Presidential Administration and the Accountability Illusion

Abstract

For over a decade, the Supreme Court has upended executive-branch structures that insulated administrative agencies from the White House. Judges and scholars justify this project in part by claiming that presidential control over administration boosts agencies' accountability to the American people. Despite the importance of "the people" as this endeavor's asserted beneficiaries, however, public attitudes concerning this foundational claim are unknown. This Article puts this claimed connection to the test. Grounded in a set of novel experiments involving over five thousand participants, it presents the first evidence of Americans' views regarding whether greater presidential authority over agencies enhances accountability to people like them. These experiments reveal that people presented with an agency over which the President possesses the authority to appoint decision-makers, remove them for any reason, or review the agency's proposed regulations are no more likely to perceive the agency as accountable than are people presented with a politically insulated agency.

Keywords: accountability, presidential administration, unitary executive, administrative agencies, independent agencies, civil servants, empirical legal studies, empirical administrative law

JEL Classification: H10, H11, H83, K23