Of course, By Executive Order is not merely descriptive. Rudalevige’s thesis is that presidents face “collective action problems” that belie simplistic conceptions of a unitary executive. His “key point is that presidents do incur transaction costs as they engage the process of issuing directives that match their political, administrative, and substantive preferences.” In acting through executive order, therefore, “presidents face a management challenge linked to the broader challenge of administering” the “incorrigibly plural” executive branch.
To make his case, Rudalevige marshals empirical evidence from a massive dataset of executive action, including the eye-opening statistic that “a strong plurality” of executive orders (“some 44 – 49 percent”) are “crafted nearly entirely by agencies outside the Executive Office of the President.” His takeaway is that “management matters.” Presidents are more apt to succeed in effectuating their preferred policies to the extent they reduce the “transaction costs” inherent to earning bureaucratic buy-in.
My only criticism is minor. In this blogger’s opinion, Rudalevige could’ve better engaged Congress’s role (or lack thereof) in presidential administration. To establish that administrative agencies serve “multiple principals,” he cites scholarship regarding how “the legislative arena [was] central” decades ago. But then Rudalevige drops the matter, which, I think, leaves an analytical gap. Fifty years ago, congressional committees vied with the president’s political appointees for managerial primacy over regulatory agencies; today, by contrast, Congress is a nonfactor in administrative policymaking. To be sure, Rudalevige may be forgiven for lending short thrift to the legislature in a book about executive orders. Still, Congress’s decline in this capacity surely speaks to the principal-agent dynamics faced by the executive branch bureaucracy, about which Rudalevige otherwise provides so much insight.
Again, my criticism is minor. I learned a lot from this book, and I recommend it without reservation.
By Executive Order explains in depth what happens before an executive order is issued. As Rudalevige notes in the book’s final chapter, “we don’t know” what happens next. That is, we don’t know whether these EOs are implemented in accordance with presidential expectations. He suggests that this open question merits further attention. I agree.
Along these lines, I’ll devote the rest of this post to discussing the troubling prospect that the difficulty of implementing EOs—and of presidential administration, more broadly—depends too much on the president’s political orientation. In the second chapter, Rudalevige hints at this possibility: