Administrative Procedures, Information, and Agency Discretion

This paper investigates the design of administrative procedures when policy consequences are uncertain. In general, when deciding how much discretion to delegate, legislators must trade off informational gains from agency expertise and distributive losses from bureaucratic drift. We show that when Congress has both ex post agenda control and access to information, it will delegate a large degree of authority to all agencies, regardless of differences in policy preferences. This discretionary floor rises as future events become more uncertain. We further show that the possibility of coalitional drift, or changing preferences of the median legislator, may lead either to hard-wired agencies with little authority or soft-wired agencies with large powers to set policy.