Top Highlights

• During the New Deal era, Congress divorced many government officials from democratic accountability to those they rule and removed presidential control over many government actions.
• judges frequently abdicated independent evaluation of administrative actions in favor of “deferring” to the judgment of the bureaucrats who run the agencies. These judicial deference doctrines wrongly instruct courts to defer to an administrative agency’s interpretation of a statute, even if another interpretation of the statute made more sense.
• These anti-democratic moves were—and sometimes still are—defended on the grounds that expert regulators insulated from politics have a more “neutral” view of their subject areas than elected presidents or legislators. These experts are thought to be free of partisan and other biases that skew politicians’ judgments.
• even if agencies were staffed with genuinely politically-disinterested experts, the technocratic rule is an invalid ideal. There are many areas in which scientific analysis may shed light on part of a problem, but where science cannot alone explain how to integrate those facts into sound public policy.
• Public choice theory suggests that executive branch employees often choose to pursue policies that are in the interests of executive branch employees as a class, even if those policies are not in the general public’s interest.

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