Congressional Oversight

1. The Bureaucracy… Congressional Oversight

2. Forms of Congressional Supervision • Congress creates agencies • Influences agency behavior by statutes it enacts • Congress authorizes funds for programs • Allows program to exist • Done by legislative committee • Congress appropriates money • Always done by House Appropriations Com. • Funds can’t be spent until appropriated, usually for less than authorized

3. The Appropriations Committee & Legislative Committees • Appropriations Committee may be the most powerful • Most expenditure recommendations are approved by House • Tends to recommend an amount lower than the agency requested • Has power to influence an agency’s policies by “marking up” an agency’s budget • But becoming less powerful • Trust funds operate outside the regular government budget and are not controlled by the appropriations committees • (Social Security being the largest) • Annual authorizations allow the legislative committees greater oversight (they can set limits on authorizations before Appropriations com. sets appropriations) • Budget deficits have necessitated cuts

4. The Appropriations Committee & Legislative Committees • Informal Congressional controls over agencies • Individual members of Congress can seek privileges for constituents • Congressional committees may seek committee clearance, the right to review/approvecertain agency decisions w/o passing a law

5. The Legislative Veto • Definition: authority of Congress to block a presidential action (Congress vetoes executive order) • Declared unconstitutional by Supreme Court in Chadha (1983) • Congress can’t take action that has force of law w/o executive consent • However, Congress still passes laws that contain legislative vetoes. • They will stand until challenged in court

6. Congressional Investigations • Power inferred from the congressional power to legislate (SC upholds, but not if personal) • Means for checking agency discretion and also for authorizing agency actions independent of presidential preferences

7. Major problems with Bureaucracies: Why? • Red tape: keeps large organizations operating smoothly, also satisfies legal/political requirements • Conflict and Duplication: Congress sets up agencies to achieve a number of goals which end up overlapping • Imperialism- goals are vague and difficult to measure…hard to tell when they’ve reached it (so they just keep going) • Waste: no incentive for agency to cut waste • Use it or lose it! • Must buy American, hire unions etc.

8. Reforming the Bureaucracy • Numerous attempts to make the bureaucracy work better for less money • Prior reforms stressed increasing centralized control on behalf of efficiency, accountability, and consistency • National Performance Review (NPR) in 1993 designed to reinvent government calling for a new kind of organizational culture • Less centralized management • More employee initiatives • Fewer detailed rules, more customer satisfaction

9. Bureaucratic reform is always difficult to accomplish • Most rules/red tape are due to struggles between president and Congress • Periods of divided government worsen matters, especially in implementing policy • Presidents of one party seek to increase political control (executive micromanagement) • Congresses of another party respond by increasing investigations and rules (legislative micromanagement)

10. Sunshine Laws All states also have similar laws! • Government in the Sunshine Act (1976) • Required for 1st time all multi-headed federal agencies hold their meetings regularly in public session • Freedom of Information Act (1966) • Required federal govt agencies, with some exceptions, to disclose to individuals at their request any information about them contained in govt files. • Many curbs on the public’s access to information since 9/11 • Thousands of documents removed from internet sites, libraries, etc, in the name of national security.