Re-Setting the Agenda: Estimating Congressional Responsiveness to Fire Alarms in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals

Abstract

Evaluating the effects of bureaucratic policy-making requires a systematic way to evaluate the policies that emerge over time. Such a measure would allow us to understand the substantive policy effects of agencies’ implementation choices over time. This paper raises the following core question: To what extent, and under what conditions, do congressional coalitions respond to interest group fire alarms raised through the DC Circuit by statutorily amending administrative capacity? I argue that agency losses through DC Circuit litigation should raise signals to Congress that the agency has drifted in its implementation behavior, and spur it to amend legislation to better constrain the agency’s latitude. I evaluate this in the context of the Environmental Protection Agency from 1973 to 2010 using a rich new dataset comprising the 2,000 statutory amendments to the legislation under the jurisdiction of the EPA, each of which is hand-coded to determine the magnitude of the congressional revision, as well as the DC Circuit cases in which the agency was the defendant. I find robust support for the claim that agency losses are associated with subsequent statutory constraints on the agency, but do not find strong support for the claim that executive branch vulnerability is predictive of congressional interventions.