Legislative Influence v. Presidential Dominance: Competing Models of Bureaucratic Control

The continued delegation of policy-making authority to the bureaucracy has made the administrative process a primary arena for competition between the American president and Congress. The fact that the president has been winning consistently in recent years thus has important implications both for the character of policy making and for the distribution of power within our political system. This article is concerned with innovations in theory that have provided impetus and justification for this development. As an exercise in institutional analysis, it integrates normative considerations of good and constitutionally-sound policy making with an empirical assessment of executive and legislative competence. We argue that the emergent model of political oversight, which advocates centralized presidential control over agency policy making while prescribing a passive role for Congress, ignores key goals of our political system as well as important external influences and internal constraints that shape institutional behavior. A theory of oversight properly reconciled with the reality of agency policy making must allow for a direct congressional role in the administrative process as a counterpoise to executive power. Oversight issues were once much simpler than they are today. As discussed in the first section, the traditional model of public administration yielded an elegant set of prescriptions for institutional control of the bureaucracy in which formal