Two important tools for presidential control of bureaucratic agencies are regulatory review and politicization. Extensive literatures in political science investigate the use of these tools in isolation, but I argue that these tools should be understood as strategic substitutes. Using a dataset of 14,171 regulatory actions reviewed by OIRA between 1994 and 2022, combined with personnel information for 154 agencies from the Office of Personnel Management, I find that rules from more politicized agencies are changed by OIRA less frequently: a one standard deviation increase in politicization above the mean is associated with a roughly 8.5 percentage point decrease in the likelihood that a rule is changed at the review stage. The association is robust to a variety of modeling choices, and does not appear to be driven by changes to the overall volume of rulemaking activity. A placebo test supports the idea that the association reflects within-administration strategic substitution.

Federal agencies are responsible for a significant proportion of contemporary policymaking. While Congress passes the laws, it is federal agencies who define and implement the law through rulemaking, often employing broad discretion in doing so. An important element of federal rulemaking is participation by the general public through the notice and comment process. Previous scholarship has investigated whether comments provided through this process influence final policy outcomes, often finding that the process tends to favor organized or well-resourced interests at the expense of the public. However, due to feasibility considerations in analyzing large text-based datasets, existing studies typically focus on a sample of rules or agencies, limiting the generalizability of the findings. We build on this important literature using an original dataset of comments scraped from regulations.gov, the federal government’s e-rulemaking portal. Leveraging advances in AI-assisted automated text classification, we analyze over 130,000 comments on nearly 8,000 rulemaking dockets. Using these data, we find that opposition from individual commenters is associated with change between the proposed and final stages of the rule. This association is more robust than the analogous association for comments from private sector entities. Moreover, when individuals and private sector commenters disagree, we find that influence weakens for both groups, however the influence of individual commenters is more robust.

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.

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.