Introduction to the Symposium on "The Administrative Presidency"

The term "administrative presidency" was coined by Richard Nathan in his 1983 book of that title to describe the efforts of the Richard M. Nixon White House to gain control of the federal administrative apparatus. Nixon wanted the bureaucracy to be a tool of his presidency in an environment of divided government. The existence of the administrative presidency had long preceded Nixon, of course. Presidents have always worried about getting the bureaucracy to do what they want it to do and to not do what they do not want it to do. They often have been wary of their own appointees. Richard Fenno (1958), for example, details the difficult relations between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jesse Jones, his agriculture secretary, and Richard Neustadt (1990) notes how Dwight D. Eisenhower's secretary of the treasury, George Humphrey, sought to sabotage Eisenhower's budget proposal. Presidents also have been skeptical of the legion of career bureaucrats in Washington. They often think the careerists are out of tune with the changes they wish to bring about. Nixon, of course, did carry these concerns and, at the very least, responded to them in ways that tilted the balance of power within the bureaucracy and across political institutions decidedly in the president's favor. In view of Nixon's downfall and Congress's reaction to his initiatives, the administrative presidency strategy was overshadowed by the conditions that beset the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter presidencies, each of whom had their struggles with Congress. The appointments system traditionally has been a tool for the president's party. It remains so. But it also has come to reflect the efforts of presidents to get appointees to conform enthusiastically to the president's agenda--to be the president's loyal spokespersons and to move their agencies and units in ways that advance the president's agenda. In Nixon's case, loyalty to the president was especially prized because it was not always clear exactly what Nixon's agenda was from an ideological perspective. Among presidents with clearly defined ideological commitments, true believers in the president's cause are desired, although some can be brought down by their overzealousness (e.g., Ronald Reagan and the Environmental Protection Agency), and others, such as John Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations, can be thorns in the administration's side when they depart from office if they believe their administration has wavered in its commitments. The practice of the administrative presidency and its association with what Terry Moe (1985) has called "the politicized presidency" has expanded substantially since the Nixon presidency. Views of the executive as a unified branch exclusively under the authority of the president, the unilateral assertion of what parts of a law a president will and will not recognize (a kind of line-item veto), and expansive notions of executive privilege have been articulated and put into practice in recent times, beginning especially with the Reagan administration and culminating extravagantly in the presidency of George W. Bush. The administrative presidency and its conjoined politicized presidency are with us more than ever. Nathan described a particular presidency--that of Richard Nixon--and its tactics, enjoying the vantage point of both a participant and an analyst. Moe, however, asserted that incentives structured into the situation that all presidents face lead them to politicize their operations in order to get what they want. It is undoubtedly a reflection of the impact of Moe's seminal work that two of his former students--who, of course, have their own perspectives--are represented in this special issue on the administrative presidency. The articles in this issue cover a variety of approaches to and perspectives on the administrative presidency. They offer both positive and normative assessments of this phenomenon. They assess the tools of the administrative presidency, raise questions about how effectively they can be applied, and ask what the consequences of the administrative presidency are. …