A few weeks ago, Kevin Drum posed a discussion question to his readers, asking them which they’d prefer Dems win in November, the White House or control over Congress. The overwhelming majority wanted the presidency, usually to help re-establish a sensible foreign policy and/or appoint reasonable judges to the federal judiciary.
One of the things nearly all of the participants neglected to mention, however, is that the president is also the head of a massive executive branch bureaucracy with enormous regulatory power. It’s the kind of power the media generally ignores and the public almost never hears of, but it has a significant impact on public policy at almost every level.
To their credit, the Washington Post and the New York Times ran tremendous, award-worthy items over the weekend about Bush’s regulatory power and the ways in which it’s being used. I’d strongly recommend reading the articles in their entirety. (The Times ran one lengthy piece on Saturday; the Post is running a three-part series that’ll wrap up tomorrow.)
The [Post’s] analysis, combined with the more detailed look at specific regulatory decisions, shows how an administration can employ this subtle aspect of presidential power to implement far-reaching policy changes. Most of the decisions are made without the public attention that accompanies congressional debate. Under Bush, these decisions have spanned logging in national forests, patients’ rights in government health insurance programs, tests for tainted packaged meats, Indian land transactions and grants to religious charities.
Take a wild guess who’s benefiting from these “far-reaching” changes.
On second thought, don’t guess, just consider the Times’ analysis.
Health rules, environmental regulations, energy initiatives, worker-safety standards and product-safety disclosure policies have been modified in ways that often please business and industry leaders while dismaying interest groups representing consumers, workers, drivers, medical patients, the elderly and many others.
And most of it was done through regulation, not law — lowering the profile of the actions. The administration can write or revise regulations largely on its own, while Congress must pass laws. For that reason, most modern-day presidents have pursued much of their agendas through regulation. But administration officials acknowledge that Mr. Bush has been particularly aggressive in using this strategy.
[…]
The overall regulatory record shows that the Bush administration has heeded the interests of business and industry. Like the Reagan administration, which made regulatory reform a priority, officials under Mr. Bush have introduced new rules to ease or dismantle existing regulations they see as cumbersome. Some analysts argue that the Bush administration has introduced rules favoring industry with a dedication unmatched in modern times.
“My thoughts go back to Herbert Hoover,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian. “No president could have been more friendly to business than Hoover” until the Bush administration.
(There’s that Bush-Hoover connection again…)
There’s far, far more to these reports — too much to quote here — so go check these articles out.