Negotiating for Knowledge: Administrative Responses to Congressional Demands for Information

Abstract

Congressional requests for administrative agency information could be handled in a less confrontational manner by negotiation. Instead of negotiations occurring ad hoc as they currently do, Congress and the executive branch could have a written agreement to structure negotiations regarding inter branch sharing of sensitive information. Analyses of this issue tend to argue that Congress's right to information varies with executive and independent agencies, but Supreme Court decisions show that the division of agencies into these two categories has no basis in the Constitution.