Presidential Leadership and Administrative Coordination: Examining the Theory of a Unified Executive

Abstract

Although presidential management is often prescribed as an antidote to the fragmentation of American bureaucracy, scholars have given relatively little explicit empirical attention to the premises that sustain this theory. Indeed, the premises themselves have remained vague in important respects. This article examines the effects of presidential management as manifested in the most direct and systematic effort to oversee administrative policy making to date. Regulatory review has produced coordination of a reactive nature. It has not, however, led to the kind of top-down planning and coordination that some authorities at least implicitly associate with a unified executive. In conjunction with other evidence, this has important implications for our understanding of the institutional motives and capabilities that link the president to the administrative process. As is often noted, the delegation of policy-making authority to the bureaucracy presents important doctrinal and constitutional issues for American government. What values should guide the administrative process and what institutional controls are appro priate for advancing those values? Particularly influential in this debate is the argument that the centralization of authority in the presidency is desirable as a way of rationalizing public administration. Thus, a unified executive has taken its place alongside presidential leadership in the legislative process as a prescribed response to the need for effective governance. To claim that everyone endorses this view would be a considerable exaggeration. At least since the New Deal, however, it has enjoyed majority support among students of political science, public administration, and administrative law as an antidote to the pathologies associated with the growth of a large and fragmented bureaucracy and with the decentralization of political power in American government more generally. As such, it has provided a rationale for the creation and empowerment of the Executive Office as an institutional