Designing Executive Agencies for Congressional Control

In an era of intractable legislative gridlock and unabashed governance-by-executive-order, congressional oversight holds promise as a means of buttressing Congress’s role in the policy-making process, and thus helping to restore the legislature’s place as a co-equal branch. Despite the demonstrated effectiveness of congressional oversight (when it occurs) little is known regarding whether legislators can design administrative agencies so as to strengthen ties between these agencies and their political principals in Congress. Leveraging data on agency characteristics, agency-subcommittee relationships, and congressional oversight, this article explores the connections between various agency design features and congressional oversight levels. The article finds that (i) agencies with leaders that are confirmed by the Senate receive greater attention from congressional overseers; (ii) independent agencies appear to be more independent of congressional as well as presidential control, contrary to a conventional wisdom that they tend to reflect Congress’s preferences; and (iii) subcommittee jurisdictional fragmentation or redundancy is associated with greater oversight. Through greater attention to agency design, Congress can create future executive agencies and retrofit existing agencies to optimize congressional control of these agencies in the future. Thus, legislators desiring to reverse their branch’s declining influence over the administrative state should devote their attention to the careful design of bureaucratic institutions.