The Prospects for Executive Branch Coordination and Legislative Budget Authority

• In Event: Vacancies, Delays, and Legislative Constraints in Presidential Appointment

Abstract

Although U.S. presidents are often ascribed as having unique powers attributable to their role as unitary elected chief executives (e.g., Moe 1987; Mayer 2001; Howell 2003; Howell, Jackman, and Rogowski 2013), effective executive branch policymaking nonetheless requires well-coordinated action between presidents and various unelected officials within the executive branch of government (e.g., Krause 2009, 2020; Lowande 2018; Rudalevige 2020). This proposed study advances research on this topic in a novel direction by jointly considering both policy (ideological) and non-policy (fealty) sources of appointee loyalty to presidents as a means for understanding executive branch coordination, and its implications for legislative budget authority. In turn, this proposed study will allow us to evaluate how the legislative branch uses the budgetary process to limit opportunistic executive branch behavior that is predicated on the prospects for coordinated executive action.

We propose a theory which assumes that the legislature favors executive branch coordination under unified partisan control of government since their policy and electorally fortunes are linked to one another; while preferring a lack of executive branch coordination in times of divided partisan control of government since the legislature has a strategic incentive to undermine the president’s efforts at coordinated executive action.

Our theory predicts that the legislature’s willingness to increase (decrease) discretionary budget authority to U.S. federal agencies under unified party government is conditioned ex ante by the prospects of effective (ineffective) executive branch coordination captured by complementarities (substitution) involving both the levels of policy and non-policy appointee loyalty to presidents. Accordingly, our logic predicts that the legislature’s discretionary budget authority to U.S. federal agencies will be decreasing (increasing) in the prospects of effective (ineffective) executive branch coordination captured by complementarities (substitution) involving both the levels of policy and non-policy appointee loyalty to presidents under divided party government.

We plan to empirically test the empirical implications of this theory applying panel regression methods to unbalanced panel data on U.S. federal agency discretionary budgetary authority covering three decades of the modern administrative presidency. The broader aim of this proposed study is to obtain an enhanced understanding of how Congress’s budgetary choices reflect their desire for (in)coherent executive branch policymaking.

Authors

• Gary E. Hollibaugh, University of Pittsburgh

• George A. Krause, University of Georgia