President/Executive Department Commons^™

Water, Water Everywhere, But Just How Much Is Clean?: Examining Water Quality Restoration Efforts Under The United States Clean Water Act And The United States-Canada Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, Jill T. Hauserman

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The President's Budget As A Source Of Agency Policy Control, Eloise Pasachoff

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A large body of literature in administrative law discusses presidential control of executive agencies through centralized review of regulations in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), part of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Largely overlooked in this literature is how the President’s budget acts as a source of agency policy control—in particular, how the White House exercises control through OMB’s authority to prepare the budget, oversee agencies’ execution of the budget, and create and implement management initiatives through the budget process. This Article identifies seven levers associated with OMB’s work on budget preparation, budget …

The Judicial Role In Constraining Presidential Non-Enforcement Discretion: The Virtues Of An Apa Approach, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars, lawyers, and, indeed, the public at large increasingly worry about what purposive presidential inaction in enforcing statutory programs means for the rule of law and how such discretionary inaction can fit within a constitutional structure that compels Presidents to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Yet those who have recognized the problem have been hesitant to assign a role for the court in policing the constitutional limits they articulate, mostly because of the strain on judicial capacity that any formulation of Take Care Clause review would cause. In this Article, I argue that courts still can and …

Category Errors And Executive Power, Jonathan H. Adler

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this brief essay is to provide some clarity in the muddled discussion over executive power. Specifically, the aim is to help clarify what sorts of actions taken by the executive branch can be properly characterized as “enforcement” actions—where the President’s inherent authority to exercise prosecutorial discretion applies—and what sorts of actions cannot. Specifically, this essay seeks to explain why some particularly controversial actions—such as the Administration’s decision to delay the so-called employer mandate imposed by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and to “tailor” the application of federal regulations governing greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act …

Controlling Presidential Control, Kathryn A. Watts

Michigan Law Review

Presidents Reagan and Clinton laid the foundation for strong presidential control over the administrative state, institutionalizing White House review of agency regulations. Presidential control, however, did not stop there. To the contrary, it has evolved and deepened during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Indeed, President Obama’s efforts to control agency action have dominated the headlines in recent months, touching on everything from immigration to drones to net neutrality. Despite the entrenchment of presidential control over the modern regulatory state, administrative law has yet to adapt. To date, the most pervasive response both inside and outside the …

Just A Miner Threat? The Fourth Circuit Refuses To Review Temporary Reinstatement Orders Through The Collateral Order Doctrine, Lindsay N. Kistler

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Beyond Legality: The Legitimacy Of Executive Action In Immigration Law, Ming H. Chen

Publications

Recent uses of executive action in immigration law have triggered accusations that the President is acting imperially, like a king, or as a lawbreaker. President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) programs, which provide protection from deportation and a work permit during a temporary period of lawful presence, serve as the lightning rod for these accusations. But even as legislative and litigation challenges to DACA proceed, many states appear to accept and comply with it, including nearly all of the states that have joined the Texas v United States lawsuit that challenges …

Politics And Agencies In The Administrative State: The U.S. Case, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

The pending American presidential election, culminating a period of extreme political partisanship in our national government generally, gives point to an essay on politics and agencies in the American regulatory state. In our two-party system, it has often been the case in recent times, including the last six years, that the President comes from one of our two major political parties and one or both houses of Congress are controlled by the other. All American agencies (including, in the American case, the so-called independent regulatory bodies) are associated with the President in the executive branch, yet dependent on the Senate …

Presidential Control Across Policymaking Tools, Catherine Y. Kim

Florida State University Law Review

Over the past quarter century, administrative law scholars have observed the President’s growing control over agency policymaking and the separation-of-powers concerns implicated by such unilateral exercises of power. The paradigmatic form of agency policymaking—notice-and-comment rulemaking—mitigates these concerns by ensuring considerable oversight by the courts, Congress, and the public at large. Agencies, however, typically have at their disposal a variety of policymaking tools with which to implement White House goals, including the issuance of guidance documents and the strategic exercise of enforcement discretion. While commentators have drawn attention to the risk that agencies will circumvent the extensive checks associated with rulemaking …

Deferred Action And The Bounds Of Agency Discretion: Reconciling Policy And Legality In Immigration Enforcement, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Unpacking Eme Homer: Cost, Proportionality, And Emissions Reductions, Daniel A. Farber

