What role does Congress play in shaping presidential unilateral action? Recent scholarship highlights that executive orders require cooperation from agencies, and thus should be understood not as truly 'unilateral' but instead as acts of executive-branch delegation. In this paper, I argue that this delegation facilitates an under-investigated channel for Congressional influence: Congressional committees can exercise their oversight capabilities to shape the implementation of executive orders by administrative agencies. I demonstrate this dynamic using two novel datasets. The first is a dataset of executive orders that have been coded using original measures of executive-branch delegation and discretion. The second is a collection of Congressional hearings that have as a primary focus an executive order or its implementation. Using these data, I find that Congress engages in more oversight activity when an executive order delegates more authority and a wider discretionary window to agencies. This relationship is generally not conditioned by partisan division, but rather persists during periods of both unified and divided government. This finding supports the theory that Congress is able to participate in unilateral policymaking by shaping agency implementation, recasting our understanding of the inter-branch politics of executive unilateralism.

Recent scholarship on presidential unilateralism has shifted focus from the political dynamics between the president and Congress, to the intra-branch administrative politics of unilateral action. In this paper I contribute to this emerging literature by considering the president’s ability to constrain bureaucratic behavior in the context of unilateral action. In particular, I examine the relationship between the role of agencies in the formulation of an executive order and its associated discretionary window. I find that when agencies develop executive orders, the orders contain narrower grants of discretion than when orders are developed by White House staff, even when controlling for order significance and extent of delegated authority. Moreover, this relationship does not seem to have changed over time, and does not vary by party. This finding suggests that, at least in the context of executive unilateralism, presidents are able to constrain the exercise of agency discretion.

A common assumption in the American politics literature is that a president, as head of the executive branch, prefers high-quality governance to low-quality governance, irrespective of policy choice. Legacy concerns, fear of electoral reprisal, and the unique national constituency of the president all support this assumption. Puzzlingly, however, presidents sometimes make administrative decisions that seem contrary to a good governance objective. This paper addresses this dilemma by developing a formal model of presidential incentives to undermine bureaucratic capacity. The model identifies conditions under which an incumbent president has an incentive to reduce the long-term capacity of the bureaucracy so as to constrain the ability of future administrations to pursue policies that are far from the incumbent’s ideal point. This finding indicates that low-quality governance can sometimes be a deliberate choice, rather than an inadvertent result of political trade-offs.

A central concern of presidents is how they can influence bureaucratic policy outcomes. Two commonly-cited tools of such influence include include centralized regulatory review political appointments to administrative agencies. Extensive literatures in political science investigate the use of these tools in isolation, exploring the conditions under which presidents are more likely to use appointments or to request changes to agencies’ proposed rules. In this paper, I argue that the tools of presidential management should be considered not only in isolation, but also in combination as components of a comprehensive administrative strategy. In particular, I test whether the use of political appointments informs patterns of post-hoc regulatory review. I find that more appointments is associated with fewer rules being changed by OIRA, suggesting that politicization through appointments can be a substitute for post-hoc regulatory review.