Executive Orders and the Limits of Presidential Power

• In Event: Presidents and the Administrative State

Abstract

Executive power has been at the forefront of scholarly and popular concerns about the presidency for some time now, and as critical immigration, healthcare, and various other regulatory decisions are increasingly made on order of the president or the president’s immediate subordinates, these concerns are not set to abate any time soon. But much research has illuminated the complexities of the unilateral policy-making process in a way that reveals just how limited, from a practical perspective, the president’s executive power truly is. Recent events in the Donald Trump administration (including the so-called “travel ban” executive order and the fallout therefrom) have only served to put this point in even starker relief. One of the principal complexities of the unilateral policy process lies in the president’s need for the vast federal bureaucracy that can turn these directives into policy and the principal-agent dilemmas that inevitably result in this relationship. In this paper, I further develop my previous research on bureaucratic responsiveness to executive orders by incorporating new measures for an increased subset of federal agencies to demonstrate the circumstances under which the president’s bureaucratic agents are likelier not to carry out executive orders. The results provide a basis for modifying our expectations of unilateral exercises and considering more deeply the role of the bureaucracy in the broader study of presidential power.

Author

• Joshua Kennedy