The article discusses the bureaucracy as an institutional mechanism of governance, in terms of the management of the State, intending to propose some reflections about the trajectory of the bureaucratic model. It starts on the primary concepts about the model, as proposed by Max Weber, as a form of rational-legal dominance and to contest the patrimonialism, exploring its limitations and crises, until their more recent innovations, as a mechanism of State administration in the context of New Public Management, that supposedly would be delineating a post-bureaucratic model. It concludes that the traditional weberian model still has not changed to a new paradigm, capable to supplant its basic foundations, especially in terms of its rationality way and legitimacy used: the practice in government administration shows that the precepts of the New Public Management still coexist side by side with the traditional bureaucracy.