Agencies self-regulate by raising procedural hurdles to make policy change harder for successors

Evidence

Along similar lines, Elizabeth Magill has described how administrative agencies often impose limitations on their own discretion to act as a means of ensuring that policies implemented by the sitting agency are difficult to change by the appointees of the subsequent administration. For example, agencies sometimes offer greater procedural protections than the APA requires. Just as procedural rules imposed by the APA create hurdles to policy change, this and other forms of agency “self-regulation” can increase these hurdles and more fully insulate the policy status quo. As Magill elaborates, a “self-regulatory measure might create a process that involves so many key actors that the status quo bias would be great because it takes so many to agree to change policies or because the specific actors empowered under the regime will predictably hold particular views.” — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 362

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete mechanism of path dependence — deliberately compounding veto points — that the reader’s ideology-durability model should incorporate. — connects to: Policies can entrench themselves by weakening their own enemies’ political capacity — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 201; Some policies are self-consciously designed to entrench themselves and their creators.
• DEFINE: Clarifies ‘agency self-regulation’ as discretionary procedural hurdles beyond what the APA requires.

Broader Connections

• Some policies are self-consciously designed to entrench themselves and their creators. #exemplifies (0.95)
• Policies can entrench themselves by weakening their own enemies’ political capacity #expands (0.85) — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 201