Understanding the origins of the administrative state goes a long way towards grasping how policy is really made today in American government. Ronald J. Pestritto:
The principles and policies of America’s original progressives have received renewed attention over the last decade, both in academia and in public discourse. Today’s progressive politicians and intellectuals have pointed to their roots in the original progressive movement; moreover, the connections between the original progressive calls for reform and the language and shape of our politics today have become increasingly obvious. In what follows, the relevance of original progressivism to government today will be more fully explored. There is no better place to begin than with our administrative state. This essay deals with the general principles of the administrative state and its roots in the original progressive movement.
The term “administrative state” has come to have a variety of meanings, but at its core it points to the situation in contemporary American government, created largely although not entirely by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, whereby a large, unelected bureaucracy is empowered with significant governing authority. The fundamental question for many of those making reference to an “administrative state” is how it can be squared with government by consent and with the constitutional separation-of-powers system.
Nominally, the agencies comprising the bureaucracy reside within the executive branch, but their powers transcend the traditional boundaries of executive power to include both legislative and judicial functions; these powers are often exercised in a manner largely independent of presidential control and of political control altogether. Given the vast array of activities in which the national government has involved itself in the post-New Deal era, the political branches of government have come to rely heavily on the expertise of bureaucratic agencies, often ceding to them significant responsibility to set, execute, and adjudicate national policy. The major policy debates during the current and most recent presidential administrations show that the administrative state is of the utmost relevance: with President Obama’s healthcare and environmental initiatives, or with President Trump’s immigration initiatives, to name just a few of the most obvious examples, debates have centered around the extent to which agencies have authority to make and carry out policy in the absence of clear legislative warrant. As the constitutional branch tasked with making law, Congress has increasingly ceded this responsibility, the administrative state has stepped into the gap.
[Ronald J. Pestritto, "The Tyranny of Experts,” American Greatness, August 13]
