About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

95 S. Cal. L. Rev. 731 (2021-2022)
Divided Agencies

handle is hein.journals/scal95 and id is 785 raw text is: DIVIDED AGENCIES BRIAN D. FEINSTEIN* & ABBY K. WOODt ABSTRACT Clashes between presidential appointees and civil servants are front- page news. Whether styled as a deep state hostile to its democratically selected political principals or as bold resisters countering those principals' ultra vires proposals, accounts of civil servant opposition are legion. Move beyond headlines, however, and little is known about the impact of political divisions within agencies on their workaday functioning. This Article presents the first comprehensive, empirical examination of the effects of intra-agency political dynamics on policymaking. Leveraging data on political preferences based on campaign donations, we identify ideological scores for both appointees and civil servants in dozens of agencies over thirty-four years-the first measure of the political gap between these two groups across agencies and time. We use these scores to examine how ideological divergence between appointees and civil servants affects regulatory activity. We find that agencies with greater distance between these two groups- which we term divided agencies -may adopt a more cautious posture. They tend to extend the rulemaking process and allow consideration of late- filed comments. These features provide appointees with extra time to gather and digest comments from politically aligned outside experts. Divided agencies' caution may extend to the completion of final rules, which-in * Assistant Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. t Professor of Law, Political Science and Public Policy, University of Southern California Gould School of Law. We thank Adam Bonica, Devin Judge-Lord, and Rachel Potter for data, and Ming Hsu Chen, John Harrison, Erin Hartman, Kathryn Kovacs, Jeff Lubbers, Neysun Mahboubi, Jennifer Mascott, John McGinnis, Jon Michaels, David Noll, Anne Joseph O'Connell, Richard Pierce, Zach Price, Michael Rappaport, Noah Rosenblum, Amy Semet, Bijal Shah, Kevin Stack, Matthew Stephenson, Chris Walker, Dan Walters, Adam White, and participants at the Presidential Administration in a Polarized Era conference at.the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State for helpful comments. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the Gray Center's financial support of this research. 731

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most