Bureaucratic Slippage and Failures of Agency Vigilance: The Case of the Environmental Studies Program

This paper focuses on bureaucratic slippage—the tendency for broad policies to be altered through successive reinterpretation, such that the ultimate implementation may bear little resemblance to legislated or other broad statements of policy intent. It is well known that policy enforcement can be constrained by funding limitations, or by the fact that an apparently strong statement of intent can be coupled with a level of funding that is too low to do the job. A clearer test, however, involves cases where clear policy statements are coupled with substantial levels of funding. The Environmental Studies Program (ESP) of the U.S. Minerals Management Service provides such a case. The program, which is explicitly required to study impacts of offshore development on “the human, marine, and coastal environments,” has spent roughly $500 million on such studies over the past two decades. Independent evaluations, however, have found the studies to be lacking. The reasons go beyond mere difficulty, and instead include considerable bureaucratic slippage. The broad mandates of the law are whittled away at successive stages of translation, such that, by the time of the agency's actual “implementation,” the ESP is virtually prohibited from fulfilling some of the law's clear requirements. The findings suggest the need to go beyond the analysis of policies and to devote far greater attention to the “details” of implementation. Those details have the distinct potential to be not just administrative, but effectively political.