Rudalevige’s findings will be of interest to all scholars of government bureaucracy.
On the other hand, where an order is highly technical, involves a routine statutory delegation, or implicates agencies loyal to the President, it may be cheaper to “buy” than “make.” Rudalevidge codes his sample for these and other factors, and then uses data and narrative accounts to check his hypotheses. Where an executive order involves multiple agencies’ jurisdictions, reorganizes the government, or implements the President’s main policy priorities, it may be cheaper to “make” the order than “buy” it. The crux of the issue, he surmises, will be the transaction costs the President faces in the “policy market” for executive orders. Rudalevige imports ideas from information economics to motivate intuitions about when Presidents will make each choice. Or she can “buy” the executive order from the agencies, relying on their substantive expertise. Either she can “make” policy herself, relying on her central staff. With every executive order, the President is faced with a classic “make or buy” problem. Rudalevige models the presidency as a kind of firm. The whole makes for a compelling work of empirical political science. Rudalevige fills out his analysis of this aggregate data with illuminating case studies and capsule accounts, illustrating some of his key conclusions. He has carefully balanced and coded his data set, which allows him to run regressions and assess trend lines. His source base is a representative sample of over five-hundred signed and promulgated orders, along with over two-hundred un-promulgated draft orders, which he has unearthed in the archival files of the Office of Management and Budget. Rudalevige develops his account through an analysis of a large cache of historical executive orders. Those that sidestep this institutional development, like the first iteration of President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban, are exceptions that prove the rule, as they can turn out to be ineffectual, hard to implement, or legally infirm. Regardless of where orders start, they usually go through an elaborate interagency review process before reaching the President’s desk. But often they originate in the agencies themselves and embody agency priorities more even than the President’s. Sometimes executive orders are driven primarily by the President’s staff. Rather, according to Rudavelidge’s history, they emerge from a “narrow two-way street.” To turn a policy idea into an executive order, the President, represented by her staff in the various White House offices and the Executive Office of the President, negotiates with a bevy of other government actors, especially the officers in the many line agencies. The truth is that successful executive orders are not usually the product of top-down dictation. The epitome of this fantastical personalized rule is the executive order, which presidential will is supposed to make “pretty much just happen.” But, as Andrew Rudalevige’s excellent book establishes, that image is as far from reality as the old Schoolhouse Rock video. And commentators sometimes seem to imagine this is how the presidency works. Presidents and presidential hopefuls like to suggest that they can translate their vision directly into law though executive action. Presidential rhetoric echoes the Saturday Night Live skit. “I’m an executive order and I pretty much just happen.” Out walks a new piece of paper, singing and smoking a cigarette. “There’s actually an even easier way to get things done around here,” he explains. Once the bill arrives, however, instead of signing it, he shoves it back down the stairs. In it, President Barack Obama waits for a bill at the top of the Capitol steps.
In the fall of 2014, Saturday Night Live released an updated version of the bit. Readers of Notice and Comment surely remember the classic Schoolhouse Rock clip about how a bill becomes a law. For other posts in the series, click here.
#IM JUST A BILL SCHOOL HOUSE ROCK SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE SERIES#
* This is the sixth post in a series on Andrew Rudalevige’s new book, By Executive Order: Bureaucratic Management and the Limits of Presidential Power.
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