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Legislative Organization And Administrative Redundancy, Michael Doran
Legislative Organization And Administrative Redundancy, Michael Doran
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Congress regularly enacts legislation providing for redundant administrative programs. For example, there are more than 100 federal programs for surface transportation, 82 programs to ensure teacher quality, 80 programs to promote domestic economic development, and 47 programs to provide employment and job-training services. Recent high-profile legislation–-such as the financial-industry reform measure and the health-care reform measure–-add new programs without repealing existing ones directed at the same policy goals. Prior academic analyses generally have not considered why Congress pursues redundancy. This article addresses that question through both theoretical and institutional analysis.
The article first constructs an organizational theory that attributes redundancy …
Time To Start Over On Deferred Compensation, Michael Doran
Time To Start Over On Deferred Compensation, Michael Doran
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Writing good regulations--"good" in the sense of promoting the public interest--always presents challenges. Regulators must hit a small but important target where private conduct is brought within appropriate government control, but unnecessary compliance burdens and other deadweight costs are minimized. Even if they see the government's objectives clearly, regulators often have only a limited understanding of the underlying private activities. Moreover, regulators may be unaware of how their rules disrupt or distort those activities in socially harmful ways.
Regulators occasionally hit the target exactly. More often, they miss--though not by an intolerably wide margin (good enough for government work, as …
Legislative Compromise And Tax Transition Policy, Michael Doran
Legislative Compromise And Tax Transition Policy, Michael Doran
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The extensive literature on legal transitions has formed a general position in favor of establishing a governmental transition policy; the primary debate concerns whether the policy should be one of systematically mitigating or not mitigating transition losses. Arguments on both sides generally have assumed a sharp dichotomy between a substantive legal change and the transition treatment associated with the substantive change. Focusing on federal tax legislation, this article challenges that assumption and the normative conclusions that it supports.
Specifically, this article identifies compromise as an important component of the tax legislative process and argues that the ability to provide or …