Tightening Control over the Federal Bureaucracy

The New York Times features a story about the President's January 18th, 2007 Executive Order, which gives the White House greater control over the guidance documents that agencies produce. These guidance documents, while not themselves binding law, nevertheless strongly influence the way businesses comply with federal regulations. The new executive order imposes greater restrictions on when and for what purposes the agencies can write these documents; and it requires that they clear these advisory documents with regulatory policy offices staffed by political appointees of the Administration. The purpose is to ensure that the guidance documents are consistent with the Administration's policy views.

The new Executive Order amends a previous order promulgated in 1993 by the Clinton Administration, which also sought to bring the bureaucracy more under the control of the White House. In fact, the Clinton Adminstration introduced a number of changes designed to ensure that federal agencies better reflected the President's policy (and political) agenda. And Clinton's innovations, in turn, built on decisions made in the Reagan Administration.

It is true that the Bush Administration's new rule will give political appointees more say over the guidance documents that are produced by scientists and other experts in the civil service. It will increase the control that the White House and its political concerns have over the bureaucracy. But this development is best understood as the continuation of a trend that goes back through several administrations, both Republican and Democratic.

As the federal bureaucracy has grown larger and its orders and advice more frequent and pervasive, the bureaucracy has also become increasingly independent of the political will of the White House. Presidents, realizing this, have sought to bring the bureaucracy under their control in various ways. The Reagan Administration tried to slow down bureaucratic initiatives it did not like. The Clinton Administration tried to harmonize regulations and require additional justifications. The difference in strategies makes some sense: The Reagan Administration ran against government regulation, and so tried to control it by impeding it. The Clinton Administration, by contrast, tried to impose various good government reforms on regulation, and, perhaps more important, tried to take credit for the work that the bureaucracy was doing, particularly after the Democrats lost Congress following the 1994 elections. Thus, the President would often make public statements and hold press conferences to announce decisions made in the bureaucracy, declaring them to be initiatives (and successes) of his Administration. Where Reagan sought to rain on regulation's parade and slow it down, Clinton sought to run ahead of the parade so that he could lead it. (For those who are interested, Dean Elena Kagan of the Harvard Law School wrote an important study in the Harvard Law Review in 2001 comparing the Reagan and Clinton Administrations' attempts to control the federal bureaucracy, and this post draws on her analysis.)

Interestingly, the Bush Administration has built on the Clinton model more than the Reagan model. Instead of trying to halt regulation, it has sought greater political control over advisory documents and required a greater showing that regulation addresses a genuine market failure. It seeks to use political appointees to act as gatekeepers for the content of advisory documents before they are published.

The reasons why Bush has followed Clinton more than Reagan flow from the rise of Bush's big government conservatism, a conservatism that happily uses all the levers of federal power to benefit his political allies, including most particularly business interests, who remain central to the Republican political coalition. The Bush Administration does not so much seek to stop regulation as to mold it in a decidedly business-friendly way.

It no accident that these revisions occur following the Republican loss of Congress in 2006; both Congress and the President have varying degrees of influence over the bureaucracy; the Administration, faced with a Congress of the opposite party, is trying to ensure that its influence remains stronger. But it is likely that these changes would have occurred even if the Republicans retained Congress, because these changes are part of a longer trend of Presidents finding ever new ways of asserting control over the federal bureaucracy, and, more to the point, they mesh well with Bush's big government conservatism.

Critics may assume that the use of political appointees as gatekeepers is consistent with the Administration's "war on science." There may be something to that, but here is a better way to look at it. Scientific expertise is a source of authority for the bureaucracy; it justifies its independent judgment. Such independent judgment is precisely what Presidents seek to curb in asserting control over the bureaucracy. There is no one way to do this, of course. The Clinton Administration sought to require greater justification for bureaucratic policy initiatives with the idea of ultimately taking credit for the bureaucracy's best ideas. The Bush Administration has built on the Clinton model to some extent, but also tried a different approach, seeking to hew bureaucratic judgment more closely to the White House's political judgment. While both models assert political control over bureaucracy, the Bush strategy treats expertise more like a threat to Presidential authority than the Clinton model did. That should not be surprising. The "permanent campaign" of the Clinton Presidency has morphed and metastasized into the basic operations of governance in the Bush Administration. Critics often charge that the Bush Administration does not care much about policy debate, only about politics. The Bush Administration's distinctive solution to the conflict between the President and the bureaucracy reflects this larger tendency.