Intra-Agency Coordination

II. INTRA-AGENCY COORDINATION By conceiving of the agency as an information processor, this Part develops and applies the resulting insights about how agency heads engage in this coordination task and why. The core idea here is that agency heads faced with novel exogenous uncertainties must manage their resources and personnel teams to ensure efficient access to favored internal information sources. In doing so, they can choose among various coordination mechanisms designed to reduce the processing costs for particular kinds of privileged information. Information requires internal processing in the sense that it must be interpreted and then effectively communicated to decisionmakers. Thus, when confronted with exogenous uncertainties requiring more specialized knowledge, agency heads can respond by creating structures and processes that lower the costs of internal information processing. (184) Specifically, agency heads can lower such costs through structural choices such as centralizing their authority through hierarchy, reorganizing their staff to gain more direct access to specialized knowledge, or separating informational sources from final decisionmakers. Agency heads have process-oriented options as well, including standardizing informational inputs or imposing priority-setting procedures or internal-clearance chains that incorporate particular kinds of information directly into the decisionmaking process. A. Coordination Mechanisms Agency heads possess substantial discretion over how to manage their agency's rulemaking resources in ways that further their own goals and priorities. While the APA mandates some features of the internal organization of adjudicatory actors, (185) no analogous provisions exist for individuals engaged in rulemaking. Instead, many agency enabling acts are silent or ambiguous with respect to how agency heads can structure and select their rulemaking staff. (186) Chairmen of multimember commissions, for example, are sometimes authorized to appoint the heads of "major administrative units," but what constitutes a "major administrative unit" is largely left within their discretion. (187) Accordingly, while Congress and the President can write more specific dictates governing internal agency organization, (188) agency heads remain otherwise unbound by detailed legislative or executive strictures. By and large, the task of intra-agency coordination falls to the agency head. (189) Some of the following design choices can be implemented by Congress and the President as well, (190) but many are distinctive to the agency head's toolkit. A few ways in which the management problem for the agency head may differ from that of the President is that the former often has less relative control over her budget constraint and is also subject to more direct means of accountability; for example, agency heads are often called to testify in defense of their agencies before Congress, while presidents are not. (191) Moreover, agency heads often have more informal, though less transparent, means of imposing these coordination mechanisms, whether through internal memoranda or verbally in meetings. By contrast, the President often operates through more public documents such as executive orders or presidential memoranda. 1. Centralization.--Organizational theorists and economists have long recognized that the centralization of authority is often necessary to coordinate dispersed information, especially in the absence of price signals that can serve the same function in the market. (192) This observation is especially true in the context of government bureaucracies, which produce outputs that are difficult to value and measure. (193) Professor Kenneth Arrow, for example, points out that "the centralization of decision-making[] serves to economize on the transmission and handling of information" within organizations. (194) In his view, it is less costly and thus more efficient to transmit internal information to a centralized source, rather than to multiple individuals within an organization, given that the transmission of such information is costly. …