Presidents and the Politics of Centralized Control: Regulatory Auditing at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

Abstract

The emergence of a vast administrative state is a hallmark "arguably the hallmark" of modern government. As was quickly understood by Woodrow Wilson and other early students of American political development, the presence of gigantic standing bureaucracies with enormous scope and power presents not merely a problem in public administration; it presents a problem in brute politics. The crux of the matter, as a leading scholar of public management rather dryly notes, is that "whoever controls the bureaucracy controls a key part of the policy process" [Lewis 2008]. The problem of political control is acute for Congress. Not surprisingly, it became an analytical focus of the "new institutionalist" revolution in scholarship on Congress and the administrative state [McNollgast 1987], [Ferejohn and Shipan 1990], [Epstein and O'Halloran 1999]. But the problem of control is equally if not more acute for America's chief executive officer, the President: How can one man, aided by a relative handful of confederates, exert effective control over rule making in the agencies? Presidents, working diligently and with considerable ingenuity, have responded to the challenge by developing a remarkable set of tools for controlling policy making in the administrative state. Perhaps the most important is "politicization," the systematic placement of loyal subordinates into supervisory positions within the agencies [Lewis 2008]. But others include: - Centralized budgeting [Tomkin 1998], - Direct command through executive orders [Howell 2003], - Centralized review and direction of the agencies’legislative programs [Rudalevige 2002], [Neustadt 1954], and - Reorganizing or terminating agencies [Lewis 2003]. One of the newest tools, and potentially a puissant one, is direct centralized review and revision of the agencies' proposed rules. This tool (innovated by the Nixon Administration but solidly institutionalized during the Reagan Administration, and then retained by every subsequent president) can be seen as the apotheosis of the centralizing tendencies of the American presidency, noted so crisply in Moe's classic analysis [Moe 1985]. The locus for the President's centralized review and revision of agency rules is the Office of Information and Regulatory A¤airs (OIRA) in the office of Management and Budget (OMB). In a very real sense, OIRA is the point of the spear in the President's battle to exert direct centralized control over agency rules.