POLSCI 318 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Nondelegation Doctrine, Bureaucracy, Rulemaking
4 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Congress and the President
11.16.16 Lecture Notes – Delegation to the Bureaucracy
x Federal ageies i the ureauray are trapped i the e of politis – Weingast
x Beholden to the President, but also moderated by Congress
o Principal (Congress and the President) – agent (bureaucracy) problem
x Congress has many ways to influence the actions of bureaucratic agencies
o Can rewrite underlying laws to restrict actions of agencies
o Control over the appropriations process – can remove funding from agencies that have drifted
▪ Agency drift – ageies that ipleet poliy that dierge fro Cogress’s ill
o Oversight processes that can investigate
x Bureaucracy can be called on to make rules/regulations
o Rules are just as much as the law of the land as any other law passed by the federal
government
x Why would Congress delegate to the executive bureaucracy?
o 1. Delegation can occur because citizen demands on the government are so large and varied
that Congress alone cannot address these demand
o Congress is in charge of so many policy areas that they need to delegate authority to federal
agencies to deal with any problems with implementation in policy areas that already have a
huge corpus of existing law
o Agency serves as the first line of communication between citizens and the policy area
o 2. Saves time – Congress has limited time, resources, and effort
o 3. Agencies have more information and experience than congress in implementing policy – has
learned over time what works best
▪ Information asymmetry
x In our system of balance of powers, with so many veto points and compromise, Congress has the
incentive to delegate
o Compromise process of legislation includes the preferences of many individuals – law is very
vague
o Allows agencies to determine the specifics of decisions on how to implement the policy
o Congressmen are held less responsible by voters, responsibility is now the unelected
bureaucrats
▪ MT – oters do’t pay that uh attetio, ould’t ost oters just hold ogresse
accountable for problems in their district
o Congress is responsible for determining the balance of power for how much responsibility they
want to delegate to the executive branch
▪ Congress cannot delegate legislative authority to independent commissions (outside of
the executive branch)
o Unconstitutional delegation of legislation authority doctrine is also called the nondelegation
doctrine
o Constitution leaves out how much authority should be delegated to the executive branch – the
number or character of rules the executive can pass
▪ However, we know that delegation of this form is necessary because of the sheer
amount of minutia of law (when the Social Security office will open in the morning)
o Congress has made the decision of granting a lot of authority to executive agencies
▪ Many of our current laws are passed through the executive rule-making process
x Rule-making process
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