2.14/2.15 - Holding the Bureaucracy Accountable

Congressional Tools

• Congressional Oversight: Congress investigates and holds hearings on agency activity, requiring agency heads to testify regularly about what they've done, how they spent money, and whether they succeeded.
• Oversight includes ongoing review and monitoring of agencies, not just hearings. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) works as Congress's investigator, auditing how agencies spend money and whether programs work.
• Why it matters: the bureaucracy is part of the executive branch, so oversight is also a check on the president. Examples: the Senate Watergate hearings (1973) and the Iran-Contra hearings (1987) investigated abuses inside presidents' administrations.

• Power of the Purse: Congress can cut an agency's budget if it's unhappy with performance, giving agencies a strong incentive to stay in Congress's good graces. In extreme cases, Congress can eliminate an agency entirely.

Presidential Tools

• Executive Orders: the president can redirect an agency's goals or instruct it on how to interpret a law.

• Example: under Trump, the EPA shifted from a more regulatory stance toward deregulation in several industries.

• Appointments: presidents choose Cabinet secretaries and agency heads who share their ideology and goals, and can fire Cabinet secretaries at any time. A new president can change an agency's direction just by changing who runs it.

• Budget: the president's Office of Management and Budget proposes how much money each agency gets and reviews major new regulations before they take effect.

Compliance Monitoring

• Challenge: monitoring takes staff, time, and money, and agencies can't watch everyone, so rules get enforced unevenly. Heavy paperwork can also slow programs down, and states or businesses may push back against strict oversight.

Judicial Tools

• Lawsuits: courts can rule that an agency went beyond the power Congress gave it, violated the Constitution, or skipped the required process for making rules. Example: in Biden v. Nebraska (2023), the Court ruled that the law the Department of Education relied on didn't let it cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans.

• Less deference: in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), the Court ruled that judges, not agencies, have the final say on what an unclear law means. This limits how much discretion agencies have.

How Accountable Is the Bureaucracy?

• Competing interests: Congress, the president, and the courts don't always want the same thing. An agency may get directions from a president of one party and face oversight from a Congress controlled by the other, while iron triangles and interest groups pull it in their own direction.

• Limits on control: most bureaucrats are career civil servants hired under the merit system, so they stay when presidents change, and agencies often know more about their policy area than the officials overseeing them.

Policy and the Branches of Government

• Multiple access points: because power is split among Congress, the president, the courts, and the agencies, people and groups have many places to push for a policy. They can lobby Congress, pressure the president, comment on proposed agency rules, or file lawsuits. If they lose in one place, they try another. Example: civil rights bills were blocked for years in Congress, where Southern senators filibustered them, so the NAACP turned to the courts and won Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

• Constrained policymaking: since the branches share power, big changes need several of them to agree, which makes national policy slow and usually incremental. A president's plan needs Congress to pass it, can be stalled by a Senate filibuster, can be slowed by the agencies carrying it out, and can be struck down by the courts, a power the Court has had since Marbury v. Madison (1803).

Big picture