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Interstate air pollution can prevent even the most diligent downwind state from attaining the air quality levels required by federal law. Allocating responsibility for emissions cuts when multiple upwind states contribute to downwind air quality violations presents a particularly difficult problem. Justice Ginsburg’s opinion for the Court in EPA v. EME Homer City Generator, L.P., gives EPA broad discretion to craft regulatory solutions for this problem. Although the specific statutory provision at issue was deceptively simple, the underlying problem was especially complex because of the large number of states involved. Indeed, neither the majority opinion nor the dissent seems to …

Beyond Transparency: Rethinking Election Reform From An Open Government Perspective, Michael Halberstam

Seattle University Law Review

During the past decade, “transparency” has become a focus of democratic governance. Open government and right-to-know regimes have been around at least since the 1970s. They include measures like open meeting laws, campaign finance disclosure, lobbying registration, and freedom of information laws. But the Open Government projects— variously referred to as e-democracy, Open Data, or Government 2.0— have evolved into something new and different. They view transparency not primarily as a right to know, but as a condition for a more efficient, intelligent, and cooperative form of democratic government. This Article considers how various election reform projects fit with the …

Human Rights Violations At Guantánamo Bay: How The United States Has Avoided Enforcement Of International Norms, Samantha Pearlman

Seattle University Law Review

Guantánamo Bay has become a symbol of the United States’ approach to the War on Terror. The detention center is globally known for the human rights violations committed there; yet, the international community has failed to take actions to successfully close the facility through either the use of pressure on the U.S. government or by utilizing enforcement mechanisms against the United States as it would any other nation committing proportional human rights violations. The United States’ actions at Guantánamo Bay violate its obligations under the Third Geneva Convention, the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention Against …

Immigration Policy And The Rhetoric Of Reform: “Deport Felons, Not Families,” Moncrieffe V. Holder, Children At The Border, And Idle Promises, Terri R. Day, Leticia M. Diaz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Democratic Rulemaking, John M. De Figueiredo, Edward H. Stiglitz

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines to what extent agency rulemaking is democratic. It reviews theories of administrative rulemaking in light of two normative benchmarks: a “democratic” benchmark based on voter preferences, and a “republican” benchmark based on the preferences of elected representatives. It then evaluates how the empirical evidence lines up in light of these two approaches. The paper concludes with a discussion of avenues for future research.

Reverse Nullification And Executive Discretion, Michael T. Morley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Presidential Administration And The Traditions Of Administrative Law, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

American administrative law has long been characterized by two distinct traditions: the positivist and the process traditions. The positivist tradition emphasizes that administrative bodies are created by law and must act in accordance with the requirements of the law. The process tradition emphasizes that agencies must act in accordance with norms of reasoned decisionmaking, which emphasize that all relevant interests must be given an opportunity to express their views and agencies must explain their decisions in a public and articulate fashion. In the twentieth century, American administrative law achieved a grand synthesis of these two traditions, with the result that …

The Judgment Fund: America's Deepest Pocket & Its Susceptibility To Executive Branch Misuse, Paul F. Figley

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Over the last thirty-five years, the United States government has paid out billions of dollars in settlements that have had no fiscal consequences for the agencies whose actions caused the claims. It has done so through the Judgment Fund, a relatively unknown permanent, indefinite appropriation originally created by Congress almost half a century ago to pay certain types of judgments entered against the United States.

Congress struggled for nearly two hundred years to find a way to exercise its Appropriations Clause authority over claims payments that did not drown its members in procedural detail. The article surveys that history. Through …

Quitting In Protest: A Theory Of Presidential Policy Making And Agency Response, Charles M. Cameron, John M. De Figueiredo, David E. Lewis

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines the effects of centralized presidential policy-making, implemented through unilateral executive action, on the willingness of bureaucrats to exert effort and stay in the government. Extending models in organizational economics, we show that policy initiative by the president is a substitute for initiative by civil servants. Yet, total effort is enhanced when both work. Presidential centralization of policy often impels policy-oriented bureaucrats ("zealots") to quit rather than implement presidential policies they dislike. Those most likely to quit are a range of moderate bureaucrats. More extreme bureaucrats may be willing to wait out an opposition president in the hope …

The President And The Constitution, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

That comprehensive and undefined presidential powers hold both practical advantages and grave dangers for the country will impress anyone who has served as legal adviser to a President in time of transition and public anxiety.... The purpose of the Constitution was not only to grant power, but to keep it from getting out of hand.... With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations.

