Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

Today, the idea that the President possesses at least some constitutional authority to direct administrative action is accepted by the courts, Congress, and the legal academy. But it was not always so. For most of American history — indeed until relatively recently — Presidents derived their authority over the administrative state largely from statute. Any role for the White House in agency rulemaking or adjudication had to be legally specified. Scholars mostly agree about when this change occurred. But the dominant shared narrative — exemplified by then-Professor Elena Kagan’s seminal article Presidential Administration — is Whig history. It offers a depoliticized interpretation that presents White House primacy as the product of steady progress toward greater administrative rationality.

This Article offers a historical corrective. It explains how “administration under law” was lost and replaced with a new constitutional baseline, “presidential administration.” It is both an account of constitutional change — how one understanding of constitutional text and structure gave way to a different one — as well as a history of the regulatory state and how, beginning in the 1980s, federal officials reworked the relationship between the President, Congress, and administrative agencies in order to expand the role of market actors in governing economic activity. The Article draws attention to the intense political conflict that accompanied the advent of presidential administration. What is today bipartisan was originally nothing of the sort. It also reveals how a new interpretation of Article II took hold without any fundamental doctrinal or statutory change or shift in formal law. It highlights the emergence of a neoliberal consensus around aspects of economic regulation that incentivized and buttressed presidential administration as an approach to administrative governance. And it reveals the relative novelty of originalist arguments about the “Unitary Executive.”

Disciplines

Administrative Law | Law | President/Executive Department

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