The Role of Guidances in Modern Administrative Procedure: The Case for De Novo Review

This article examines the rise of the administrative guidance under the APA. Guidances supply information so private parties can organize their behavior in accordance with law, but also allow agencies, without notice and comment, to indiscriminately expand their power. Separating useful from dangerous guidances requires allowing review of all guidances de novo as questions of law, without Chevron and Skidmore deference, by any interested party, even for nonfinal agency actions. Private selection effects will limit challenges to dangerous guidances without undermining those guidances that reduce uncertainty without improperly expanding the scope of agency power. The purpose of this article is to analyze the role that various guidance statements have played in the modern law of administrative procedure. In one sense this inquiry is an odd one, because the canonical statute of administrative law, the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (APA), 5 U.S.C. § 500 et seq, does not use the term “guidance” at all. Historically, the phrase only worked its way into administrative law in the mid-1990s, about 50 years after the passage of the APA