muted, at least for a time. The two case studies were selected to illustrate variation in the roles played by state bureaucracies and to cover key domains of social policymaking. The child allowances scheme demonstrates that the level of social policy politicization is influenced by changes in a program’s rules of entitlement, and that in turn the level of politicization determines whether and how bureaucrats are involved in policymaking. The National Health Insurance Law shows how bureaucratic actors may respond to a highly politicized change in the institutional arrangement of a social policy field by shifting the locus of decision-making to the bureaucratic arena, where powerful bureaucracies dominate policymaking.