When Do Agencies Have Agency?: Bureaucratic Noncompliance in the EPA

Abstract

This paper raises a question that is little-discussed yet central to lawmaking and policy implementation in the American separation-of-powers system: Under what institutional conditions do we observe variation in bureaucratic compliance with legislative dictates in contemporary statutory implementation? The paper challenges the assumptions of conventional delegation models and holds that variation in institutional conflict and oversight of agencies fundamentally reshape agencies’ latitude as active policymakers. I answer this question in the context of the Environmental Protection Agency from 1973-2008 using a novel and original dataset on noncompliance. The study provides the first empirical analysis of the extent of, and the conditions underlying bureaucratic noncompliance in policy implementation in the US, providing support for the hypotheses that amid heightened inter-branch ideological conflict, the EPA increasingly deviates from congressional preferences in implementing the delegating statutes.