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President/Executive Department Commons

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Administrative Law

University of Michigan Law School

Executive oversight

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Full-Text Articles in President/Executive Department

Irrelevant Oversight: "Presidential Administration" From The Standpoint Of Arbitrary And Capricious Review, Daniel P. Rathbun Feb 2009

Irrelevant Oversight: "Presidential Administration" From The Standpoint Of Arbitrary And Capricious Review, Daniel P. Rathbun

Michigan Law Review

The president is now regularly and heavily involved in the decisionmaking processes of administrative agencies. What began in the mid-twentieth century as macro-level oversight has evolved, since the Reagan Administration, into controlling case-level influence. Scholars have hotly debated the legality of this shift and have compellingly demonstrated the need to ensure that agencies remain accountable and that their decisions remain nonarbitrary in the face of presidential involvement. However, as this Note demonstrates, the existing scholarship has not provided an adequate solution to these twin problems. This Note provides a novel and effective solution to the accountability and arbitrariness problems of …


Legitimacy, Selectivity, And The Disunitary Executive: A Reply To Sally Katzen, Lisa Schultz Bressman, Michael P. Vandenbergh May 2007

Legitimacy, Selectivity, And The Disunitary Executive: A Reply To Sally Katzen, Lisa Schultz Bressman, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Michigan Law Review

This reply addresses the thoughtful comments that former OIRA Administrator Sally Katzen has provided on our Article, Inside the Administrative State: A Critical Look at the Practice of Presidential Control. Our Article is the first to investigate the agency perspective on White House involvement in agency rule-making. We interviewed 30 of the 35 top political officials in the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA") during the George H.W. Bush ("Bush I") and the William J. Clinton Administrations during 1989-2001. Prior to our study, empirical studies of White House involvement in agency rule-making had focused almost exclusively on the White House side, …


A Reality Check On An Empirical Study: Comments On "Inside The Administrative State", Sally Katzen May 2007

A Reality Check On An Empirical Study: Comments On "Inside The Administrative State", Sally Katzen

Michigan Law Review

Presidential control is the term used for the process (or some would say, the model) by which agency decision-making (more particularly, rulemaking) is brought under the direction of the president to "render such decision- making accountable and effective." Until now scholars, who have generally endorsed both the theory and the practice of the process, have written from the perspective of those who exercise presidential control - those at the White House or the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs ("OIRA"). In a recent article in the Michigan Law Review, Lisa Schultz Bressman and Michael Vandenbergh ("the authors") decided to …


Inside The Administrative State: A Critical Look At The Practice Of Presidential Control, Lisa Schultz Bressman, Michael P. Vandenbergh Oct 2006

Inside The Administrative State: A Critical Look At The Practice Of Presidential Control, Lisa Schultz Bressman, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Michigan Law Review

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. …