Law Commons^™

Participant Compensation In The Clinton Administration, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

A half-decade ago in the pages of this journal, I suggested that the Bush Administration, the federal administrative agencies, and Congress seriously consider revitalizing participant compensation. Participant compensation is the agency payment of expenses that members of the public incur when they are involved in administrative proceedings. Initiatives in the executive and legislative branches supported my recommendation that both branches revive this valuable mechanism for facilitating citizen participation in agency processes.

Much to my chagrin, the Bush Administration neither introduced legislation which would have specifically authorized participant compensation nor suggested that agencies rely on their implied authority to reimburse parties, …

Great Expectations And Mismatched Compensation: Government Sponsored Public Participation In Proceedings Of The Consumer Product Safety Commission, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

During the last twenty years, numerous proposals for enhancing the quality of federal administrative agency decisionmaking have been offered, but few actually were implemented. One controversial approach, with which fourteen agencies experimented, has been the reimbursement of non-regulated individuals and organizations for the costs of their involvement in administrative proceedings. A principal purpose of that public funding was to improve agency decisionmaking by rectifying the participatory imbalance between regulated parties and non-commercial interests involved in administrative initiatives; however, little of the government- supported citizen activity that occurred has been analyzed. Participant compensation effectively has been discontinued and most agency proceedings …