Networking in the Shadow of Hierarchy: Public Policy, the Administrative Presidency, and the Neoadministrative State

As traditionally conceptualized by presidents and scholars, the administrative presidency is premised on three assumptions (Nathan 1983). First, congressional opposition to presidential legislative initiatives is the rule rather than the exception. Second, federal agencies make policy as they exercise bureaucratic discretion when implementing statutes. Consequently, presidents have another opportunity to "legislate" that does not require them to mobilize legislative majorities or supermajorities in Congress. Third, and premised on conventional notions of hierarchical control, presidents indirectly can influence policy by naming political appointees to agencies who either substantively or ideologically share their policy agendas. These appointees, in mm, can change agency rules, budgets, structures, and personnel requirements to suit presidential policy goals. In contrast to this more "indirect" (or "contextual") approach of acting through agents, presidents can take a more direct (or "unilateral') approach. They do so when issuing executive orders, proclamations, presidential signing statements, national security directives, and presidential memoranda (see Durant 1999a for an in-depth treatment of these tools; also see Cooper 1986, 1997; Moe and Howell 1999a, 1999b). As Louis Fisher (1999) demonstrated, however, the seeming straightforwardness of the administrative presidency belies the battles that this strategy can inspire. Spawned often by administrative strategies are lawsuits or congressional actions bent on diluting or stymieing presidential agendas altogether (also see, e.g., Waterman 1989; Durant 1992; Golden 1992; Maranto 1993a, 1993b; Holt 1998). Yet, no matter how adroitly or ham-handedly applied by presidents, such a strategy seemed, on its face, perfectly suited to the administrative state (Waldo 1948). Since the New Deal, the administrative state has been structured on the basis of functionally specialized federal agencies engaged in service delivery that are held accountable by hierarchical process controls. Thus, hypothetically, political appointees could directly influence bureaucratic discretion by altering agency structures, budgets, personnel, and decision rules. Yet, major and accelerating changes in governance philosophy have coalesced to alter fundamentally the nature of the administrative state in the United States. Ascendant as the nation enters the twenty-first century is faith that the challenges, choices, and opportunities faced in a post-cold war information age of global markets are met best by decentralizing, dispersing, and fragmenting federal responsibilities and authorities. These responsibilities and authorities move "upward" to international bodies like the World Trade Organization, "downward" within public agencies and to states and localities, and ``outward' to private and nonprofit organizations (Milward 1994, 1996; Peters 1996; Durant 1998; Hall and O'Toole 2000; Kettl 2000). Nor are these tendencies likely to abate soon. Both presidents and Congress members face perverse credit-claiming incentives to take on new federal obligations, but without increasing the visible size of the federal government's workforce (Light 1999b; Durant 2000; Kettl 2000). Left in the wake of these so-called new governance (Peters 1996) reforms is an evolving "neoadministrative state" (Durant 1998), one in which a sizeable and ever-growing proportion of the federal executive branch no longer directly makes or implements policy. Rather, these agencies arrange, coordinate, and monitor networks of public, private, and nonprofit organizations that pursue these things with or for them. In turn, these complex, nonhierarchical, and loosely coupled networks operate within ever-expanding discretionary bounds, with federal agencies able to affect their structures, budgets, personnel decisions, priorities, and decision rules only marginally. Paradoxically, the United States is not so much shrinking the administrative state as it is changing and expanding its metes and bounds. …