Administrative Law Judges ALJ

As New Deal agencies multiplied in the 1930s, critics complained that the same agencies investigated, prosecuted, and judged cases. The Administrative Procedure Act of June 11, 1946, responded by requiring that formal agency hearings be conducted by hearing examiners with a degree of independence from the agency's investigators and prosecutors. The examiners were renamed administrative law judges in 1972, and today there are about 2,000, most of them at the Social Security Administration, with others at agencies such as the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Department of Labor.

Administrative law judges preside over hearings, take testimony, rule on evidence, and issue initial decisions, which the agency head or a review board may adopt or modify before review in federal court. They decide hundreds of thousands of Social Security disability appeals a year, as well as cases involving labor disputes, workplace safety, immigration-related employment, and securities enforcement. By law they cannot be assigned duties inconsistent with judging, cannot be supervised by agency investigators or prosecutors, are paid on a separate scale, and can be disciplined or removed only for good cause found by the Merit Systems Protection Board.

The Supreme Court has reshaped the office in recent years. In Lucia v. SEC in 2018 it held that SEC administrative law judges are officers of the United States who must be appointed by the President, a court, or an agency head, and a 2018 executive order moved their hiring out of the competitive civil service. In SEC v. Jarkesy in 2024 it held that civil penalties for securities fraud require a jury trial in court, and in 2025 the Justice Department said it would no longer defend the judges' layered removal protections. Supporters of agency adjudication say it delivers expert, efficient decisions, while critics say it denies defendants a neutral judge and a jury.