Inter-Agency Learning in United States Regulatory Policymaking

Abstract

While a number of scholars have evaluated the strategies driving congressional decisions to delegate regulatory authority to administrative agencies, the literature has been largely restricted to evaluating the relationship between Congress and its administrative agent. I argue that this presents an incomplete picture of implementation given that it is typically carried out by multiple administrative actors that interact in multiple contexts and that share political principals. Such arrangements for overlapping jurisdiction and interagency organizations provide opportunities for agencies to learn from one another about the constraints of the political environment within which they are operating. This paper provides a preliminary examination of the extent to which administrative agencies can learn from other agencies the preferences of shared political principals and use that information to reshape their regulatory strategies. Using original data on Court of Appeals litigation directed at administrative agencies from the 93rd to the 113th Congress, as well as congressional delegation to administrative agencies within the text of the Statutes at Large, I provide preliminary evidence that when an agency observes a closely-linked agency facing legal constraints, it reshapes its own regulatory strategy so as to provoke less costly litigation. The results pave the way toward further, more in-depth examination of the spillover effects of bureaucratic punishment and the ways in which this inter-agency learning takes place over time.