Subordination or Independence for Administrators? The Decision of 1789 Reexamined

Abstract

ing the constitutive position helped shape the outcome as well as the ongoing debate over the constitutional status of thefederal bureaucracy. What is the proper role for administrative power in the American constitutional system? This question was certainly a central concern in the writings of Woodrow Wilson and Frank Goodnow. Louis Brownlow, Luther Gulick, and Charles Merriam fashioned an expansive answer as part of the foundation for the New Deal, and, 30 years later, Theodore Lowi (1969) rebuked what they had wrought. Recently, the Constitution's bicentennial stimulated an outpouring of historical research and normative argument attempting to demonstrate the compatibility of the modem administrative state with American constitutional principles (Freedman, 1978; Rohr, 1986; Public Administration Review, 1987; Wamsley, et al. 1990). After more than a century of commentary and scholarship on the subject, it is surprising to find only a handful of in-depth analyses of the seminal event in the establishment of public administration under the Constitution: the debate in the U.S. House of Representatives in May and June of 1789 concerning the organization of the first cabinet departments and the power of the president to dismiss executive officers.