Administrative Advocacy

Abstract

Research on techniques and efficacy of techniques of lobbying—of efforts to affect legislation—are reviewed in Chapter 7. Governmental policymaking is of course not limited to those elected to enact laws. Administrative agencies share much of this responsibility. Bureaucratic decision making is in fact important at three points. First, legislatures depend to a large extent on the executive branch to generate legislative proposals. The professional staffs needed to examine the multiplicity of issues with which lawmakers must deal are in fact concentrated in the executive bureaucracy. (Congress and some state legislatures have of course attempted to counteract this imbalance of expertise and authority by creating their own factfinding agencies; e.g., the General Accounting Office, the Office of Technology Assessment, the Congressional Budget Office, state legislative research services.) Second, in interpreting statutory provisions, administrative agencies in fact generate policies. For example, most of the specifics of implementation of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94–142), discussed in Chapter 3, are present in the regulations of the Department of Education, not the authorizing statute. Thus, the important provisions dealing, on an individual level, with the development of Individualized Educational Plans are the product of regulatory (administrative) law. Moreover, to the extent to which an agency has broad regulatory authority, it may more or less independently generate legal rules with broad policy import.