Explain the Administrative Role of a Federal Agency

Week 3

Administrative Rulemaking

The sheer size and scope of the federal government’s rulemaking responsibilities are vast to the say the least. Ironically, an overwhelming majority of American public policy is established, enforced, modified, and eventually replaced or nullified through administrative rulemaking—as opposed as to statutory laws debated and passed by the public’s elected congressional representatives/senators and signed into law by the president. Collectively, the federal government sets, inspects, and enforces administrative regulatory rules by the thousands—governing food safety standards for the food you eat, air purity standards for the air you breathe, water purity standards for the water you drink, medical standards for the health care you receive, consumer safety standards for the vehicles you purchase, and the list goes on and on. It is through these regulatory rules that the federal government brings to bear significant influence on not only social behavior, but safety standards for people’s homes, workplaces, schools, restaurants, hospitals, farms, and even fresh water sources. The same goes for the personally-procured modern equipment and technologies you use every day—ranging from vehicles (automobiles, aircraft, boats) to electronics (cell phones, computers, televisions) to household equipment (washing machines, dryers, microwaves, toasters), which are regulated for consumer safety. Speaking of regulatory influence, it should also be noted that every major component of the American economy is also meticulously regulated and controlled—ranging from banking/commerce, technology, communications, education, energy, manufacturing, and transportation. These are all methodically regulated through a litany of administrative regulations.

To get an idea of how vast America’s current regulatory reach is, Dr. David H. Rosenbloom, one of America’s foremost Public Administration scholars, illustrates that between 1993 and 2013, federal agencies routinely published approximately 3,500 to 4,000 administrative rules annually, totaling 81,883 distinct rules over the 20-year period studied. This significantly exceeded the volume of congressional lawmaking and took up an astounding 24,690 pages in the Federal Register. In 2013 alone, a federal administrative rule or federal law was passed, on average, every 2.5 hours throughout the year—with administrative rules outnumbering federal statutes (passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by the U.S. President) by a ratio of 29-to-1. Regarding economic impact, the gross cost of this massive administrative rulemaking machine performed by 290,000 federal bureaucrats cost the average American family approximately $15,000 annually, or roughly 23% of the average nation-wide household income in 2013 (Rosenbloom, 2015).

Since being sworn into office in January 2017, President Donald J. Trump proclaimed the “deconstruction of the administrative state” to be one of his administration’s main objectives and during his first 18 months in the Oval Office, he delivered on this pledge with an array of anti-regulatory actions (Metzger, 2017). This included the issuance of an executive order requiring a minimum of two regulations to be identified for elimination to issue one new regulation and a requirement that all future federal regulations must be cost-neutral based on the costs of the two-or-more regulations each new regulation replaced (Trump, 2017). As President Trump seeks to fulfill other campaign promises—a major increase in national infrastructure development, an organizational enhancement of the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, and a national crackdown on illegal immigration—it is possible the federal government’s administrative regulatory functions may still increase, albeit at a much slower pace than in recent years. For now, whether the current anti-administrative state efforts of the Trump Administration will ultimately prove successful remains to be seen (Metzger, 2017).

References:

Metzger, G. E. (2017). 1930s Redux: The administrative state under siege. Harvard Law Review, 131(1), 2-4.

Rosenbloom, D. H. (2015). Administrative law for public managers (2nd ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ISBN 978-0813348827

Trump, D. J. (2017, January 30). Presidential Executive Order on reducing regulation and controlling regulatory costs [Web resource]. The White House.

Be sure to review this week's resources carefully. You are expected to apply the information from these resources when you prepare your assignments.