The Administrative State

How federal agencies decide individual cases, from benefits claims and immigration hearings to enforcement actions, outside the regular federal courts

The practice, required by executive order since 1981, of weighing the expected costs and benefits of major federal regulations before they are issued

The reduction or removal of government rules on industries and the economy, from the bipartisan transportation reforms of the late 1970s to the regulatory budgets of 2017 and 2025

How Congress shields some agency leaders from presidential firing, and the Supreme Court cases testing whether it can

The rule that agencies need clear congressional authorization for policies of vast economic or political significance

The theory that regulatory agencies come to serve the industries they oversee rather than the public, and the safeguards designed to prevent it

Clauses that make a law, program, or agency expire on a set date unless lawmakers act to renew it

The hundreds of federal agencies that write rules, enforce them, and decide disputes, sometimes called the fourth branch

A contested term for career officials, especially in intelligence and law enforcement, said to resist or work against elected leaders, and the debate over bureaucratic power it reflects

The principle that Congress may not hand its lawmaking power to agencies or others, enforced by requiring that delegations come with an intelligible principle

The nineteenth-century practice of giving government jobs to party loyalists, and the merit system that replaced it after the Pendleton Act of 1883