Inside the administrative state: a critical look at the practice of presidential control.

Michigan Law Review, October, 2006 by Bressman, Lisa Schultz; Vandenbergh, Michael P.

From the inception of the administrative state, scholars have proposed various models of agency decision-making to render such decision-making accountable and effective, only to see those models falter when confronted by actual practice. Until now, the "presidential control" model has been largely impervious to this pattern. That model, which brings agency decision-making under the direction of the president, has strengthened over time, winning broad scholarly endorsement and bipartisan political support. But it, like prior models, relies on abstractions--for example, that the president represents public preferences and resists parochial pressures--that do not hold up as a factual matter. Although recent empirical analyses purport to validate the model, they fall short...

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