The Administrative Conference And The Political Thumb, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

In his valuable contribution to this special issue, Richard Pierce underscores the role the Administrative Conference of the United States (“ACUS”) has played over the years in encouraging on the ground fact-finding by its consultants, who have usually been academics consulted at the beginning of careers that ever after would be marked by this encounter with the realities of the administrative process. As the mentee of Walter Gellhorn, who directed the remarkable empirical studies of federal agency procedures that underlay the eventual Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) and who was a member of the ACUS Council from its initiation in 1964 …

The Uncertain Effects Of Senate Confirmation Delays In The Agencies, Nina A. Mendelson

Articles

As Professor Anne O’Connell has effectively documented, the delay in Senate confirmations has resulted in many vacant offices in the most senior levels of agencies, with potentially harmful consequences to agency implementation of statutory programs. This symposium contribution considers some of those consequences, as well as whether confirmation delays could conceivably have benefits for agencies. I note that confirmation delays are focused in the middle layer of political appointments—at the assistant secretary level, rather than at the cabinet head—so that formal functions and political oversight are unlikely to be halted altogether. Further, regulatory policy making and even agenda setting can …

Taking Public Access To The Law Seriously: The Problem Of Private Control Over The Availability Of Federal Standards, Nina A. Mendelson

Articles

In the 1930s, Harvard professor Erwin Griswold famously complained about the enormous numbers of New Deal regulations that were obscurely published on individual sheets or in “separate paper pamphlets.” Finding these binding federal rules was difficult, leading to “chaos” and an “intolerable” situation. Congress responded, requiring that agencies publish all rules in the Federal Register and in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Currently, recent federal public laws, the entire U.S. Code, the Federal Register, and the CFR are all freely available online as well as in governmental depository libraries. But with respect to thousands of federal regulations, the clock …

The National Security Council And The Iran-Contra Affair, Ed Jenkins, Robert H. Brink

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The National Environmental Policy Act Of 1969 And Its Implications For Nafta: Public Citizen V. United States Trade Representative, 822 F. Supp. 21 (D.D.C.), Rev'd 5 F.3d 549 (D.C. Cir. 1993)., Kristin R. Loecke

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Offices Of Goodness: Influence Without Authority In Federal Agencies, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Inducing governmental organizations to do the right thing is the central problem of public administration. Especially sharp challenges arise when “the right thing” means executing not only a primary mission but also constraints on that mission (what Philip Selznick aptly labeled “precarious values”). In a classic example, we want police to prevent and respond to crime and maintain public order, but to do so without infringing anyone’s civil rights. In the federal government, if Congress or another principal wants an executive agency to pay attention not only to its mission, but also to some other constraining or even conflicting value—I …

Unitary Innovations And Political Accountability, Edward H. Stiglitz

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

An important trend in administrative and constitutional law is to attempt to concentrate ever-greater control over the administrative state in the hands of the President. As the Supreme Court recently reminded us in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, one foundation for this doctrinal trend is a fear that diffusing power diffuses accountability. Here, I study whether institutional innovations resulting from such judicial decisions support this functionalist constitutional value of political accountability, emphasizing under-appreciated complications arising out of interbranch relations. For most of the Article, I conduct an indepth empirical case study of the legislative veto, one …

The Hearing Examiners And The Administrative Procedure Act, 1937-1960, Joanna L. Grisinger

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

Resolving The Alj Quandary, Kent Barnett

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

Three competing constitutional and practical concerns surround federal administrative law judges (“ALJs”), who preside over all formal adjudications within the executive branch. First, if ALJs are “inferior Officers” (not mere employees), as five current Supreme Court Justices have suggested, the current method of selecting many ALJs likely violates the Appointments Clause. Second, a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision reserved the question whether the statutory protections that prevent ALJs from being fired at will impermissibly impinge upon the President’s supervisory power under Article II. Third, these same protections from removal may, on the other hand, be too limited to satisfy impartiality …

The Transformative Twelfth Amendment, Joshua D. Hawley

Faculty Publications

This paper argues that the Twelfth Amendment represents far more than a mechanical adjustment of the electoral college. Rather, it is the constitutional text that gives us the political presidency that we know today. The Twelfth Amendment worked a major structural change in the relationship between the legislative and executive branches and for that reason bears directly on the debate over the unitary executive and the meaning of “executive power.” Specifically, presidential removal power is best justified not by the original Article II, but by the constitutional structure the Twelfth Amendment created. And the scope and definition of executive power …